A 14-year-old girl was shot and killed last night while boarding a city bus in Queens. Police are still looking for the gunman, who they say opened fire on the Q6 bus around 9 p.m. on Saturday.

New Yorkers! If you were planning on taking the A, C, B or D trains this afternoon, you may want to reconsider, since an escaped prisoner is maybe also commuting on those trains, and police have shut them down in order to find him.

In this 17-minute video essay from Jonathan Hertzberg, he compiles scenes of the New York City subway in movies mostly from the 1970s and the 1980s. Though this is an account of the subterranean railway's presence in mainly fiction films, it shows a glimpse of a grimy and violent past. As the subway trundles through these two pre-Giuliani decades, it hosts a variety of gangs, purse-snatchers, tough cops, harassers, jaunty graffiti, drug-pushers, and zombie-eyed post partiers. Hertzberg has simply titled his short film Dirty Old New York Subway.

This past Saturday, in a nondescript NYC subway car, something truly extraordinary took place.

The MTA is reporting this morning that a female subway patron was struck and killed by a southbound No. 3 train after falling on the tracks.

The inevitable NYC subway fare hike was just approved. Take it in slowly. It's not so bad. There, there.

A freelance photographer working for the New York Post on an unrelated assignment happened to be standing on the 49th Street station platform when 58-year-old Queens resident Ki Suk Han was suddenly pushed onto the tracks by an as-yet-unidentified assailant.

Let's all give a hand to New York's MTA, for their work after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Really. They had to get an entire system back on line, despite extensive damage and heavy public pressure, and they did it. Let's just take a moment to acknowledge the hard work of all those workers who got down in dark, flooded tunnels and fixed that whole mess so this city could get moving again. We salute you all. This moment in time represents the most public good will the notoriously poorly managed MTA has had in many years.

Just in time for the next weather disaster, the MTA has released video of a dry L train tunnel.

This morning was the first day back to work for many New Yorkers, and with the subways still not running 100 percent, the typical moderately aggravating commute transformed into a jam-packed nightmare for some.

After Gov Cuomo declared a transportation emergency, the MTA is waiving all fares this Thursday & Friday. [twitter.com]

Hurricane Sandy is currently enjoying a nice leisurely Sunday off the coast of South Carolina as she prepares for her jaunt up the coast en route to the finest cities the East Coast has to offer (and, yes, I mean Atlantic City). Current projections show that Sandy should be touching down in South Jersey around 2 a.m. Tuesday morning — she is expected to cross the state into Pennsylvania before heading north through western New York into Canada, where she will presumably stay if Mitt Romney has defeated Barack Obama.

Jasheem Smiley of Williamsburg says he was on a southbound 4 train early Sunday morning when he saw a man sit down next to a sleeping woman and sexually assault her in full view of other riders.

The New York Daily News seems to think so, because it took the time to put together a four-minute tutorial called "Teach Me How Too... Ride the Subway (Without Annoying Everyone)."

That or the MTA decided to turn the 1 train into a Six Flags-esque log flume ride. Either way, expect to get wet, experience "technical difficulties," and lose your mind while attempting to drown-out the screaming kids in the front row.

Caroline Stern and her boyfriend George Hess were waiting for their train at the Columbus Circle subway station just before midnight when a busker began playing music on steel drums and they decided to dance along.

Less than a day after filmmaker Dean Peterson's short doc about the mischievous subway stair at the 36th Street station gained viral status, the MTA has put an end to the voyeuristic schadenfreude by bringing in a repair crew.

How many people do you reckon were hit by subway trains in New York City last year? Five? Eleven? Fourteen? Twenty-six? Thirty-seven? Forty? Forty-two? Forty-three? Forty-five? Forty-eight? Fifty-one? Any of those numbers? How about fifty-four, then? Fifty-five? Fifty-nine? Yes? Well, you're wrong.

At 12:30AM Sunday, I thought the reason I wasn't getting home as early as planned was that piece-of-shit L train. Seven hours later I found out it was because, among other things, of a severed head.

In its infinite wisdom, the New York City Transit system has decided to stop shutting down the subways for repairs every weekend, and start shutting down the subways for repairs every weeknight. How will this affect you, the straphanger, and the "new breed" of trained subway thieves that prowl the trains to prey on you? Allow us to help you make sense of the new, improved New York Subway system.