New York may use staggered hours to keep subway as safe as in 1918
As New York City makes plans to reopen in the coming months, officials are dusting off the playbook from the 1918 flu pandemic, when businesses were ordered to begin their work days at staggered times to prevent the subway from becoming a vector of disease.
The idea, then and now, is to spread riders through the day to avoid the kind of crowding health experts fear could turn the subway into a breeding ground for the novel coronavirus which has killed over 20,000 people in the city.
Talks over staggered hours and days for offices are still at an early stage, a member of the New York state’s reopening panel told Reuters. Coordination could prove complex in a city of 220,000 businesses, most of them smaller firms.
But Patrick Foye, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has been making the case to business leaders, signalling that he sees it as key to restoring confidence in the tangled web of 665 miles of track that ferried 5.5 million people a day before the lockdown in March.
Coordinated start times
Foye told a May 6 call organised by the Association for a Better New York that he sees staggered work hours and days as “part of the answer” to congestion, citing the 1918 response.
Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City and a member of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reopening committee, said businesses would support coordinated start times.
“It’s the expectation of employers that something like that will have to be worked out if they are going to get their people back on the trains,” she said.
During the 1918 pandemic, the New York City health commissioner, Royal Copeland, staggered starting and ending times for most businesses by 15-minute increments. While it is unclear what impact the move had, New York ultimately fared better than other cities — it had a death rate of 4.7 per 1,000 residents, far lower than Philadelphia at 7.3.
‘Work from home’ to continue
New York City is unlikely to reopen in a meaningful way until autumn. Even then, workers will likely return in phases, if at all. Employees of technology firms Twitter Inc and Square Inc, for example, have been given the option to keep working at home.
“As we try to reopen the economy the use of buildings is obviously going to change. We should be talking about implementing staggered shifts,” said Kyle Bragg, president of service workers union 32BJ SEIU.
Last month Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and physician Jeffrey Harris published a paper that pointed to a parallel between rider patterns and virus spread in early March. But some officials have said they are not convinced the subway is a root cause. One sceptic is Cuomo, who has cited data showing transit workers with below-average infection rates and a hospital survey indicating most patients had not used public transit.
Sarah Kaufman, associate director at New York University (NYU) Rudin Center for Transportation said the notion that subways spread the virus was inaccurate. “It was a failure to quickly make people stay home.”