Marcos Crespo has some zany ideas for subway safety.

By and large, the subways are a rather efficient and relatively quick means of transportation around New York City. A 24-stop ride from Forest Hills to Canal St. on the R takes 47 minutes; a 19-stop trip on the Q from Coney Island to DeKalb takes around 33 minutes; and a 27-stop jaunt from Wakefield/241st St. to Times Square runs around 50 minutes.

What would happen, though, to New Yorkers, to the city’s productivity, to their patience with the subway if the MTA were forced to add another minute per station to everyone’s commute? Suddenly, it would take almost an hour and 20 minutes to go from the Bronx to Midtown, and an end-to-end run on the 2, a 61-stop trip that normally takes 90-100 minutes, would run for over two and a half hours. It would take over 70 minutes to go from Forest Hills to Chinatown, and a trip within the same borough from Downtown Brooklyn to Coney Island would last nearly 50 minutes.

That is the worst-case scenario that could come to pass if Marcos Crespo gets his way. As I reported yesterday morning, Crespo has submitted a bill to the State Assembly that would over-legislate a non-existent safety issue. Since 0.000006 percent of subway riders are struck by train cars, Crespo would like the other 1.6 billion riders to pay the price. His bill would mandate that trains stop completely outside the station so the driver can inspect the tracks to make sure no one is in them. Then, the trains would creep into the station at 5 miles per hour before coming to a complete stop.

In expressing my incredulity at this dumb idea yesterday, I wondered if Crespo even knows what he’s talking about. After all, in the memo attached to the bill, Crespo claims the conductor would be the one to inspect the tracks, but the conductor sits in the middle of the train set. The Assembly rep should be calling for the driver to perform the visual inspection, and while I may be splitting hairs, a legislative mistake could lead to a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s just sloppy work.

Meanwhile, as commenters on this site noted, Crespo’s bill would do more than just slow down commutes to unbearable speeds. One comment highlighted how taking the rapid out of transit would reduce tunnel capacity. “The signal system is designed under the assumption that trains will generally be moving at speed, except when stopped at a station,” Andrew wrote. “Violating that assumption comes at an extreme cost to capacity – my guess is on the order of 10-15 tph. So not only will the trains be slower, but they will be much, much more crowded, since they won’t be able to run as frequently.” Brilliant!

Gothamist, in their coverage of the story, touched base with the Assemblyman, and he seemed both defensive and on the backpedal. He repeated his statistically insignificant claims of injury and defended his bill. “Over the last three years there have been an average of 60 deaths and hundreds of injuries because of trains,” he said. “I’ve taken the subway, I know how they operate. They come into stations full speed and I’m concerned about that.”

That an Assembly representative from the Bronx must state that he’s taken the subway speaks volumes of Albany. Still, as criticism rolled in, he attempted to distance himself from the idea. “This is a conversation starter,” he said. “If coming to a full stop is too much, I’m willing to address the issue.”

The problem with Crespo’s approach is that he’s picking on an issue that isn’t. If a manufacturer had a safety record akin to the MTA’s train-on-person numbers, they’d get a gold star from OSHA. If cars were anywhere close to that safe, the city would not be embroiled in a debate over how better to protect pedestrians. In fact, in 2009, there were over 75,000 car accidents in the five boroughs alone, and the accident rate was 1642 per 100,000 licensed drivers. Conversely, injuries caused by subway cars reached just 6 per 100 million straphangers. That certainly puts Crespo’s misguided legislation in perspective.

Ultimately, though, this move isn’t anything we don’t expect from Albany. We have legislators who rob from transit funds and others who never deign to ride the subway. Seeing another bad idea for the city’s public transportation network emerge from Albany is neither a surprise nor unexpected, and that is a sad commentary on the state of New York politics.

Handing policymakers numbers without contextualizing them often leads to Very, Very Bad Ideas from policymakers. For instance, if I told someone that 90 people were struck by subway trains in 2009, that person might be surprised. After all, 90 seems like a good number, and the 40 people who died from the impact represent tragic deaths indeed.

But what if I said 0.000006 percent of all subway riders were struck by trains in 2009? Would your response be to propose a measure that would add 20 minutes to a trip from Coney Island to Midtown? Or 12 minutes for those who ride the D from the Bronx to Herald Square? As Pete Donohue explores in his column today, that’s what one Assembly representative has done.

Dononhue writes of this Very, Very Bad Idea:

Commuting by rickshaw would be faster than the subway under a Bronx assemblyman’s proposal to increase straphanger safety.

Before entering each and every station on the line, a train would have to come to a complete halt just shy of the platform. Only after a required pause could the train move forward to pick up passengers. The maximum permitted speed when entering would be 5 mph.

The regulation by Democratic Assemblyman Marcos Crespo – introduced in the Legislature last week – would achieve its goal: preventing people from getting hit by arriving trains.

The bill — labeled A04796 in the Assembly — is available here, and Crespo’s justifications defy logic. He seems to think that 155 injuries over three years as well as liability of between $30-$60 million a year is rationale enough for this move. Crespo wants trains to come to a complete stop while drivers — he says conductors, but the drivers would do it — inspect the tracks for people before moving ahead very slowly. The cost in lost productivity due to slower commutes alone would wipe out the savings in human life and liability payments.

Donohue believes that Crespo’s “heart is in the right place” and claims that personal accidents are “harsh realities of the subway that are either routinely ignored or quickly dismissed as unavoidable.” From the perspective of the personal, perhaps Donohue is on target, but the numbers don’t support this sentimentality. Exceedingly few people are struck by subway trains every year, and even fewer die from those accidents. In a traditional model of economic efficiency, It’s not worth robbing the subway of speed to save a handful of lives.

Where Donohue hits the nail on the head though is in his attacks against those who slammed the MTA for requesting information about platforms doors. Crespo claims that it is “unlikely the MTA will incur that expense” of installing the new technology. He seemingly ignores the MTA’s proposal that someone else foot the bill for the platform doors and doesn’t know or pay attention to the difference between the authority’s operating and capital budgets.

As I noted a few weeks ago, critics who blasted the MTA’s Request for Information were barking up the wrong tree. Donohue, who notes that at least one company — Crown Infrastructure — is interested in the MTA’s proposal, agrees. “You would think” based on the reaction, he says, “subway executives had expressed an interest in building a space shuttle from the sharp criticism that emerged.”

Citing the high cost of fires caused by track debris and the safety benefits, Donohue says the authority “should test platform doors in a pilot program and not be rattled by critics.” I have no qualms with that claim, but we should not overstate platform dangers either. One train may hit one person every four days on average, but that represents one six-millionth of one percent of all subway riders. The city would suffer tremendous were slower subways the price the other 99.999994 percent would bear in the name of false security.