I’ve been pretty busy lately with less time than I’d like to devote to the site. I haven’t had much time to do much long-form reporting over the last few wees, but there are still a series of newsworthy happenings. Let’s run them down.
Profiling the train that collects the trash
After much hand-wringing over the cleanliness of eating on the subway, Pete Donohue took a ride on the garbage collection train for his Daily News column this week. Deep in Brooklyn, Donohue hopped the Southern, one of eight garbage trains currently in use and rode one of the 9:30 p.m.-to-5 a.m. shifts. Transit crews, he reports, pick up 90 tons of garbage per day, and perhaps that’s why rodents are so numerous underground.
Rife: Keeping an eye on the looming labor negotiations
Up in the Hudson Valley, Judy Rife of the Times Herald-Record has her eye on the looming negotiations between the MTA and the TWU. MTA CEO Jay Walder has vowed to maintain a “net zero” increase in the cost of labor spending as the union contracts come due, and Rife wants to hold Walder to his promise. “There can’t be any increase in the value of the contract, but raises are still possible if they’re counter-balanced by other savings,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said to her. This is clearly a story I’ll be following this year.
Inside the Long Island Bus battle
In the Our Towns section in The Times today, Peter Applebome profiles the LI Bus debate. The fight between Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano and the MTA is well-trodden territory for SAS readers, but essentially, the county wants the MTA to foot the operations costs for Long Island Bus despite agreeing to fund the bill itself. The MTA has proposed cutting more than half of the bus routes, and Mangano keeps making noises about privatization despite extreme skepticism.
Politicians and activists are watching this fight to see how it’s resolved. “Simply put, County Executive Mangano is dreaming,” Kate Slevin, head of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said last week. “Let me make this clear — no other system in the country does what Mangano wants to do. Most county governments with private systems provide much more in the way of government funding, not less.”
15 comments
Thank you for pointing out the story on the garbage collection underground. This is exactly why I’ve been saying cracking down on littering is a mute point if you really feel rats are the problem.
OT: NYC’s Nuclear Powered Subway Trains
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/pro.....;start=965
There seems to be a lot less trash on tracks lately. I even witnessed a crew of about 6 men walking the station track and picking a majority of the garbage as long as the reach wasn’t too difficult.
New Yorkers are less likely dump their garbage on tracks when they are clean to begin with. Several weeks later, they seem to still look much better than last year.
Maybe keeping the stations clean encourages the pigs of our city from acting as such.
Profiling might be a tool to use in combating littering. Rate the trains with the dirtiest trains and stations and blitz them with cleaners once over. Then blitz the lines and stations with cops and monitors who can write the litterers up. Do a media outreach program during the enforcement push. Two things to consider are to get the free paper companies to fund paper collection bins in station, and increase the number of general trash bins.
It won’t help because you still can’t solve the 90 tons of trash collected a day from non litter bins. The storage of those 90 tons in stations and so on….
The additional trash and paper bins would provide additional storage volume in them. Visible enforcement would deter people from littering. And like David in NY said, if the stations and tracks were clean (or much cleaner), people are less likely to throw trash around in a station.
As for 90 tons of trash, either you ban food drink and papers, or deal with it. Even if the MTA were to somehow rid the system of trash, the Dept of Sanitation would have to deal with it. In that case, you would shift the cost from the MTA to NYC govt.
The way I see it. The Department of Sanitation specializes in getting rid of trash so I wouldn’t have not one banning food and drinks in the subway. I don’t think the MTA should be responsible for collecting any trash and if you don’t want your newspaper, you take it and empty it in the proper recycling receptical. Newspapers should never be thrown in the garbage as what is currently the standard today in the subways.
I just clicked on the link to Judy Rife’s aricle, and immediately lost all interest in it when I saw mention of Scott Walker. Looks more like an anti union article I would expect to see in the National Reveiw than in a “mainstream” newspaper.
weird – when i got off the lex just now there was a garbage train on the downtown track, and here i am reading about it!
The garbage trains are no bargain to work on since your breathing in diesel fumes all day long. Yet, in order to work on it, you need a ton of seniority. Go figure.
Garbage trains aren’t diesel. The jobs have built in OT and additional OT.
I meant to refer to the work trains. They are diesel since they have to be able to run when the 3rd rail is shut off.
And it’s necessary. These guys have to walk into that rat contaminated trash room on the 86th and Lex platform. Scoop out all of the trash and load them on the trash train. It’s a really horrible job. You think the Dept of Sanitation has it bad. At least they have the open air streets to work with. Down in the Subway you are in the rat’s domain!
The biggest loser in terms of the loss of network coverage is Nassau’s South Shore east of Freeport and south of Hempstead Turnpike. I guess it’s no surprise why (the closest to true car-only suburbia you can get), but the loss is still jarring. Here, if the county had the good thought to do so, it would have proposed better integration with the LIRR through scheduling, the way Pace Bus does with Metra and Bee-Line does with Metro-North. Maybe it didn’t because if it did, it would entangle its county system more with the MTA, an organization it apparently hates and mistrusts. It wants the right hand to not communicate with the left. Conspiracy abounds.
[…] up in the subway, and along with the refuse come rats. Operationally, workers remove trash via the garbage train, but even this morning at 10 a.m., I saw MTA employees dragging bags of trash through the 7th Ave. […]