HEAP OF TROUBLE: Brooklynites in Kensington yesterday shovel out from under the foot and a half of snow that fell over the past two days. (Paul Martinka)
They’re finally getting their act together.
The response by the city and the MTA to yesterday’s monster storm was a big improvement over the post-Christmas disaster — but there’s still a long road to plow.
Mayor Bloomberg insisted his administration learned its lesson after being raked over the coals a month earlier.
“We asked the questions ‘What didn’t work last time?’ and ‘Is there anything we could do differently?’ ” he said.
“There’s a whole bunch of things that we did. We had 15 major things that we had focused on. I think those things worked.”
Among them, he said, was quickly lining up private snowplow operators and communicating more efficiently with trucks on the street.
But the bad news included:
* Canceled bus service for hours.
* Incredibly slow service on some subway lines, particularly ones that run on elevated tracks or in open trenches.
* Angry subway riders commandeering a parked N train to use as a makeshift dormitory.
* Scores of streets untouched by plows for hours, one of them on the Lower East Side, where good Samaritans helped shovel out a police car.
The city did have one good excuse — everything happened too fast.
Although this storm dropped slightly less snow than the December one, the downfall came nearly all at once.
From 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., snow fell at the amazing rate of nearly 3 inches an hour — all of it landing on top of the 6 inches that dropped on the city earlier in the day — making for a not very grand total of 19 inches. The storm made this January the snowiest in the city’s history — a total of 36 inches with four days to go.
The MTA finally had just about all of its subway and bus service back by the evening commute, and nearly all of the major streets were plowed.
But getting to that point was a long road for many.
On Sullivan Street just off Houston Street, a police car was stuck on the unplowed road, forcing an ambulance to back out of the street.
Michele Costa and several others helped dig out the cop. “We shoveled it, then we pushed it out, too,” Costa said.
And scores of subway and bus riders found themselves without any way to get home.
At 2 a.m., about 100 passengers were ordered to leave the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island because no trains were running.
But there also was no bus service.
So they took over an N train and demanded the conductor turn on the heat. They refused to move when the MTA and NYPD tried to kick them out.
After serving as a sleeping car for four hours, the train finally left for Manhattan at 6 a.m.
“Where were we going to go?” asked Eva Mahoney, one of the people who climbed aboard.
Others complained about the 311 system — people calling about unplowed streets well into yesterday evening weren’t getting service numbers, which would help them track the complaint.
Bloomberg said the 311 system was handling triple the normal amount of calls: 145,000 by 8:30 a.m.
Meanwhile, some of the happiest New Yorkers live on one Brooklyn block.
Residents of East Seventh Street between Greenwood Avenue and Ocean Parkway in Windsor Terrace — which The Post identified as the worst block in the city during the December blizzard — was clean as a whistle by the morning.
“We are definitely on the Sanitation Department’s priority list,” said John Torrillo. “You can definitely put this response down to The Post.”
Two smaller storms are expected today and tomorrow — and maybe a bigger one on Tuesday.
Additional reporting by Lachlan Cartwright, David Seifman and Ikimulisa Livingston