Another Reason To Keep Your Car

When an environmentalist wacko tells you that we should all junk our cars and rely upon mass transit, remember this.

A fire in a signal room the size of a small studio apartment has crippled the world's longest subway line, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will endure a painfully slow commute for six months.

Sunday's fire, which fire marshals declared was intentionally set, knocked out all service on one Eighth Avenue line -- the C train. It forced the legendary A train (subject of jazzman Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A Train" song) to cut service by more than two-thirds.

The C line carries 110,000 daily riders and the A line shoulders another 470,000 -- together the lines haul about the equivalent of the population of the District (of Columbia) every single day.