Night Cleaners Coming Back To NYC's Nasty Subway Stations

NEW YORK — Hopefully this will work better than Febreeze. The MTA plans to bring full overnight cleaning crews back to stations where it scaled them back about a year ago, the city's transit workers union says.

Last fall, the MTA said it had shifted some cleaning work from overnight to just after the rush hours. The initiative started on the R line in Brooklyn and expanded to four other routes this January, according to the Transport Workers Union Local 100.

The agency has now reversed course with New York City Transit President Andy Byford in place and is putting cleaners back on overnight shifts on segments of the R, A, G, D and 6 lines, the union said.

"We told the MTA last year that their plan to practically eliminate overnight cleaner positions stunk to high heaven," union President Tony Utano said in a statement. "We’re glad the new administration now appears to agree and is restoring positions at the affected stations."

Heavy-duty cleaning continued at each station overnight under the program that's now being halted, an MTA spokesman said last year. But the initiative left "skeletal overnight crews" to cleanse some of the city's sometimes disgusting stations, according to the union.

An MTA spokesman acknowledged the impending change, though he said the pilot program involved only schedule changes, not job cuts.

"We began a pilot program on several lines last year to try different cleaning schedules with the goal of getting stations cleaner in a more timely and effective manner," the spokesman, Shams Tarek, said in a statement. "... With the introduction of the Group Station Manager program, we’re taking a fresh look at the whole stations program and as a result we’re suspending this pilot early in 2019."

Tarek was referencing Byford's new initiative tasking managers with overseeing the cleanliness and safety of up to 25 stations apiece.

The cleaning program was tested amid MTA Chairman Joe Lhota's Subway Action Plan, an $836 million scheme to stabilize the beleaguered subways. Byford in May unveiled a sweeping "Fast Forward" plan to overhaul and modernize the city's transit sytem, which he has said could cost about $40 billion over 10 years.

(Lead image: Trash is seen on subway tracks at an F train station in Manhattan. Photo by David Allen/Patch)