MTA Denies Plans To Scrap Overnight Subway Cleaning

NEW YORK CITY — The MTA has no intention of scrapping overnight track cleaning despite a newspaper report that it was eliminating crews working the graveyard shift, it said Tuesday. The New York Post reported that the shifts would be eliminated by next year.

“The MTA is absolutely, unequivocally, not getting rid of overnight cleaners – we are actually adding staff to ramp up cleaning," MTA spokesman Shams Tarek told Patch in a statement.

He said the MTA is picking up more subway trash than ever before by bolstering cleaning efforts around the system with 73 additional track cleaners, 10 more portable vacuums and three more vacuum trains Subway trash has been blamed of sparking fires that cause delays.

Cleaning is a central part of MTA Chairman Joe Lhota's $836 million Subway Action Plan to fix the city's transit crisis, Tarek said.

The Post reported that the R line no longer has any cleaners on the 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. shift, and that the same shift will be cut on five other lines by January and across the system by 2018.

While some cleaning has been shifted from overnight to just after the rush hours, "when it's needed most," every station is still getting overnight "heavy-duty" and "emergency" cleaning, Tarek said.

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That "keep(s) trash from piling up and making its way to tracks where it can cause fires and delays," he said. The MTA says it adjusts cleaning schedules regularly.

Workers have removed about 12 million pounds of trash from the tracks so far this year, up from 7.6 million pounds in all of 2016, the MTA said. One recent night at the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn produced more than 2,800 garbage bags containing more than 7o,000 pounds of trash, the MTA said.

Snuffing out trash-fueled fires has been a focus of the MTA's bosses as they work to remedy the subway system's widespread problems. After a Harlem fire sent smoke through train tunnels and snarled service in July, Lhota proposed banning food from subway stations to curb the problem. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA, doubled the fine for littering in stations to $100 last month.

Portable vacuum cleaners helped reduce trash fires by 51 percent in the stations where they were tested, the MTA says. Two of those machines arrived earlier this month and eight more are on the way, the agency said.

Cutting overnight cleaning shifts, though, would save the MTA about $1.44 million in extra wages each year, the Post reported Monday. The 300 union workers on those shifts get $150 to $200 every couple weeks on top of their salaries, the Post's report says.

(Lead image from the MTA)