State slams lax repairs on subways

Repair and maintenance of the city’s critical subway signal equipment has been routinely neglected, according to a damning report from the state controller’s office released Wednesday.

State Controller Thomas DiNapoli’s audit of signal work from 2015 through Oct. 31, 2017, shows that work was often pushed off for days.

“Faced with staff shortages, MTA put off inspections of one of the most critical components of the subway system,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “Transit acknowledges that malfunctioning switches and signals are one of the main causes of train delays and badly in need of repair, but it gave short shrift to preventative checks that could save riders aggravation and inconvenience.”

The audit on signal equipment in two locations — the No. 6 Parkchester stop in the Bronx and the Howard Beach station on the A line in Queens — found that more than a third of maintenance, inspection and testing tasks were done outside the repair cycle.

Of 1,280 tasks between 2015 and May 16, 2017, 450 of them were completed late. While most were no more than 10 days late, 83 jobs took longer than that to be finished.

Supervisors told the controller’s auditors that they lack resources and that strict safety precautions that have to be enacted before work begins often slow the pace of maintenance and repairs.

Meanwhile, staff in an East New York, Brooklyn, facility charged with repairing and maintaining signal-related equipment had problems completing work on time.

About half of the 55 maintenance tasks for new technology devices were late, some by more than a year. One device that was supposed to get maintained every 200 days hadn’t been looked at for longer than two years as of Oct. 31, 2017, when the controller’s staff reviewed it.

NYC Transit President Andy Byford wrote in response to the audit that transit officials have focused on fixing these maintenance delays by filling vacancies and tracking equipment with a new asset management system.