As I left my parents’ house this evening and walked towards the 96th St. stop, one of the MTA’s Mobile Wash Units went zooming north up Broadway. “There goes a crew pretending to clean the subway,” I said to my friends, and we all commented on the utter lack of cleanliness in New York City’s subways.
Journey elsewhere, and the subways range in cleanliness from spotless — Washington, DC, and Singapore come to mind — to utterly filthy. While New York’s system is clean compared to, say, Rome’s or Madrid’s, it’s not going to win any awards. Mostly, the tracks and platforms are littered with trash, and the MTA’s efforts to take out the trash often result in a stream of garbage juice stinking up the stations. While now and then, MTA workers attempt to clean stations, that effort is about as effective as those street cleaners the Department of Sanitation employs.
Today, Pete Donohue of The Daily News explores the cleanliness of the subways. It would take, he says, $100 million to maintain “an acceptable level of cleanliness” throughout the subway system. While Donohue doesn’t quite lay out what that level would be, it would represent a vast improvement over the current state of our stations.
He reports:
NYC Transit would have to hire an additional 1,575 cleaners, and spend nearly $230,000 per hub, to reach and maintain an acceptable level of cleanliness across the entire system, according to an agency analysis.
“That’s a lot of money,” William Henderson, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said. “In today’s climate, that’s an awful lot of money.”
The total cost would be about $100 million, which NYC Transit can ill afford as it faces down a large 2009 deficit and tries to stave off service cuts.
As the MTA is wont to do lately, the officials quoted point to the line manager program as indicative of the success of cleaning efforts. The L and 7 stations now report heavy litter just 10 percent of the time, down from 33 percent prior to the start of the line manager program.
But that overlooks the real cause of the increased cleanliness. The stations along these two lines are enjoying substantially more cleaners than the rest of the system. Two hundred and twenty five MTA cleaners are assigned to the 45 7 and L stations. In other words, 26 percent of the cleaning crew is assigned to just under 10 percent of those stations. Of course, they’ll wind up cleaner.
In the end, this is another case of the MTA’s simply not having the money. There’s no way they can come up with $100 million right now to fund a cleaning program. It’s too bad; we could really use a tidier subway system.
Graphic courtesy of The Daily News.
Thomas DiNapoli, New York State comptroller, has delved into the MTA’s books, and he doesn’t like what he has found there.
For some reason, New York City transit advocates are fighting, mildly, a battle over modes of transportation in the city that shouldn’t be fought. At a time when we should be teaming up to advocate for an expansion of all modes of car-independent transit in New York City, divisive ideas still permeate the field.