NYC’s gross subway cars are actually getting worse – and causing delays

By David Meyer, Daniel Cassady and Aaron Feis

September 9, 2019 | 1:14pm | Updated 

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Getty ImagesNonprofit news outlet The City, which first reported on the festering problem, reviewed MTA documents reporting trains strewn with garbage and bodily fluids — as well as messes made by the growing number of vagrants in the system.

Nelson Rivera, administrative vice president for Transport Workers Union Local 100, said that there’s no single factor fueling commuters’ increasingly gag-worthy rides.

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“If you take, say, the L line for example, it could be the millennials getting drunk and throwing up on cars,” said Rivera. “It’s not only the homeless, it’s all types of people.”

Rivera and the TWU also pointed to an MTA-ordered moratorium on hiring new car cleaners as older workers retire.

In 2016, the ranks of cleaners were 1,049 deep. Now, only 968 are employed to maintain the same number of cars, letting the mess mount.

“These disgusting conditions are terrible for riders and workers,” said Rivera in a statement. “If MTA Chairman Pat Foye wants to talk about ‘worker availability,’ [he] needs to recognize the environment and unacceptable assaults that cause workers to get sick and injured.”

The MTA insisted that train cars aren’t getting dirtier —it’s just that more people are reporting problems.

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“The accuracy in reporting and coding these types of incidents has been improved, which has contributed to a rise in the number of reports,” said the MTA.

But riders say that a trash-strewn commute has become par for the course.

It’s not your imagination — the subways are getting even grosser.

Complaints of “soiled” subways are piling up, with skeeved straphangers reporting more cars caked with garbage, food spills and human waste so far in 2019 than in all of 2017, according to MTA data.

Having already blown past the 1,504 reports logged in 2017, this year’s 1,623 complaints as of the end of August are on pace to obliterate 2018’s year-end tally of 2,058, the agency said — to the surprise of absolutely no New Yorkers.

“Saying the trains are getting dirtier is like saying the Titanic took on two inches of water after it had already sunk,” said Gene Glicksman, a Queens lawyer toughing it out on the A/C platform at Fulton Street in lower Manhattan.

Grimy subway cars aren’t just funking up your commute — they can also slow it down.

From January 2018 through July 2019, delays related to the interior of train cars being soiled and dirty accounted for approximately 1 percent of total delays, the MTA said.