Workers at 23rd Street were able to give the track bed a thorough scrubbing with no trains zooming by. (Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin)
For the millions of New Yorkers who rely on the city’s subway system at all hours of the day, the best time for the MTA to do its work is never. We don’t want weekend slowdowns; we don’t want overnight delays; we don’t want mid-day re-routings. We want the subways to run all the time whenever we need it.
That is, of course, a problem when you’re talking about infrastructure that’s around 80 years old at its youngest spots and over 100 at its oldest. To combat a decline that reached a nadir in the early 1980s, the MTA is, as we know, engaged in a never-ending battle to repair its system. We are stuck with weekend headaches, mid-day, off-peak diversions and overnight work. If the early returns are any indication, we might end up with once-a-quarter FasTrack shutdowns as well.
In a presentation to the Transit Committee earlier this week, MTA officials praised the results from this month’s four-day overnight shutdown of the East Side IRT. They spoke of the productivity gains and the money saved, and while a one-time trial along one subway line isn’t enough to judge a program, officials were optimistic that the program would be a successful one in the long run.
According to the laundry list of accomplishments the authority released, work crews identified and completed 324 tasks over the course of the four nights. This included removal of over 20,000 pounds of debris from subway tracks; installation of new tie blocks, plates and friction pads; 311 signal inspections; grout work at various points along the line; and retiling, repainting and repair work at numerous stations, just to name a few. “We’re able to complete work that we would not normally be able to do in our normal customary way of doing it,” Department of Subways head Carmen Bianco said. “The level of exposure [to danger] went down for employees, because we’re not running trains.”
Overall, the authority says it saved around $673,000 by turning off service. If that’s a projectionable figure, the MTA could save around $10 million annually while improving the physical plant in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. That, at least, is the long-term goal, and it’s going to take a few more pilots to see if FasTrack is a sustainable effort. “This is the first time ever in the history of this organization that we’ve done this,” Transit President Tom Prendergast said. “So we need to actually have three or four more experiences before we can ascertain how successful it is and how we can improve upon it, and what the impacts are.”
With the work accomplishments in hand, what of the impact on customers? Some praised the idea as a way to combat decrepit station conditions; others did not. ““This a bad plan that you have decided,” Thanisha Mitchell said to the MTA. “I have to open a gym at 6 am and I have to punch in by 5:30. I actually have to be to work before 5. This Fastrack plan is garbage and effects everyone’s schedule. Your ad says you are reliable, and I don’t believe so.”
Interestingly, the MTA claims that it did not notice increased use of parallel lines either. While the authority halted work on those parallel lines — in this case, the BMT Broadway trains — so as not to further inconvenience customers, the authority noted that extra shuttle service and the so-called gap trains on the Na and R “were not well utilized.” Transit is waiting for a full analysis on adjacent routes and bus lines until more data has been collected.
So now, we wait. In February and March, FasTrack moves to the West Side as the 7th, 6th and 8th Avenue lines get their treatment over the span of five weeks. Then we’ll reassess what it means to lose subway service from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. four nights a week for one week every three months. With the right results, it should be worth it, but the jury is still out on what those right results should be.
20 comments
I took a long break from any kind of work, but if I take trains at night as often as I used to this coming year, I’m hoping increased service along parallel route remain. Traveling is a hassle already at night.
Gap trains are trains that aren’t scheduled to run, but instead sit on a siding, with a crew, in case there’s a gap in service, at which point they can be dispatched into service.
Nobody is claiming that the N and R weren’t well ridden, only that no large gaps developed to the point of needing the gap trains. Still, I hope they keep the gap trains, since there’s nothing worse than discovering that, not only is your usual subway line not running, but there’s a long delay on the alternative as well.
I’m not surprised that there wasn’t much use of the extra shuttle service, since that wasn’t the main alternative. The 7 is probably enough.
You probably know this: what’s the marginal cost of pressing a gap train into service over keeping it ready with a crew?
I think that’s probably more an incremental cost, not a marginal cost. No idea what the answer is, but presumably the crew is being paid and the train is maybe even idling, so wouldn’t the additional cost just be energy consumption and wear and tear on the train?
What Bolwerk said, but in addition, once the train is pressed into service, it isn’t available anymore if a gap develops later on.
Incremental cost is correct. Marginal cost is the difference between the cost of the next train and the last. It would be very low compared to, say, opening the 2nd Ave Subway and calculating the cost of running just one train on it – in that case the gap trains on other lines have very low marginal cost.
Thanks for sharing the results Ben. If the success continues, hopefully Prendergast and Bianco will make this a routine practice.
As an east sider I can attest to the success of fast tracks first week. The stations are notably cleaner and far nicer and less decrepit due to the retiling work. Downtown its like a whole new train. Its a minimal price to pay for an improved system.
What stations exactly are cleaner/less decrepit? When I rode the Lex the week after FasTrack, I saw a few painted/repaired platform edges and some new signage at Union Square. That’s it. The uptown platform at Bowling Green still has missing ceiling tiles and the platform edge on the Brooklyn-bound side (the one that has the protective fencing) is as filthy as ever. Grand Central looks untouched, with tons of missing ceiling tiles in the mezzanine area, and Brooklyn Bridge is as dirty as ever.
I was expecting to see a noticeably cleaner/brighter look after 4 days of closures.
Think they even got 24 hours of time to work? If they were mainly focusing on track and signal work, I can’t imagine they had much time to deal with stations.
Probably not, which is why I thought it odd that the MTA would promise cleaner stations and platforms. I don’t doubt the workers did some major work that most riders can’t see (tracks/signals/switches) but the stations themselves don’t look that much better. Grand Central, Brooklyn Bridge and Bowling Green look exactly the same as they did prior to FasTrack.
I didn’t notice 33rd Street on the Lex was any cleaner yesterday, but then it was never in especially awful shape. I’ll be at 23rd Street today for the first time since late December, so I’ll see what happened there.
Though I would guess just removing trash is a big undertaking.
Look up at the ceilings.
I did. And the ceiling tiles at Grand Central and Bowling Green are missing, as they have been for at least the past 8 years. Heck, a few pieces of painted plywood would be better than the gaping holes with exposed wire currently on display.
The Grand Central mezzanine was fully open to the public, and was probably busier than on a normal night, since trains were terminating there. Only the southbound platform and tracks were out of service.
Also, remember that there are going to be three more closures of the same line segment this year. Not everything that has to get done has to get done in the first four nights – there will be a second chance in a few months.
FWIW, I was on the platform @ Grand Central a few days after FasTrack, and the trackbed was just about immaculate on the downtown side.
If only it could stay that way…
(Still, it was an amazing sight to behold!)
When Chicago does it’s renewal of lines. Major fixes, ceiling tiles, rehabs, ADA accessibility, new paint, plus track work. The shut down the entire line. For at least a year. (Usually in stages but not always.) And they have a small fraction of the redundancy that NYC does. But their overhaul projects really do sparkle. I guess you have to decide which is more important: keeping the total system running 24 hours a day or doing really intensive maintenance on a decent schedule.
I don’t think we can realistically shut down any of our lines for a full year. Maybe the Culver below Church, maybe the Sea Beach, maybe something in Lower Manhattan (the J/Z south of Essex, or the R through the tunnel, or the 1 to South Ferry), but the others are all either too busy or too isolated to consider closing them for a year.
This whole thing is just a weird mentality about scarcity that Americans have. I was just in Berlin and they are shutting down TXL altogether to build a new terminal. Imagine what the reaction would be if they shut down La Guardia to build a new terminal, even if it saved as much money as the profit on all the flights out of there combined. But that’s Germany… a country that seems to understand that building two of something is cheaper than what it’s going to cost if you build just one.