Benjamin Kabak

Franklin Street on the 1 train on a particularly busy day. (Photo by flickr user NYCUrbanScape)

Dotted throughout the subway system are a series of shuttered subway stations that pop up now and then as ghosts. They are reminders of an era when subways were shorter and stations even more plentiful than they are today. Many people don’t know these stations exist, and as trains fly past 91st St. and Broadway or Park Ave. and 18th St., astute straphangers can espy glimpses of a past when the city closed subway stations.

Today, we are set in our ways with 468 subway stations, and in a few years, we’ll see that total creep up by four to 472. Closing a subway station, even temporarily or overnight, is pretty much a non-starter as community groups and politicians who otherwise look down on public transit or ignore its needs entirely throw a fuss whenever the MTA threatens service. Still, it’s probably possible to argue that, in some spots, we have too many subway stations.

Yesterday, in the comments to my post on the city’s ever-growing wishlist for transit maintenance prioritization and improvements, a few SAS regulars and I got to talking about station closures. The challenge: Identify 25 stations to close that would cause minimal disruption to those who rely on transit. Challenge accepted.

In essence, it’s a thought piece. With staffing levels on the decline, shuttering 25 stations wouldn’t make much of a dent where it counts in the MTA’s budget. Sure, the MTA wouldn’t have to rehab these stations every three or four decades or paint and clean them more regularly. But the jobs saved would add up to maybe a few million dollars while a lot of people would be both upset and angry at the MTA for failing to provide an adequate level of service.

Still, thought pieces can be fun, and as I toyed with the idea, a few obvious stations came to mind, many of them along the same few routes. First, Rector St. and Franklin St. on the 1 are ripe for closures. Neither provide transfers to other lines, and entrances to both are around 0.3 miles away from the next closet station. A five- or six-minute walk is hardly a major disruption. With fewer than 6000 riders per day, Franlkin is the 240th most popular stop in the system.

Other 1 train stops were prime culprits as well. Up in northern Manhattan, barely 2000 riders per day use 215th St., and 18th St., a relatively popular station, is not even a quarter of a mile away from 14th St. In Brooklyn, Cortelyou Road and Beverly Road are 0.2 miles away from each other, and in Queens, 21st St. on the G averages 1123 riders per weekday. While those folks would argue for their stations, it’s easy to see a rational argument against keeping these stops open. Subway rides would be faster, and expenditures on stations less.

Of course, we can’t just cut willy nilly. We can’t leave neighborhoods without subway stations, and we can’t discourage system-wide use. We need to maintain regular service while allowing for it to be fast, reliable and comprehensive at the same time. So here’s my own challenge should you choose to accept it: Help me develop those criteria for assessing stations. I’ve looked at exit coordinates, distance to the next nearest subway and ridership as potential indicators of a station’s value. What do you think? I’ll develop a full list with some explanations on the stations we pick for a post early next week.

Earlier this week, I featured a piece I wrote a few years ago about brining air conditioning to the subway. It was not easy, unsurprisingly, for New York City Transit to usher in something like air conditioning, and the subways were even worse in the summer 30 years ago than they were today. In fact, a 1983 study found that just 50 percent of buses and 33 percent of subway cars were air conditioned. Considering how we respond to un-air conditioned subways today, it’s hard to believe New Yorkers suffered through such brutal summers barely 30 years ago.

In the comments to that post, SAS regular Phantom said something I’ve often thought over the years. “The subways,” he said, “are off the charts better than they were in the past. We forget that sometimes.” As we fight for better transit planning, more political support and sounder financial investments, we certainly do forget that. We forget what it was like to ride around in graffiti-covered cars that were un-air conditioned, poorly lit and prone to breakdowns. We forget what it was like to avoid subway stations over concerns for personal security or only ride during certain hours. We forget how far we’ve come over the last three decades.

Now and the, while researching a post on subway history, I come across glimpses of the subway past. I wasn’t alive when things were really bad in the 1970s and my memory of the 1980s is sparse. By the time I was old enough to ride the subways alone, the system was on the upswing with better rolling stock, safer environments and stations undergoing renovations. I remember the days of rampant graffiti, and I remember all that graffiti vanishing. I pin I have from a late-1980s street fair proclaims a new “Wipe out graffit” campaign, and it was successful.

But while graffiti became a visible symbol of the system’s decay, the state of the subways went well beyond vandalism. Track fires, such as one from September of 1979 that shut down the West Side IRT for three hours, were common occurrences. This one led to the evacuation of thousands of passengers as subway service from Manhattan to the Bronx shut down, and it was hardly an isolated event. From the DeKalb Ave. bottleneck to the Bronx and Queens, the system suffered from minor delays all the time. It was just a fact of travel.

Meanwhile, the rolling stock was in a terrible state. We look back in wonder at a time without air conditioning, but the train sets from the late 1970s and early 1980s were old. Cars broke down regularly; doors wouldn’t open; lights weren’t on. Stainless steel with FIND displays these cars were not.

By the standards of 35 years ago, today’s subway system is downright luxurious. Stations are in much better state; the rolling stock is mostly newer; switches and signals have been upgraded; technology has made its way underground. Today, minor delays as treated as major inconveniences, and four decades ago, those delays would have been just another part of the daily ride. No matter how much better we want subway service to be, it’s hard to deny the progress the city has made since the state began investing more in transit.

So where do we go from here? One of the reasons why I’ve called for more investment is because we can’t relive that era. The subways and buses were losing 5-10 percent of their ridership annually due to the state of the system and the state of the city’s economy. Right now, though, the subways power New York City, and the powers that be must ensure that it can continue to do so for another 110 years. We have to remember the past or else we may be doomed to repeat it. No one wants to relive that subway experience again.