A homeless man sleeps as the uptown 2 leaves 72nd St. This is becoming a common sight on late-nite trains. (Courtesy of flickr user slice_of_danny)

I boarded a downtown 2 train at 96th St. on Saturday night around 11:45 p.m. and encountered a familiar scene. As the car doors slid open and the automated voices loudly announced the stop, I noticed that the car was completely deserted except for one guy.

“Uh, oh,” I thought to myself. “That’s trouble.”

Certainly enough, as the doors slide closed, I got a good whiff of the car, and it was not pretty. Breaking the law, I moved between train cars and found olfactory relief. I wish I could say this incident was a rare occurrence, but more and more, I’m noticing it’s an every-weekend event. Ride the subway late enough, and you’ll see the tell-tale signs. Crowded cars surrounding an empty car while the guy with no shoes sleeps sprawled across three seats in that empty car.

This problem isn’t limited to the trains either. As it’s incredibly hard to sleep with some guy yelling at you to “Stand clear of the closing doors please” every five minutes, many residents of the subway have taken to sleeping in stations. Forgotten corners house homeless people, and the 2nd Ave. stop at Houston Street is a breeding ground for unsavory smells.

Many of us straphangers don’t believe the MTA ever does anything about that Stinky Guy in the next car. No one wakes him up or makes him leave the trains. But, as The New York Sun reports, the MTA is actually trying to do something about the homeless problem but at a huge cost to the cash-strapped Authority.

The MTA this year renewed its $1.5 million contract with the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit social service provider, to fund the program for outreach workers to visit subway stations and try to convince homeless people to accept escorts to city-run shelters or detox centers…

The outreach program carried out 875 escorts last year, according to statistics provided by the MTA. Outreach workers estimated that they were re-escorting the same homeless people back to the shelters from subway stations about 25% of the time. “It’s a tough sell,” the program director, Robert Rumore, said. “The largest portion of people we escort is back out again.”

The article from Monday’s Sun details a program that is hardly the definition of success. Groups of homeless people living together in the subway exert pressure on each other to ignore the entreaties of outreach workers who are facing an uphill battle against people suffering from psychological disorders or chemical dependency issues. Furthermore, while 22 workers patrol the 660-mile subway system, no one works on weekend nights when the problem seems to be at its worst.

Meanwhile, because many of these homeless people earn money for food by panhandling in the subways, they are loathe to leave the warmth and shelter provided by the roof of the train.

The police, too, are handicapped. Arrests are meaningless for homeless people, and they, more often than not, return to the subway after being released. While the NYPD’s Homeless Outreach Squad claims some measure of success in reducing the number of homeless subway dwellers down to just under 1000, it may simply be impossible to find a solution in which 100 percent of the subway system is homeless-free.

While I wholeheartedly support the social benefits of homeless outreach projects in the subway, I am left wondering at the cost to the system. According to The Sun, this project costs $2000 per homeless person removed, and even then, at least a quarter of the 875 folks taken out of the train system head right back in.

Is the solution a return to the draconian Giuliani-era programs of arrest and incarceration? I don’t think so. But an increased presence of authority figures could do wonders for the problem of Stinky Homeless Guy in A Train Car Syndrome that so plagues the New York City subways.

Subway ridership by month, 2005 and 2006. (Source: NYCT Performance Indicators)

The F train is too crowded; there’s no doubt about that. While we’re content to blame bad scheduling and unannounced service cuts, subway ridership numbers are contributing to the overcrowding as well.

After decades of declining ridership numbers, the number of straphangers has shot up over the last few years, and 2006 was no exception. In fact, subway and bus ridership numbers are at a 37-year high, and the city could see record ridership levels sometime in the next decade. Crain’s NewYorkBusiness.com reports:

Annual ridership on subways and buses rose to 2.2 billion, a level not seen since 1969, when 2.3 billion rides were recorded, MTA officials said on Friday…

In 2006, there were 1.5 billion trips on New York’s subways. That’s up 3.4% from a year earlier and the highest since 1952, when 1.55 billion trips were made. Average weekday subway ridership rose 2.7%, to 4.9 million, the most since a 1953 when 4.99 million trips were reported.

So trains are more crowded, and the MTA is not increasing service. In fact, while New York City Transit officials won’t confirm this, most riders feel that subway service has actually declined this year with the F and L trains serving as the biggest examples of this.

It’s all a matter of economics really as Newsday reports that the average paid fare is just $1.29, a far cry, inflation-wise, from the five cents charged in 1904. The MTA may simply have to raise the fare again to meet service and maintenance demands.

Meanwhile, as Crain’s reports, 30-day unlimited MetroCards make up nearly 30 percent of all MetroCard sales. While these discounted MetroCards are driving more commuters underground, they are money-losers for the MTA. If people are paying less per ride, the MTA simply cannot capture the same revenue.

So here’s the tradeoff: Would your rather have cheaper subways and questionable service levels or a slightly more expensive train ride but more frequent subway service?

While the good folks in Queens are still trying to figure out the whole 7 train mess, Theodore Kheel’s recent call for a higher road tax that would subsidize free subway rides has found an unlikely ally among the City’s religious community.

Writing in The Jewish Press, Rabbi Gershon Tannenbaum has expressed his support for the free subway rides on religious grounds:

With increasing permitted use of automation and technology on Shabbos, such as halachically acceptable elevators and escalators, the possibility of using fare-free subways on Shabbos and Yom Tov would be of great interest. The majority of poskim in the past have leaned towards disapproval. The ability to use the subway on Shabbos was inhibited due to such considerations astechum Shabbos (measured distances prohibited outside a city) and maaris ayin (appearance of transgressing Shabbos). Should the entire NYC subway system become fare-free fulltime, the question of subway usage on Shabbos could be more clearly defined.

Since many very observant Jews do not believe in spending money on the Sabbath, free subway rides would enable these religious men and women to utilize the City’s rapid transit system without breaking the Sabbath.

My only issue with Tannenbaum’s article is his reliance on the same misinformation being promulgated by the media as they attempt to describe Kheel’s plan. Tannenbaum wrote, “Questions whether the subway system would be able to carry the increased number of passengers can be answered by a review of the subway’s history. In 1943 the NYC subway system carried eight- million passengers daily. Today’s passenger load is less than four-and-a-half million daily.”

As I’ve pointed out in the past, that information is incorrect. The 8 million figure was a one-day high set in 1946 and not an average daily total. Here’s what I wrote two weeks ago in clearing up this misconceptions:

But the most accurate ridership information I could find (in [a] PDF presentation) showed an annual ridership of slightly more than 2 billion in 1946, largely considered the busiest year in subway history. That amounts to an average daily ridership of around 5.5 million people. Recently, in September of 2006, just over 5 million people a day rode the subways. We’re not that far off from those records.

Overall, it’s a small bone to pick. I wonder if Rabbi Tannenbaum’s thoughts will gain more traction as the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility continues its Kheel-funded study of a free subway system.

MetroCard photo from Triborough’s flickr stream.