NYC Subway Should End 24-Hour Service, Planning Group Says

NEW YORK, NY — New York City's ailing subway system should stop running 24 hours a day in order to properly fix it up, an influential planning group argues in a report released Thursday. Nixing all-night subway service is one of several recommendations for overhauling the city's rails in the Regional Plan Association's Fourth Regional Plan for the New York metropolitan area.

The report argues closing the subways overnight would help workers keep up with the system's desperate maintenance needs. The MTA could run shuttle buses to accommodate early-morning straphangers, who only account for 1.5 percent of all subway ridership, the report says.

"The overwhelming majority of people who ride the subway during the daytime would benefit from the better, more reliable, cleaner and better-maintained system that weeknight closures allow," the RPA writes in the report.

Construction crews could use those overnight hours to install new, more efficient train signals to help the subway run more smoothly, the plan says. That would cost $27 billion over the next 15 years.

The MTA has been gradually installing new signals, but at the current pace it would take until 2050 to put them in place throughout the system, the RPA says.

But the group doesn't trust the MTA to do repairs itself. The state-run transit authority has such a bad record of finishing projects on time and on budget that a new, independently run public benefit corporation should take on the fixes, the report says.

The "Subway Reconstruction Public Benefit Corporation" would be charged with overhauling the subways over the next 15 years. The governor would control it, just like the MTA, but without the confusion over who's responsible or the bureaucratic regulations that burden the transit authority, the report says.

The MTA's bureaucratic web is "having a real detrimental impact on so many lives across the region. Just ask anyone who rides the subway regularly," Scott Rechler, the RPA's chairman and an MTA board member, said Thursday at an event launching the Fourth Regional Plan.

RPA officials acknowledge their ideas won't be politically palatable to the elected officials responsible for making them happen. But leaders have historically adopted many of the group's big recommendations — including the construction of the Second Avenue Subway and a Long Island Rail Road terminal at Grand Central Station.

MTA Chairman Joe Lhota welcomed the RPA's ideas about how to fix the ailing subways, but rebuffed the idea of a new body to handle construction.

"While we don’t need to create a new bureaucratic structure, we agree that securing a dedicated revenue source — preferably one that also battles congestion — is essential," Lhota said in a statement.

The RPA argues the MTA needs to look beyond the subways to extend transit service to low-income neighborhoods with high populations, such as Manhattan's East Side and the Bronx's Third Avenue corridor.

The plan proposes a "Trans-Regional Express" train system that would offer subway-like service for a low fare at existing Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road stations. It also calls for expanding the Second Avenue Subway into the South Bronx and the 7 line to the western edges of 14th Street and 23rd Street.

Additionally, Penn Station should be transformed from the dark pit it is into "an inspiring gateway to New York," the plan says. That would mean kicking Madison Square Garden out when its permit ends in 2023 to open the nation's busiest train station to more light and air.

The RPA seems to support the architect Visnaan Chakrabarti's vision for a new Penn Station with glass walls and reconfigured train platforms. The New York Times published Chakrabarti's concept last year, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled plans to turn the Farley Post Office into a new train station complex. The RPA says the Farley plan should also be completed.

The RPA is unveiling its full Fourth Regional Plan Thursday morning. Watch live below.

(Lead image by Mark Osborne/Patch)