At 5 a.m. today — a few hours from now or a few hours ago, depending upon when you visit SAS — the 1 train will roll north and finally pass through the tracks at 181st St. shuttered by a falling ceiling. While the train won’t stop there this morning and will bypass the station until further notice, for the thousands of riders who had to take shuttle buses and multiple subways to navigate this collapse, that journey is over for now.
For now, I say, because the stations at both 181st St. and 168th St. will be undergoing repairs. Beginning next weekend, in fact, the 1 trains will run in two sections from South Ferry to 137th St. and from Dyckman St. to 242nd St. Shuttle buses will service the intermediate stations and 181st St. during the week as it remains closed.
Right now, these portions of the 1 line are in trouble. These two stations both opened on March 16, 1906, and they are beginning to show their 103 years of wear and tear. For the past week, MTA contractors have installed supports and shielding for the ceilings at 181st St., and that station will remain closed until the vaults are secure. Meanwhile, because 168th St. features similar construction techniques and architecture, it too faced a full inspection on Sunday. The findings are a bit alarming.
According to the press release sent out by New York City Transit early Monday morning, the inspection at 168th St. revealed “some areas of concern that have been stabilized prior to the restoration of subway service but will necessitate another closure next weekend.”
The release detailed the inspection process at 168th St., and Transit’s new Twitter account provided some pictures. “Performed painstakingly, much of it by hand, the inspection revealed some areas of brickwork in the station’s vaulted segment that we felt prudent to stabilize until we can perform further inspection and evaluation,” it read. “Additionally, NYC Transit maintenance workers were called in to stabilize areas of loose plaster, concrete and brick in the extension part of the northbound platform.”
And so, here we are, eight days later and no closer to a resolution. Transit is working very diligently to correct this problem, but I fear for the results of further inspections. We can read released talking about stabilizing loose plaster, concrete and bricks. We can see water damage in many of the system’s stations. No matter what, though, we know the realities of a system with stations that range from seven to nearly eleven decades old.
On October 27, the oldest parts of the subway system will be 105 years old, and the system is showing its age. It’s showing what happens when investment lags, when we have to make a choice between rail work, station work and rolling stock that won’t break down. It’s showing what happens when the needs of this city — this economic engine so vital to the state and nation — are ignored. We need investment in infrastructure, and it shouldn’t take a collapsed ceiling to prove this point.
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I think their wishful hoping for the past several decades, that the station infrastructure would be just fine after a century with almost no maintenance has finally started to slam into reality.
For the past 35 years of the capital program, NYCT has focused largely on the infrastructure that moves people: new rolling stock and track work. The signal system is antiquated, but serviceable. The stations, on the other hand, all look pretty horrendous, even within a few years of a major rehabilitation. Just like how differed maintenance for rolling stock leads to lower mean distance between failures, the same goes for stations. Rehabbing only a few of the several hundred stations every 5 year capital program isn’t enough.
But everyone who reads this blog regularly, already knows that and knows that the main problem is the inadequate funding. Not enough money from the city or state, nor any adequate alternative revenue streams such as congestion pricing or tolling on the east river crossings. For every month adequate funding is delayed, the problems only get worse and more costly to fix down the road.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, as the MTA spends plenty on what they call line structures (the non-moving parts, if you will). But the MTA has been saying for decades that the system was not in a 100% “state of good repair,” nor do they expect it to be for many years to come. The level of funding is simply insufficient to fix everything at once, so they are forced to let some repairs languish longer than they should.
Now, the nature of being past SOGR means that some structures will fail suddenly. The ceiling at 181st St. was one they knew about, but thought they had more time fix. We now know that wasn’t the case, but when you run a system full of components not regularly repaired, sudden failure is a fact of life.
As I alluded to last week, this kind of work will always get delayed. There’s nothing sexy about spending millions of dollars so that a ceiling that hasn’t fallen (yet) won’t fall. The capital project with results that are visible (cosmetic upgrades, more frequent trains, new services) will get funding. The ones with no perceived improvement won’t, meaning they’ll continue to deteriorate.