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Today, 26 May 2008

Yesterday, 25 May 2008

Five million people ride New York City's under and above-ground railway every day, braving a vast, aging system that is dilapidated, deafening, and prone to floods, escalator outages and sealed-off exits.

Now the inconveniences they endure have been laid bare with the belated publication of a survey of the system's unreliable elevators and escalators, alongside a months-long investigative report by The New York Times.

The January 2007 report by J. Martin Associates had been kept under wraps until the Times printed its conclusions on Monday. And they are damning.

The system's 169 escalators broke down on average 68 times in 2007, and two-thirds of its 200 elevators ground to a halt with riders trapped inside at least once during the year, inspectors found.

Not enough training

"We were on the field for six months. Then the MTA said, 'you have to rephrase that,'" Michele O'Toole, head of the inspection firm, said of the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

"'No, we don't rephrase,' I answered, and I walked off the job in January 2007. They hired another consultant," she said.

The problems start, she said, with the system's under-trained workers.

"The employees are not qualified enough. They don't have elevator background, and four weeks of training is nothing," O'Toole said.

The MTA reacted quietly to the New York Times article, saying simply that significant investments had been made over the last two decades to improve equipment.

If stories of asthmatics trapped in elevators for hours are worrying, other subway ills are experienced daily by all riders.

"I have seen the metro in Paris and in London. Here, it's much louder, dirtier, more crowded," said Guy Ardito, a passenger waiting for a train at Times Square in the heart of Manhattan.

"I'm not disabled, so I don't take the elevators, but I often see they are not working," the young physical therapist added.

Stations are sinking

"You can see that New York metro is very old, 100 years. One big problem is flooding. Also some stations are stinking, like 59th Street," he said.

The free daily 'AM New York' recently published a list of the system's worst locations, illustrated by a picture of a curtain of rain separating passengers from trains on the platform at Penn Station during heavy storms in August 2006.

Yellow signs warn of slippery puddles underfoot, but nothing prepares one for the nerve-jangling noise of an arriving train, its metal wheels screeching to a stop.

"I don't use my instruments in the metro because I don't want to see the police confiscate it," said Alan Fierstein of Acoustilog, a company that measures noise and recommends how to reduce it.

"I would say 100 decibels or so, 110 when the brakes are noisy. They can sometimes be very noisy," he added.

By comparison, above ground, the sound of traffic in busy Times Square is around 70 decibels," he said, "100 decibels when you hear the horn of a fire-truck. "At 120 decibels it's painful," he said.

Accidents are rare, but when a train derailed recently, some 400 people had to be evacuated on foot through dark tunnels. No one was injured. The incident, which happened on a weekend, was scarcely covered in the media.

The New York City metro is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It comprises some 1056 kilometres of track and 468 stations, according to NYCsubway.org, an independent website about the system.

AFP