It’s become abundantly clear over the past few months that the MTA has a garbage problem. As budget cuts have led to fewer station cleaners, trash piles 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. station along the Brighton Line in Brooklyn. The leaking bags smelled terrible, and it was just a flat-out mess.
I found it fitting then when I spotted this story in the Daily News. According to a transit worker, some MTA crews have been using passenger trains to move garbage through the system. This action is, of course, against the rules, and no one is happy about it. Passengers are disgusted when trash bags start leaking, and the MTA spoke out against this practice. “It is not our practice to use in-service trains for trash removal,” the authority said.
So what’s going on here? TWU President John Samuelsen has an idea. Despite MTA denials, he claims workers are being instructed by supervisors to do so. “To bring those bags on passenger trains and expose riders to potential of rats jumping out of the bags is outrageous,” he said to the News. “When track workers walk past those bags, we give them a wide berth, knowing if you walk close to a bag, a rat could jump out right on top of you.” Heads should roll.
19 comments
Hauling trash bags on cars in regular passenger service would explain the increasing frequency of people posting YouTube videos of rats inside subway cars. It’s more likely they were carried onto the trains in the bags and broke out than they were standing on the platform edge waiting for the next Uptown 6 train to arrive or made a running leap into the cars before the doors closed.
Even more evidence that this organization is in desperate need of an overhaul.
How does the station cleaner get a dozen bags of trash in the same car of a train? Does the conductor cooperate with him and hold the doors until the dirty deed is done?
Yes. Passenger trains are also used to ferry a regiment of track workers with a ton of heavy industrial tools to tunnel locations and between stations. They usually get in the first car, and tell the driver to stop the train where needed in the tunnel, the driver then keys open a single door and they walk out onto the catwalk, closes the single door and the passenger train then drives away.
Station cleaners are not responsible for transporting trash out of stations. That’s the job of garbage collection crew using the garbage collection train. Only black bags are used in station.
This story has orange bags. They are used to collect trash from the tracks. Doesn’t really matter though. Like I said before, the MTA should not be in the business of collecting garbage period. People want to be nasty yet they have high expectations for cleanseliness in the subways.
Ben, if you see something inappropriate why don’t you post a picture? There’s 66,000 employees at the MTA and management can’t watch them 24/7. Certainly putting trash on trains is not okay, and you and your readers could be part of the solution.
“Passengers are disgusting when trash bags start leaking…”
Oh, I don’t know, some passengers are disgusting all the time.
Cool!
You’d make a good proofreader.
There’s nothing wrong with using multiple-units as locomotives in the off-peak. Is the problem that they’re actually loading trash into the trains?
That is exactly the problem
Yeah, our transit sanitation workers aren’t the best. The dragging of bags across surprisingly clean platforms is quite disturbing.
Some passenger trains already carry garbage. The only difference is that the garbage has 2 legs and 2 arms. Ok ok, I know, should not have said that. But riding the train when the high school kids get let out is not a pleasant activity.
Is this an attempt to give the train cleaners at the last stop job justification?
What we have here is a case of track workers attempting to move the trash they collect from the tracks. For what reason unknown to me they can’t leave said trash in station, in the trash collection rooms until the trash collection train arrives. And if you’ve seen what I’ve seen over the years those bags can remain on the track bed in between the columns for a full month because it’s not the job of the trash collection train to jump down on a live track to remove those bags. So what should be done here is better coordination whenever the track workers are sent in to do a track bed clean up between the trash collection trains.
What would be even better is if we finally ban food, drinks and fine heavily for littering in the subway so the MTA can get out of the business of trash collection and save millions more dollars on an expense that only exists because NYers are disgusting individuals!
I agree that banning food and fining more aggressively make sense, but I have a hard time imagining it’s fair, in the NYC summer, to say you can’t at least drink water. And I really need coffee!
Drinking water is fine. I find that to be the most reasonable. But if the contents of a drink can spill leaving a messy stain on the floor, seats or fellow passengers then I’m all for banning it. That includes coffee. Sorry….
One possible trash solution: stop collecting it for people. The transit system is for, eh, transit, not dining. Many systems make you throw your garbage elsewhere.
It’d be really nice if the city simply regulated packaging better.
I’m all for it!!!! The MTA is not a trash company, even thou they tend to transport trash on passenger trains at times….well it’s true in more ways than one.
[…] news surfaced yesterday that MTA crews had loaded up a passenger train with garbage bags, I figured heads would roll, and already, the authority is doling out the discipline. According to […]