New York City Transit

Earlier this week, Streetsblog and I received a PDF of information about the MTA’s demographics. The authority tracks the way people ride, what MetroCards they use and how often they swipe, but the materials aren’t readily available for the public. Check out Noah Kazis’ take here.

Throughout the lead-up to the fare hike, the MTA kept reinforcing the idea that a capped MetroCard would have little impact on the vast majority of riders. As the above graph shows, that would be the case. Only 7 percent of 30-day cards are used 91 times or more. Those passes are used, on average, 107 times, which doesn’t quite lend credence to the fact that fraud is widespread. Interestingly, approximately 25 percent of 30-day buyers don’t reach the breakeven point right now. Those folks are just wasting money.

Interestingly, we see similar trends with the seven-day cards as well. A higher percentage — 13 — are used 23 times or more, and those cards average around 27.5 swipes per seven days. Nearly 35 percent of those using the seven-day card do not reach the break-even point. It appears that a good number of NYC Transit riders should be using pay-per-ride cards but aren’t.

Next up comes a trove of demographics information the MTA collects through Customer Travel Surveys. (For an example, download this PDF.) Click the image below to enlarge.

We see here is a profile of the median transit rider. He or she makes $55,700 a year and is 43 years old. People who use the unlimited fare offerings do indeed make significantly more than those who do not. Generally, these numbers do not present a picture of people who own cars in New York City or make extensive use of autos. It certainly reinforces how Albany fails city residents when they take money from the MTA or force the authority to cut service, raise fares or both.

I have to believe, as Noah does at Streetsblog, that this is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t yet know the profile of bus riders or bridge and tunnel users. The real issue though concerns what we make of it all. Should the MTA be making fare hike decisions based upon its demographic profiles? Should the authority do more to encourage unlimited card use? Should they better educate riders as to the break-even point of its MetroCard offerings? The possibilities are endless.

Transit will send the Nostalgia Train up to Yankee Stadium this week as the ALCS continues. (Photo courtesy of NYC Transit)

As they did with the Yankees’ ALDS match-up against the Minnesota Twins, New York City Transit will be rolling out the Nostalgia Train three times this week as the Major League Baseball playoffs continue in New York. For railfans and Yankee fans looking to capture a bit of the past, Transit will send the Nostalgia Train from Grand Central up to the Bronx for the American League Championship Series tonight, tomorrow and Wednesday afternoon.

The four-car train is scheduled to leave an hour before game time. Tonight and tomorrow, the trains will depart Grand Central at approximately 7 p.m., and on Wednesday, the vintage subway will leave at 3 p.m. Transit says these cars were Interborough Rapid Transit company originals from 1917 and were in service through the early 1960s. Many Yankee fans can remember taking these subway cars up to the Bronx as kids decades ago.

Transit, meanwhile, took the time to remind Bronx-bound baseball fans that extra playoff-special trains will run along the 4 and B/D lines after the games are over. “For generations, Yankee fans of all ages have relied on the Jerome Avenue Line or Concourse Line to gethem to the Stadium during post-season play, and this playoff series is no different,” Thomas Prendergast, president of NYC Transit, said. “By taking the train, Yankee fans can save their energy for more important things, like rooting the Bombers on to victory.”

A Yankee victory or three sure do sound good to me.

A glimpse inside last year's Yankee Playoff Nostalgia Train special. (Photo via flickr user Amanda Rykoff)

Train buffs and baseball fans be ware! As the Yankees look to wrap up their American League Division Series against the Twins tonight, New York City Transit is running a special Nostalgia Train to the Bronx. The train will leave Grand Central/42nd St. at approximately 7:15 p.m. and will make four express stops en route to 161st St./Yankee Stadium as a celebration of playoff baseball in the Bronx.

For Transit, the playoff nostalgia train has become an annual tradition. Last year, a four-car set of Lo-Vs ran the same route. Those cars, said the agency at the time, were first put in service in 1917, six years before the first Yankee Stadium opened its doors. They were retired in the 1960s and have been retrofitted for Nostalgia Train rides.

“Taking the subway is always a great way to get to the ballgame, but being able to travel there on the nostalgia train makes an already enjoyable trip extra special,” Steven Feil, senior vice president of subways for NYC Transit, said last year. “These cars were in operation back when Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth were wreaking havoc on the American League and now they’re back again for fans to see Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez patrol the Yankees’ infield.”

Bring your Yankee paraphernalia and your cameras.

When I spoke with then-New York City Transit President Howard Roberts nearly two years ago, he discussed his plan to improve station cleanliness through a reorganization of the system’s maintenance workers and cleaners. By spending enough, he wagered, the MTA could solve one of its customer service woes: dirty walls, grime-filled staircase and garbage-strewn stations. Cleaner stations would mean a more pleasant commute for us all.

As the MTA’s finances headed south though, daily station maintenance went with it, and 15 months ago, the MTA confirmed that less money led to dirtier stations. The MTA had to cut approximately 100 cleaners, and subway stations and train cars would inevitably be dirtier.

But what if it’s not the budget cuts that make our subway cars sticky? What if it’s the attitude of those tasked to clean them? In an undercover investigation, that’s just the question WABC set out to answer. As you might imagine, their camera crews found workers slacking on the job — jobs for which they get $23 dollars an hour. The story is embedded above, but I’ll excerpt:

Perhaps you have noticed the subway cars have been dirtier lately. Eyewitness News had been told, it is because of budget cuts and workers laid-off. However, our undercover cameras found another problem: from the #4 Line in the Bronx, to the N Line in Queens, to the L in Brooklyn, we found subway cleaners more interested in reading the newspaper, chatting with fellow workers or texting on the phone than doing their jobs. Jobs for which are paid $23 an hour.

At the end of the D-line in the Bronx, cars come all the way from Coney Island and are in need of serious cleaning. There is trash and spilled soda, shoe-sticking filth, yet Eyewitness News observed a team of four cleaners one afternoon and found most of them doing very little. A lot of them stand around talking to each other or to the engineer, while one worker cleans a car or two on each train. It meant the majority of train cars on the D-Line would head back out, having to never been cleaned.

We found similar examples on the 4-Line, where it seems for some cleaners, reading takes priority. One worker sits in the air-conditioned car reading for about 6 minutes before getting up and leaving. The car left exactly how it arrived with papers on the seat, trash on the floor, and mud and dirt by the door.

WABC’s video shows the workers not very hard at work, and those with whom the reporters spoke say the problem stems from a lack of adequate supervision. These cleaners generally are not well supervised, and management at Transit says it cannot monitor everyone.

“With the level of resources we have, we don’t have one-on-one supervision for every employee,” Transit president Thomas Prendergast said, later adding. “If you have cases where the train has not been cleaned and trash on floor and sitting down that’s a management failure and I’ll clearly state that and we will have to do things to control that.”

Subway cleanliness has been a decades-long problem for the MTA, but that investigative report gives them an opening to do something. The authority has been engaged in a year-long effort to improve worker efficient and cut back on waste. Convincing its high-paid cleaners to do their work should become a top goal. It should both save money and make the subways a more pleasant place for the MTA’s customers. No one, after all, wants to ride in a car with a sticky floor, but these days, what choice do we have?

In case of emergency, go around. (Photo by flickr user rlboston)

The emergency exit doors in subway stations throughout the city are the scourge of the system. Installed in 2005 and 2006 to provide fast egress in the event of an underground emergency and equipped with an ear-splitting alarm, the doors are rarely used for their intended purpose. Instead, people who think rules don’t apply to them use the exits to escape crowds at turnstiles and generally get out of dodge faster than the person next to them.

Today, the New York City Transit Riders Council issued a call for better emergency exit policies. In a report released this morning (PDF here), the NYCTRC unveiled results of a study its members conducted of the emergency exits. These rider advocates found widespread emergency exit abuse and numerous instances of fare evasion. The group found examples of herd mentality and concluded, as anyone who spends enough time near the subway’s fare-control areas, that the alarms are completely ineffective.

The NYCTRC’s methodology is fairly straightforward. This summer, council members sat at 19 subway stations throughout the four boroughs and at various times of the day to monitor the emergency exit use. The findings are summarized succinctly:

In the course of sixteen hours of observations during peak hours and nineteen hours of observations in off-peak hours, our surveyors counted a total of 2,308 passengers using designated emergency gates for access to and egress from the paid area of subway stations. Most of this activity involved 2,115 individuals who exited the paid areas of the stations through the emergency gates. Our surveyors also observed 193 individuals entering the paid areas of stations through the emergency gates. In 109 cases, surveyors indicated that these entries into the paid areas appeared to be made in the course of evading fare payment.

So when do people use the emergency exits? According to the council’s observers, those brave souls willing to risk setting off the alarm do so to “relieve a backlog of riders waiting to exit the station.” However, as I witnessed this summer at the relatively empty north end of the City Hall/Chambers St. stop, some people use the emergency exit because it’s the door closest to the stairway. Convenience often trumps manners.

The council too noted that a herd mentality is in full effect with regards to the emergency exits. “At many locations where large numbers of riders improperly exited the station through emergency exit gates,” the report says, “it appeared that riders generally refrained from using the gates until one rider “broke the ice” by using the gate. Once the gate was opened and the alarm activated, a substantial percentage of exiting riders turned from using authorized points of egress and exited the station via the emergency gate.”

And what of fare evasion as well? Only around five percent of emergency exit use constituted examples of fare evasion, and the NYCTRC says the vast majority of those fare evasion uses came at one station — 125th St. and Nicholas Ave. — where the gate was unlocked and unalarmed. “Clearly an open gate without an operable alarm is an invitation to individuals wishing to enter the system improperly,” says the report.

Unfortunately, the report is low on recommendations. The Riders’ Council suggests that monitored exits deter improper emergency exit use, but that alarms are not the answer. “We believe that because the alarms sound very frequently, they have lost their ability to alert riders to a possible emergency,” the report says. “If anything, [the alarms] serve to distract a shrinking force of station personnel from other duties.” The alarms may also alert those looking to avoid paying that the gate is open.

Without station agents at every exit and with emergency gates so porous, the Riders’ Council suggests video monitoring, a silent alarm and a better locking mechanism for the gates. The best answer might just be targeted police sweeps aimed as those who are violating the emergency exit rules either to enter without paying or to exit improperly. The emergency exit debate has been raging for years and with no end in sight. The NYCTRC report confirms what we know: that emergency exits are far from perfect. If you build it, New Yorkers will abuse it.

These often-dirty subway benches could be going the way of the dodo. (Photo by flickr user nicolasnova)

New York City Transit’s wooden benches are an iconic part of the subway experience. Found in most underground stations, these benches are designed with raised arm rests to discourage people from living on them, but the wood can grow disgusting as gum, food, beverages and various unknown substances are rubbed into the grain, leaving them sticky and grimy. Some have been reported to carry bed bugs.

According to a report in today’s amNew York, though, these wooden benches’ days might be numbered. Transit, says Heather Haddon, is again considering stainless steel benches. In a piece that explores the various competing architectural and visual styles of a subway system pieced together over 100 years and presented to riders with a 21st Century sensibility, Haddon drops in a note in the end about the future of the benchs:

NYC Transit officials are weighing whether to scrap the standard wood bench and opt for the system’s first stainless steel seats for the Second Avenue Subway and No. 7 extension stations. Designers are having a vigorous debate between the two models, with some viewing the steel as cold, while others blasting the wood as unhygienic, [Transit architect Judith ] Kunoff said.

In coming months, officials will install prototypes of the two competing benches at an undisclosed station to get the public’s feedback, she said. It’s not the first time that transit has wxperimented with seats — funky orange benches were installed at the Jamaica-Van Wyck station in Queens, and the system also experimented with plastic, metal and stone in the 1960s.

It’s certainly undeniable that stainless steel is cold and that wood is unhygienic, but in the debate between the two, I’d take cold ten times out of ten. As I noted earlier this year, benches are an integral part of the subway experience. While at peak hours, finding a platform seat is rare, at off-peak hours when waits are longest, benches can provide welcome relief for the weary who don’t want to stand impatiently at the platform’s edge.

New York’s wooden benches — bed bugs, gum stains, stickiness and all — are a rarity among the underground systems. While New York has experimented with non-wooden benches, around the world, materials differ. The Paris Metro has molded plastic; the DC Metro sports some unforgiving concrete; the London Underground has something metallic. The grime factor is significantly less elsewhere.

So Transit will tantalize us with a pilot at some undisclosed station so bench enthusiasts don’t skew their sample. If anyone spots this pilot in the next few months, you know how to reach me. In the meantime, keep raisin’ a skeptical eyebrow at those wooden seats. Who knows what lurks within?