Blood on the tracks

15% increase in riders struck Accidents involving workers up

STRAPHANGERS were hit by subway trains a terrifying 147 times in 2011 — a sharp leap from the year before when 128 passengers were struck, MTA data reviewed by the Daily News shows.

The deadly statistic — a 15% jump — means that every 2.5 days a rider is struck by a train, according to a report on customer safety that will be discussed at the MTA’S Transit Committee on Monday.

The breakdown of those accidentally hit and those who jumped in front of speeding trains was not available. Fifty of the 147 victims died.

Frightening as the numbers sound, NYC Transit’s Office of System Safety found that in the vast 660-mile system, the rate of passengers struck by trains in 2011 was just 0.09 for every 1 million customers, up from 0.08 in 2010.

But passengers at the Times Square IRT station on Sunday said they were shaken by the grim stats.

“Anything can happen on a subway platform, and it can be very scary,” said Nancy Menendez, 59, a hospital worker from Queens.

Eva Vandenbossche, 29, a teacher from the upper East Side, gets anxious when she spots kids horsing around on the platforms.

“I know they’re only playing, but it gets scary to see how close to the trains they get when they’re messing around with one another,” she said.

The new MTA report on annual safety indicators was prepared before Friday’s tragedy on the L tracks in Brooklyn in which Joshua Basin, 20, a Laguardia Community College student, was killed by a train at the Bedford Ave. station.

He was defending himself against a boozed-up passenger who had been berating several other straphangers, and after a tussle, the two men tumbled onto the tracks. The assailant fled as a train bore down on them and is still at large, but Basin couldn’t pull himself out of the track bed in time and was crushed to death.

An MTA spokeswoman said each case in the report has its own set of circumstances and added, “As always, we urge customers to stand back from the edge of the platform.”

Even as more passengers are being hit by trains, the MTA’S record in many other safety areas is improving, with a total of 4,783 subway customer injuries in 2011, down from 4,996 injuries in 2010, the data shows.

But MTA employees faced heightened risks, with total accidents last year rising to 1,538, up from last year’s tally of 1,521 accidents, the report found.

There were also 200 cases last year in which MTA employees lost work because they were the victims of assaults, up sharply from 176 cases the year before.

High injury rates for both workers and riders has been a huge issue for Transit Workers Local 100 in recent months, and union officials recently instructed motormen to slow down even more when entering stations.

With Denis Slattery