New York City Transit

The flip seats on this R160, currently in service along the E line, will remain in the locked position. (Photo courtesy of New York City Transit)

To combat overcrowding, transit agencies can turn to a variety of solutions. Some may look to increase capacity by running more car sets, but eventually those efforts will max out when the tracks are overcrowded with trains. Others may look to a low-cost solution that allows them to stuff more people into a single car by removing seats. That’s the path New York City Transit first started to follow in April 2008 when the agency announced a pilot that see seats removed at rush hour. Now that this train car is rolling, though, the authority has canceled those plans.

The flip-seat pilot, when first unveiled, was not without its detractors. Crowded rush hour subways can already resemble cattle cars, and by removing all seats, the standing masses might take up less space but would be considerably less comfortable. Few riders liked the plan, and the plan seemed to stall last September when Kawasaki refused to retrofit an R142. Yet, Transit went ahead with the order on an R160 anyway, and the train hit the rails in February albeit with the seats locked in the down position.

As Pete Donohue reports in The Daily News, New York City Transit has no plans to flip the seats up any time soon, and it sounds as though the pilot may have been canceled for good. According to Donohue’s sources, Transit has scrapped the idea because of the fear of a widespread public backlash against the MTA. Since fare hikes and service cuts have left New Yorkers disgruntled, removing seats might push them over the edge.

“People are already feeling they’re paying more for less,” Donohue’s source, a transit official, said. “I don’t know that a train like that, even though the idea was to increase capacity, was something that the public would have embraced. We’re not going down that road.”

The original plan called for four cars in a eight-car train to be without seats for a year’s worth of rush hours. Transit would have surveyed rider reaction and then determined whether or not to expand this program as it orders new cars in the future. One MTA board member is pleased to hear that the seatless cars won’t see the light of day. “I think there would have been civil disobedience,” Andrew Albert, the New York City Transit riders representative to the board, said. “I think people would have brought bolt cutters and unlocked the seats. I hated that idea. I still do. We shouldn’t be locking [seats] away from riders. We shouldn’t be telling people they can’t have seats.”

Albert’s reaction may be a strong one, but the psychological impact of a seatless car train isn’t in doubt. Even if we’re not sitting down, we still want to know that the chance to sit might exist. Still, the fact remains that certain subway lines at rush hour are too crowded. The East Side IRT cannot handle more passengers or train sets, and the Queens Boulevard lines are nearing capacity as well. A one-train experiment with four cars of seats locked up during the rush might have been worth it.

In the end, this pilot was doomed by a change in administration at Transit. Ordered by Howard Roberts, it was canceled when economic circumstances changed with Tom Prendergast as Transit president. Still, transit officials assure me that all is not lost with this new R160. “This particular 8-car set also contains other handhold options as well as video surveillance equipment,” Transit spokesman Paul Fleuranges said to me an e-mail. “The testing of that equipment is on going. So it would be incorrect to infer that any money spent on these cars is now ‘down the drain.'”

The 181st St. ceiling on August 16, 2009. (Photo via MTA Inspector General)

The August 2009 ceiling collapse at the 181st St. station should have been avoided, says a new report. Barry Kluger, the MTA Inspector General, issued a detailed examination of the agency’s station inspection policies and procedures leading up the accident. He concluded that the authority had known about the faulty ceiling conditions and the possibility of collapse for ten years but had failed to remedy the problem.

“NYC Transit managers had learned in 1999 that a portion of the ceiling at 181st Street was at risk of collapse,” said the report, available here as a PDF. “However, it did not begin a comprehensive assessment of the ceiling’s condition until June 2009, just two months before the ceiling fell.”

The MTA’s inspection negligence, according to Kluger, was not limited to just the solitary station along the 1 line. Accidents at Bowling Green and 18th Ave. could have been prevented too. “Each of the three incidents reviewed during this audit indicates weaknesses in the adequacy of NYC Transit’s station inspections. These shortcomings increase the risk of customer injuries and service disruptions. The shortcomings also increase the probability that scarce capital and maintenance dollars will be spent addressing emergency situations,” he said. “Facing extraordinary pressure to pare spending, NYC Transit simply cannot afford the additional costs associated with emergencies that are clearly preventable.”

Unsurprisingly, the problem seems to be one of bureaucracy. According to Kluger, workers in Transit’s Capital Program Management division identified the structural issues in the 181st St. ceiling during a station rehab in 1999 and were responsible for identifying permanent solutions. CPM failed to do more than install a temporary shield, and when the Department of Subway’s Maintenance of Ways division took over inspections, it failed to question CPM’s work.

To compound the matters, MOW inspections are well below standard. According to Kluger, these inspections would take place from the station platforms. “From these vantage points,” he said, “no inspection could have adequately detected the extent of the ceiling’s distress at the 181st Street Station.”

Amongst the lack of communication across departments, the poor standards for inspection and the fact that other components aren’t inspected regularly, it’s a wonder we haven’t seen worse accidents underground. To remedy these oversights, the MTAIG has recommended the obvious: better communication and inspection standards. As the MTA begins to spend the $16 million appropriated for repairs at 181st St., Transit officials said they have already begun to implement these recommendations and to upgrade their inspection protocols. Better late than never.

Stations along the J/M/Z, G and L trains saw ridership growth during 2009. (Source: The New York Times’ Interactive Ridership Maps)

As New Yorkers travel around the city, swiping MetroCards at one end of our trip and passing through a turnstile at another, New York City Transit collects piles and piles of data. Every turnstile has a counter that clicks upward with an entrance and another one that tracks exits, and every year, the agency releases the ridership totals for individual stations to the public. For those of us who love the transit minutiae found in the data, the release is akin to Christmas in April.

Over the weekend, Transit put the 2009 ridership information available online in this table, and I spent a bit of time last night looking for trends. So too, it seems, did Michael Grynbaum of The Times, and his article spots the same trends I found. Overall, ridership for 2009 was down from 2008. Transit reported 1,579,866,600 total subway riders in 2009 with a weekday average of 5,086,833, a Saturday average of 2,928,247 and a Sunday average of 2,283,601. In 2008, total ridership topped 1.625 million with averages of 5.229 million during the week and 2.98 million and 2.312 million on Saturday and Sunday respectively.

On a more micro level, as expected, the bad economy — and subsequent decline in tourism and jobs— had a negative impact on ridership. Total figures for stations in midtown and the Financial District were down from 2008, and those areas heavily favored by tourists such as the 42nd St. corridor and Herald Square saw traffic decline by five to ten percent.

Yet, other areas, as Grynbaum notes, saw an increase in riders. For example, the BMT Nassau St. stop at the Bowery saw annual ridership increase by over 12 percent as more than 1 million people headed to the once-maligned J, M and Z trains. Overall, as a Times infographic shows, nearly every station along the J/M/Z in Queens and Brooklyn saw increases in ridership.

In fact, as Transit gears up for its June service cuts, I believe those lines will see an even greater increase in ridership this year. With the M train slated to run from Middle Village to Forest Hills via the Chrystie St. Cut and Sixth Avenue, those who live in Bushwick will now have a one-seat ride to jobs in Midtown. Even with longer waits, the trains should see more riders this year.

Some, though, aren’t as optimistic as I. With cuts looming, Andrew Albert, head of the New York City Transit Riders Council, fears that the overall decline in ridership will continue. “It remains to be seen whether people stay,” he said to Grynbaum. “If they have interminable waits or have to change lines, maybe they’ll leave the system altogether.”

Stadium Attendance and Ridership

As Grynbaum notes in his article, ridership through both Mets-Willets Point (the former Shea Stadium stop) and 161st Street-Yankee Stadium declined in 2009. Willets Point saw traffic dip to 1,862,720 from 2,036,355, a decline of 8.5 percent while even with an additional eight postseason games, traffic at Yankee Stadium declined 1.9 percent from 8,576,546 to 8,410,256. The reason, though, is not because the Mets struggled.

Rather, ridership was down because capacity at these two new stadiums was significantly lower than at what Citi Field and new Yankee Stadium replaced. The current Stadium in the Bronx can fit, on its best day, just over 52,000 — a number that includes standing room and one the team never attained last year — while the old park could fit 57,545, a ten percent difference. Citi Field can fit 45,000 while Shea packed in over 57,000, a difference of over 20 percent. In that light, then, the declining ridership numbers are actually lower than expected.

The Top Ten, Compared

I’ll leave you to muse over the differences in the top ten stations from year to year. Interestingly, 86th St. on the Lexington Ave. IRT entered the top ten as traffic at the Citigroup stop at 53rd St. fell by nearly ten percent to 11th in 2009.

At Nevins St., low-hanging rafters are often used as makeshift trash cans. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

As a route down Second Ave. has remained the city’s seemingly unattainable subway line expansion project for over eight decades, so too has subway cleanliness been considered an illusion. The New York City subways — open 24 hours and covering hundreds of stations in five boroughs — are just dirty and always will be no matter how many times MTA officials say they want to change that state of underground being.

Well, no, really, for real, this time it’s going to happen. At least, that’s what Transit’s senior vice president for subways told the New York City Transit Riders Council yesterday afternoon. Heather Haddon has the report:

“We’ve got to ensure that those stations are getting cleaned,” Carmen Bianco, NYC Transit’s senior vice president for subways, told the New York City Transit Riders Council. “We are going to maintain them at a higher level going forward.”

As amNewYork previously reported, transit has increasingly left cleaning shifts unfilled to save on overtime when workers callout. Dozens of shifts for day-to-day cleaning and deeper scrub downs have been skipped at major hubs like Herald Square, Times Square and 14th Street, transit documents show. “I’ve noticed lately the stations I’m in are noticeably trashier,” Sharon King Hoge, a riders council member.

Bianco said he recently happened upon a station that wasn’t cleaned for 18 hours on the weekend after shifts were missed. “We’re talking about the bottles, the paper … That’s not a standard I want to live to,” Bianco said. “We’ve got to be able to cover that job.”

As an approach to station cleanliness, Bianco, as Michael Grynbaum noted earlier this week, will help oversee a reshuffling of personnel assigned to clean stations. With the line manager program nearly on the way out, cleaners will be under the purview of one division in charge of station appearances. “Daily cleaning will be the responsibility of almost 1,000 station cleaners who were previously assigned to the operating groups,” NYC Transit head Tom Prendergast wrote in a memo.

Still, haven’t we heard it all before? In 2008, then-Transit President Howard Roberts pledged to clean the stations before he ran into budget cuts that saw numerous cleaning shifts unfilled. The stations, anecdotally, remain as messy as they ever are.

If Transit is serious about keeping stations cleaner, I see three distinct approaches ranging from the easy to the extreme.

1. Change the messaging — Currently, Transit announcements tell people to put their trash in the “trash receptacles” and urge people to “can it for a green planet.” While the sentiments are positive ones, those messages go well beyond the problem. Receptacle is an unnecessary 10-cent word, and an appeal to environmentalism doesn’t jibe with cleanliness. Just tell people, in no uncertain terms, that trash should go in the trash cans. The simpler, the better when it comes to messaging.
2. More in-station trash cans — I realize adding more trash cans to train stations will result in more work for an already over-taxed cleaning staff, but this move would go a long way toward making stations more pleasant. I ride the B train from 7th Ave. in Brooklyn every morning. That station features an entrance toward the front of the train with trash cans at the bottom of the stairs and a very long platform with no other garbage cans. By the time I get to the back of the train, I’ve passed numerous discarded coffee cups and newspapers lying on the ground. When the nearest trash can is the equivalent of a city block away, it’s no wonder people start to litter.
3. Enforce litter laws or ban food entirely from the subway — It’s an extreme proposal to a quality-of-life problem, but it has worked elsewhere. The D.C. Metro earned some bad publicity when a young girl was ticketed for eating on an escalator, but the draconian enforcement efforts go the point across. D.C. trains and stations are far cleaner than ours in New York, and although the stations are routinely cleaned as the system shuts down at night, during the rush hours, the platforms just aren’t nearly as messy as ours.

Until boorish subway riding culture changes, trash will always be a problem in New York City. The MTA can’t shut down the system to clean it, and so we’re left with millions of people at all hours of the day leaving garbage behind. A concerted effort may make marginal in-roads in keeping platforms litter-free, but only the most drastic of behavioral attacks will lead to real changes.

New York City Transit’s 370 Jay St. as seen from Google Streetview.

For years, any reference to 370 Jay St. was Big Apple slang for the New York City Transit Authority. The big hulking building at the corner of Jay and Willoughby in Downtown Brooklyn had housed the TA headquarters for decades, but in 2002, Transit operations moved to Lower Manhattan. The building at 370 Jay St. remains a very large thorn in the side of Transit’s real estate department.

Since 1995, the building itself has been shrouded in scaffolding. Pieces of the façade fell that year, and although the MTA has planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on repairing the building for the better part of ten years, the money has never materialized. Supposedly, the 2010-2014 Capital Plan, yet to be approved by the state, will appropriate money for the project, but in the meantime, the scaffolding still stands.

Over the years, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership has called upon the authority to sell or renovate the building. It is, they say, a blight on Downtown Brooklyn. The scaffolding creates a 420-foot-long corridor of dark shadows, and the storefront space sits empty and unused. In Oct. 2008, The Brooklyn Paper profiled the state of the protests and found that the MTA planned to spend $150 million to upgrade a building worth approximately $100 million. The work would not begin until 2012 at the earliest, and local pols were pressuring fast action.

Today, amNew York highlights the local anger over the state of the building, and the story is much the same. Now, the work is estimated to cost over $180 million, and no one knows when it will begin (or funded, for that matter). Heather Haddon has the MTA’s take on it:

Brooklyn business owners and residents are asking the MTA to wash its hands of its 370 Jay St. property, a 13-story hulk in the heart of downtown Brooklyn that has deteriorated since NYC Transit yanked most of its operations from there about four years ago…

The city owns the building and leases it to the MTA, so the agency wouldn’t make money by selling it. But the 418,000-square-foot property needs $184 million to gut it and replace the facade, up 23 percent from the previous estimate in 2008, according to MTA figures. “The MTA has failed when it’s tried to become a developer,” said Assemb. Richard Brodsky, (D-Westchester), who wants the agency to rethink its plans for 370 Jay St.

Money for the renovations was postponed by two years and is now included in the 2010 capital plan, MTA documents show, though it’s unclear when the building will be ready. In the meantime, the agency recently took out a lease in midtown for about $3 million a year to house operations that will eventually go in 370 Jay St. Once open, the new space will end up saving the agency money, “to the tune of approximately $25 million a year,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.

In a sense, 370 Jay St. has now come to symbolize the problems at the MTA. It has been in a state of disrepair for 15 years, and renovations have been on the MTA’s massive To-Do list for at least the last eight years. Yet, it still sits there empty, devoid of economic activity and a visual sorespot on Brooklyn’s downtown landscape.

The MTA continues to say it will actually save money when it can move back to 370 Jay St. In the meantime, though, Transit will soon celebrate a decade away for its once and future headquarters. Maybe, as Brodsky said, it’s time to rethink that plan.