Aug
30
‘GUYS, there are rats in the subway, and the Daily News is ON IT’
ByWith apologies to The Times Is On It, the Daily News offers up a breath-taking expose on rats in the subway: There are lots of rats in the subway, they live in garbage storage rooms, and the MTA has done very little to combat the problems despite assurances a few years ago that they would. It’s a story we’ve heard over and over and over and over again. Rats, it seems, just come with the territory.
In his piece on rats this week, Pete Donohue tries to offer up a new twist. He notes that Howard Roberts in 2009 pledged to “do something better” about the subway’s rat problems. Of course, two years and another Transit president later, nothing much has happened. The MTA says it’s going to try to seal up garbage collection rooms and place more rat poison there, but then, we’ll just be left with dead rats instead. The authority also says it’s going to have this program in place at 25 stations by the spring, but I have to wonder what takes so long.
I’m not going to hold my breath on any of this. While waiting for a train earlier this week, I spied a rat poison warning sign that was dated July 2002. The MTA will haphazardly bait the system and then leave up the signs for a decade. It’s always been the way of things, and we’ll just continue to coexist with the multitude of rodents that inhabit the system.
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Is it worse than the blood sucking rats on Wall street or in Washington?
Yes. It’s the tentacle monsters you have to worry about in Washington and in industry, not the little rats they employ.
A good first step would to outright ban eating/drinking in the system, although I don’t think nyc will ever be rid of rats entirely.
I really, really could care less about subway rats.
And why isn’t there a “rats” category?
I could be misremembering, but I swear one of the things the MTA said they were cutting back on was maintainers *and* general cleanliness of the system when the budget kept shrinking from Albany. So color me unsurprised about this.
I don’t mind the rats, as long as they aren’t on the platform or in the train cars. I kind of enjoy seeing them running around down by the rails.