Stand & deliver
Dump seats, get more people on trains: Joe
FORGET GIVING your seat to an elderly or pregnant rider, the MTA wants to make some train cars standing room only, the struggling agency said Tuesday.
Balancing the need to squeeze even more people onto subway cars against their already jampacked condition, MTA boss Joe Lhota wants to remove seats on the two-stop 42nd St. shuttle and the bursting-at-the seams L line, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“The overcrowding on the L line has just been extraordinary with the growth that’s going on in Brooklyn right now,” Lhota said.
Removing seats from the two lines will act as a chairless pilot program to see if the space-saving measure makes sense for other lines.
Lhota said packing more people into train cars could help free up perpetually crowded platforms at the 96th St. station on the Upper West Side and the Lexington Ave. line platform at Grand Central station.
“We need to find a way to get more people off the platform and onto the subway cars,” he said.
The standing-room only cars would accommodate about 25 more riders than current carriages, which hold roughly 150.
The changes will take time to implement — first, the MTA must work with regulators in the federal Department of Transportation.
Lhota cited similar moves in other cities, including Boston, which branded two seat-free cars on the Red Line as the “Big Red.”
“We want to follow what other subway systems that have been experiencing a significant increase in riders have been able to do,” he said.
Still, the Boston T’s experiment may be more of a cautionary tale of going too far. In 2008, all but two seats were removed from two 50-seat cars. Two years later, more than a half of the seats were back — 26 total in each car.
Now, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is retiring the Big Reds, along with the rest of the 218-car fleet, by 2023. Replacement cars will have seats, said agency spokesman Joe Pesaturo.
“There was a fair amount of feedback and the majority of comments were not favorable,” he said.
Andy Monat, a board member at Transit Matters, a Boston advocacy group, said he recalled seeing a Big Red car pull up and a rider next to him grousing, “Oh, great, it’s the train car with no seats.”
Monat said fewer seats could be helpful when Red Line passengers are crushed together. But it may not have been worth it.
“Removing seats just doesn’t buy you that much more capacity,” he said. “What matters a lot more is speed and reliability of the train.”
BART in the San Francisco Bay-area took a few seats out of its train cars to fit more people inside and recently expanded it. The BART board in February voted to remove seven seats from 380 cars, more than half the fleet.
Some L train riders said they could use the extra space, though there was concern for the elderly or people with disabilities.
“It’s a good idea,” said Williamsburg, Brooklyn, resident Cathy Medina, 26. “Sometimes I’ll be late to work because it’s so packed.”
But Amber Windom, 31, a student from Canarsie, Brooklyn, thought losing the chance to grab a seat is just too much to give up. “That’s ridiculous. After a long day you don’t want to come on public transportation and stand,” she said. “You want to make it as comfortable as possible because it’s already a place you share with strangers every day.”