THREE TO FIVE.(The Talk of the Town)

In the wake of a natural disaster or a major accident, there is an inevitable rush to dredge up parallels. After the recent Chambers Street subway fire--which destroyed a Depression-era control room integral to the dispatching of the Eighth Avenue A and C trains-- Stan Fischler, the hockey commentator and the author of a half-dozen books about the subway, compared it to the Astor Place flood of 1956, in which fifty million gallons of hydrant runoff spilled into the Astor Place station and collapsed the track bed. Transit workers repaired the damage in less than a week. "That was one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the city's subway system," Fischler said last Tuesday. "They fixed it up in record time."

Tuesday's papers had carried the estimate of Lawrence Reuter, the Transit Authority president, that full train service would not return to the A and C lines for "three to five years." Riders were aghast. "We built the whole IND subway line in under five years," Mayor Bloomberg (an I.R.T. regular) protested, referring to the original Independent line, which now services Eighth Avenue. "We built the Empire State Building in one year." (There's an election coming, and you know what they say about making the trains run on time.) The tabloids pointed out that the George Washington Bridge had been built in just four years, the Titanic in three. Others, engaging in a kind of office parlor game, named some less obvious parallels. Three years: a law degree. Five years: a lion grows its mane. Three to five years: a plausible prison term for the former basketball star Jayson Williams, for shooting his chauffeur in the chest.

By the time the M.T.A. had backtracked, later in the day, claiming that the restoration process would take only six to nine months, a couple of West Side residents had begun compiling a list of other recent "three to five year" estimates. There appeared to be a pattern. In baseball, for instance, this is the amount of time often cited as necessary for turning around a losing team (other than the Mets), or for a new stadium name to enter the public consciousness. Apparently, it takes three to five years to train an air-traffic controller, earn a black belt in karate, or, if you're a salesman switching industries, to get comfortable with your new line of work. The same goes for stepkids adjusting to a ...