Subway
Issue 1 Spring 2019 ../..
Connecting people in NYC
Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash
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THE HORROR
made her late to a meeting or appointment, she said. Her commute consists of two hours on the Metro-North Railroad from Connecticut before getting on the subway. “When they shut down the station, you have to figure out where else you’re going to go,” Ms. Dove, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, said. “Do you walk to the next stop? Do you take an Uber to the next stop? A cab or something?” While the M.T.A. recently declared that on-time performance for trains had been the highest since 2013 and major incidents the lowest since 2015, riders will still have to wait much longer for an overhaul. Andy Byford, who oversees the city transit system, began the “Fast Forward” plan in 2018, which will roll out subway and bus improvements over the next 10 years. The project is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars. “Despite these gains, I believe the best is yet to come,” Mr. Byford said in a May press release. That wait is especially painful for riders like Alex Lynch, 19, who grew up in New York and attends college in Boston. He said construction has caused him to wait frequently for the L train. In April, the M.T.A. began the first phase of the L Project to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and to upgrade aging staPhoto by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash
As a rat scurried across the floor of an R train heading toward Bay Ridge, the car’s passengers seemed unfazed — except for one man. Roger Morales, 48, jumped on his seat as the four-legged rodent ran past to climb on a corner seat passenger, who nonchalantly shooed the rat away. “If it was me, I would have been more than horrified,” Mr.
tions. Since work began, there have been complaints of overcrowding and delays on nearby lines, too. Boston’s subway system, the T, is “a lot more pleasant to ride because it’s cleaner and the trains show up a lot more often than New York’s,” Mr. Lynch said.
Morales said. Tales of rats, sexual harassment and the psychological toll of delays are growing in concert with the increasing unreliability of the city’s 115-year-old subway system. Ridership declined 2.1 percent from 2017 to 2018, to 1.7 billion rides, according to the Metropolitan Transporta-
“You just never know who you are going to be on the train with and what their intentions are”
tion Authority. A significant uptick in fare evasion could
For some riders, experiences concerning personal safety have left scars. April Daneus rides the subway almost daily for work, but there is one day in particular she still finds difficulty in speaking about.
also be contributing to the drop in ridership numbers, the M.T.A said.
Ms. Daneus was on her way to work from 42nd Street when a
Those with few affordable or feasible alternatives to the subway carry
following her. “You just never know who you are going to be on the
on, continuing to ride routes on the more than 665 miles of passenger
train with and what their intentions are,” she said.
man who she recalls may have been trying to flirt with her began
track, where harrowing experiences are still the exception, not the rule. L.C. von Hessen once saw an older man touching himself on the Multiple times, rain or snow have cost Shaleen Dove a subway ride and
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train. “When I saw the old man masturbating, I actually was not
Last year 1.7 billion people used the New York City subway, a decrease of 2.1 percent from the year before. However, the M.T.A. says it could be becuase of an uptick in fare evasion. Photo by Eddi Aguirre on Unsplash
Sex crimes in the subway have increased by 10 percent as compared to the same period of March last year, according to the Police Department. Some riders say they have seen public masturbation or have been followed innapropriately. Photo by Billy Williams on Unsplash
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afraid, I was just angry,” Ms. Hessen said. According to the Police Department, 165 sex crimes were reported through March 17 — a 10 percent increase compared with the same period last year. But the biggest problem with the subway system is still unreliability, said Danny Pearlstein of the Riders Alliance, a grassroots organization that advocates for improvements to public transportation in New York. His group started a campaign that resulted in a congestion tax for drivers in one of the busiest areas of Manhattan to help finance upgrades to the subway system. “What we won, in a larger coalition of people working with new progressive elected officials at the state level, is a $25 billion plan that essentially over the next decade will do this major modernization work,” Mr. Pearlstein said. He blamed negligence for the deterioration of the system. “It gets lost on the policy agenda because there’s so much to do,” Mr. Pearlstein said. “There hadn’t really been a champion of the subway, and in a way it’s structural. It’s hard for anyone to champion something that the governor so directly controls.” These continued failures have pushed Funke Adedapo, a Staten Island resident, to the brink of tears on occasion during her hour-and-a-half commutes by bus, ferry and subway to Manhattan. Ms. Adedapo was recently heading to a birthday party when an ordinarily five-minute subway ride ended up taking 30 minutes, forcing her to be the last one to show up. “This anxiety of like waiting there, not knowing when it is going to come,” she said. “It is really frustrating.”
In 2017, an estimated 250,000 to tens of millions of rats lived Blasio launched a $32 million plan in 2017 to reduce rat pop
RATS TAKING OVER Winnie Hu for The New York Times So many rats regularly lurk on a sidewalk in Brooklyn that it is the humans who avoid the rats, not the other way around. Not even cars are safe: Rats have chewed clean through engine wires. A Manhattan avenue lined with trendy restaurants has become a destination for foodies — and rats who help themselves to their leftovers. Tenants at a public housing complex in the South Bronx worry about tripping over rats that routinely run over their feet. New York has always been forced to coexist with the four-legged vermin, but the infestation has expanded exponentially in recent years, spreading to just about every corner of the city. “I’m a former Marine so I’m not going to be squeamish, but this is bad,” said Pablo Herrera, a 58-year-old mechanic who has counted up to 30 rats while walking on his block in Prospect Heights, just around the corner from the stately Brooklyn Museum. Rat sightings reported to the city’s 311 hotline have soared nearly 38 percent, to 17,353 last year from 12,617 in 2014, according to an analysis of city data by OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watchdog group, and The New York Times. In the same period, the number of times that city health inspections found active signs of rats nearly doubled. Mayor Bill de Blasio, like mayors before him, has declared war on rats, but so far the city is still losing.
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“There is no doubt that rats have a major impact on New Yorkers’ quality of life and this administration takes seriously our responsibility to control and mitigate their population,” said Laura Anglin, deputy mayor of operations. “No New Yorker likes having rats in their community and we are committed to continuing the work of controlling rats in all of our neighborhoods.” One key reason rats seem to be everywhere? Gentrification. The city’s construction boom is digging up burrows, forcing more rats out into the open, scientists and pest control experts say. Milder winters — the result of climate change — make it easier for rats to survive and reproduce. And New York’s growing population and thriving tourism have brought more trash for rats to feed on. But the onslaught of rats extends beyond New York: Cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles are also confronting outbreaks. “Everywhere I go, rat populations are up,” said Robert Corrigan, a research scientist in New York who estimates that their numbers may have increased by as much as 15 to 25 percent in some cities. The rodents are not only a nuisance and a blight on the quality of life, but also a health risk. A bacterial infection spread by rat urine, leptospirosis, killed a Bronx resident in 2017. Chicago — crowned the nation’s rat capital in one study — has more than doubled its work crews dedicated to rats, who set out poison and fill in burrows in parks, alleys and backyards. It also passed ordinances requiring developers and contractors to have a rat-control plan before demolishing buildings or breaking ground on new projects.
d in New York, according to Business Insider. Mayor Bill De Photo by Taton Moïse on Unsplash pulations in the city.
Washington, where rat complaints have nearly tripled to roughly 6,000 last year from 2,400 in 2014, is testing a rat-sterilization program tried elsewhere that uses liquid contraceptives
as bait. And Seattle is planning to train neighborhood property owners and managers on how to stem infestations. “We respond where we can, but management of rats, not elimination of them, is our practical goal,” said Hilary Karasz, a county health official. In New York, rats once scurried in the shadows but now they frolic brazenly in broad daylight. One even became a social media star: pizza rat. Parents at an Upper West Side playground said rats jumped into the sandbox where their children played, though the vermin have been cleared for now. Mr. de Blasio, calling for “more rat corpses,” unveiled a $32 million assault on rats in 2017, which included increased litter basket pickups, the deployment of solar-powered, trash compacting bins and rat-resistant steel cans. The city has also used dry ice to smother rats where they live.
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