Waiting for subway trains used to be one of the surprisingly quiet pleasures of New York life. Not when a train is nearby, of course, but at other times. The sounds of the street are usually gone or at least made distant. In some stations you can hear trains in motion somewhere else. And there are also the various sounds that human beings make — which are much harder to hear on the street. I find subway platforms reasonably good for reading and proofreading my writing.
But since the new announcement system was installed, within the past couple of years, we have begun to be bombarded with the hyper-amplified human voice about once a minute. It's a horror and I wonder if it was not set in place by one of the many MTA executives who don't actually live in New York or take the subway. Some day, something must be done about those people — require them to commute by subway, for a start.
Trying to understand this as an intentional act, I wonder if it is not actually a secret strategy to drive away vagrants who would otherwise try to sleep in isolated places on the platforms.