A new study has found the subways infested with rats. I’m shocked. (Photo via flickr user timmurtaugh)
The New York City Department of Obvious released a study on sanitary conditions in the subway system yesterday, and the findings are incredible. Trash is everywhere! The subways are unclean! Rats have taken over! I had no idea.
Okay. Okay. Let’s try that again with a little less snark.
In an effort to improve health and sanitation conditions in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Department of Health has released a report highlighting the extreme numbers of rats in the city’s subway system. With the MTA strapped for cash and constantly reducing the number of employees available to clean stations, rodents have feasted on garbage that is allowed to fester, and city health officials want to begin the Sisyphean task of combatting the rats.
“We’re actually trying to measure what the factors are directly that cause rats to take advantage of certain stations and not others, so we’re putting some science into this,” Robert Corrigan, a DOH research scientist leading the city’s effort, said yesterday.
For anyone who rides the subway, rats are simply a fact of life. We see these rodents scurrying along the tracks — and sometimes station platforms — searching for something to eat and oblivious to their surroundings. We see families hunt together, and we see rats shimmy themselves into spaces seemingly too small for any living creature. Tales of mutant rats the size of squirrels are passed down as true urban lore, and New Yorkers simply live with the idea that disease-carrying rodents are a New York fact of life.
If the Department of Health has its way, though, the rat population — estimated to be greater than the city’s human population — could start to dwindle. The Times has more on the study:
Rodents, it turns out, reside inside station walls, emerging occasionally from cracks in the tile to rummage for food. The legend of teeming rat cities tucked deep into subway tunnels is, in fact, a myth. The electrified tracks, scientists said, are far too dangerous.
Not every station has rats, although plenty do. Of 18 stations examined in Lower Manhattan, about half of the subway lines got a fair or poor rating for infestation, meaning they exhibited the telltale culprits — overflowing trash cans, too much track litter — that can lead to a rodent jamboree.
But befitting a creature that has evaded annihilation for centuries, officials found no obvious solutions: poison packets and traps have proved no match for an agile mammal known to be diabolically clever.
Rats are and always have been a problem underground, and with trash collection posing problems for the MTA, rats live the good life. Corrigan claimed that trash storage areas where garbage may site for a few days are breeding grounds for the rodents. One family of 8-12 rats can live in one cinderblock in the wall of a storage site, and every wall, he said, can be chock full of rats. As many as 150 rats can live off of the trash found in a storage room with no problems.
Corrigan’s suggestions seemed sparse. As The Times noted, few solutions work, and the scientist wants better insulation that more effectively seals trash rooms and “advanced poison bait technology.” Everyone wants to build a better mouse trap, but the obvious solution, though, is one often left unsaid: Don’t allow people to eat in the subway system.
Rats live off of human garbage and the remains of a sandwich, a french fry or even a speck of chocolate stuck to the wrapper of a Milky Way. Even those pieces of trash that aren’t discarded as litter and find their ways to trash receptacles are fair game for rats that can sneak into garbage cans. But if people aren’t bringing food on their travels, the rats will find less sustenance in the subways. Now who wants to the start the No Food Underground movement?
17 comments
The NFU sounds a little draconian- besides impossible to enforce.
Rats tend to know where the food is; and will travel further to a known food source than risk an unknown one (eg the usual trashcan vs. a new and fancy bait or picking up litter off the tracks).
Um…
People have been fighting rats for centuries- so the Bloomberg administration and the MTA are going to suddenly solve it? Ha!
Except that the NYC subway system is the ONLY subway I’ve been on where rats are a common sight. DC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Paris, San Fran. Ain’t never seen a rat on any of these systems, and it’s no wonder. Look at the pic above showing a rat on a filthy, muck-covered floor. NYC riders are absolutely the biggest slobs on earth. Chicken bones, sunflower seeds, rice and beans, and every other item you can think of (including used condoms) can be found thrown on subway platforms. Dis-gust-ing.
More rats, not less rats, is the only way to get people to stop eating on the subway. The thought of a rat reaching in for a bite (and no, I don’t mean a Yankee fan at Target Field) should be enough to discourage people from this activity.
Seriously, some of these answers are obvious. Use more trash cans, particularly the type with flaps that spring closed to keep the trash in and the vermin out. Don’t let the trash pile up in refuse rooms “for a few days”. It won’t eliminate the problem, but it would sure help.
Pied Piper?
Hopefully, the when the Pied Piper is successful, the MTA can pay him!
Can I ask about how relevant this really is? We all find the rats disgusting and will agree that there are tons of them all over NYC, including the subway system. However, what harm do the rats cause? This point seemed to be glossed over in the NY Times article. Yes, rats can carry disease. What percentage of them in New York actually do? Furthermore, how many people each year are bitten by the rats and how many people acquire disease?
I raise this issue because it seems the task of reducing rats is largely an aesthetic one at the moment. Now, even I can jump behind that but it largely Sisyphean, as you described Ben. Certainly, if we could eliminate rats then this would be a huge victory for the Dept. of Health, but this won’t happen. So what exact health benefits will be gained by a modest reduction in this setting?
What do we expect to gain if we reduce the number of rats in the subway by 5%? 10%? What impact will this have on those of us who ride the subway? Essentially, I’m asking for a real cost-benefit analysis. Is this worth the time and energy that Bloomberg & Co. want to invest or should more economical measures be used, like Ben mentioned. We can’t completely eliminate the rats from the subway, so we should be sure that a noticeable and worthwhile reduction in harm from the rats will actually occur with any large investment. For a smaller investment of resources, sure, an aesthetic improvement (via decreased numbers of those furry critters) can be defended.
As best as I can tell, the Department of Health is concerned not with the sheer number of rats in the subway but with the public health risks they pose to the city at large. That seems to be why they care. I guess it’s a laudable concern because rats have the potential to cause some pretty deadly diseases.
But as you said, it’s nearly impossible for the city to do anything about it, and the costs probably far outweigh any benefits of a slightly smaller rat population.
Ben,
I was wondering if the figures on rat infestation include top level employees of Goldman Sacks & other Wall Street furms or members of our political class. Or am I just insulting the rat population.
I only brought this up because as a medical professional, I cannot see much to be gained from this. We all keep touting the diseases that rats carry but what are the actual percentages? Just like our fear of touching wild birds, how many pigeons actually carry cryptococcus? Without delving into specifics, rats can certainly carry many bad diseases. Nonetheless, I have never seen an article or met anybody who has actually caught a disease from a rat here in NYC, much less from a rat in the subway. Though it could happen, it seems like a grossly overstated basis on which to run an anti-rat campaign.
Sign me up for NFU, Ben. I personally find the idea of consuming food while underground repulsive. I just think of all the steel dust from the rails settling onto my bouillabaisse or fresh watermelon slices and I lose my appetite.
Tales of mutant rats the size of squirrels are passed down as true urban lore
I think we both know from our own firsthand experience those aren’t just tales or lore…hello platform at 149th St. Grand Concourse.
there are worse ways of funding NYPD than tickets for NFU — as long as nobody is under the illusion that enforcement of NFU will actually stop the rat problem.
For anyone interested in some more detailed “urban nature” writing on rats, I recommend Robert Sullivan’s book from a few years ago:
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants
I picked it up on a whim and never expected to find it so fascinating. I learned a LOT about rats, their habits, what is/isn’t successful in fighting them, etc. The author actually camped out in an alley somewhere near Wall Street and observed a pack of rats for a whole summer to prepare for the book.
Now the Times is asking people to send in their photos of subway rats. I don’t know about you, but that latest transit reporter is taking the Times’ transit coverage to a new (populist) direction.
“However, what harm do the rats cause?”
Bubonic plague?
Just guessing.
Yersinia pestis is found in the Southwest and the West Coast, usually carried by mice and quite harmful to the prairie dog (Though, 10-20 hikers each year do seem to acquire it). Anyway, it’s not in the Northeast. If the rats in New York City had the Plague, we would know by now. We would DEFINITELY know. Haha.
There are still thousands of cases of plague still reported every year, but the epidemics throughout human history were wrongly blamed on rats. Rats were carriers but the fast rate of disease spread indicates that the infection was spread human to human and that it was airborne.
The high number of rats was just an obvious consequence due to the abundance of “food”.
[…] highlighted the rat problem. The DOH inspected 18 subway stations in Lower Manhattan and found signs of mild-to-serious infestation problems in half of those stops. Rats lived in the tunnels and the walls. They thrived near garbage and […]