I ride the NYC subway almost every day. On some days, I ride on up to three or four different train lines in the course of a single day. Perhaps the most agonizing part about all of this local travel is the waiting: five minutes for one train to come, ten minutes waiting in the station for a connecting train to arrive. Like myself, many New Yorkers have learned how to pass the time by reading books or newspapers, listening to iPods or playing a handheld video game. I can’t often commit to doing any of the above because of my ADD-like tendencies, for as soon as I delve into Salman Rushdie’s latest novel or the 50-page reserve reading for a class or choose Kayne West’s new track to bless my ears, my attention is often diverted to elsewhere in my surroundings. Namely, the platform or the subway tracks. Over the last six months, possibly even longer ago, I began noticing the piles and piles of garbage just “hanging out” on the subway tracks. And of course, my attention is often diverted to the scurrying rats that go to and fro across the tracks—but rats are boring. Everyone talks about them, gasps or squeals when they see one, laughs at said person’s reaction, stares as they go out their grubby, dirty business. But I have never overhead a conversation about the amount of garbage that just seems to pile up on the subway tracks. Or who deals with it, and why it just never seems to go away. Or most importantly, what is immediately affected by this seemingly endless build-up of garbage.
Up until about one month ago, I took for granted the fact that I put my trash out on sidewalk on Monday and Thursday evenings, and in dawn hours of the following mornings, the familiar loud engine and grinding compactor of the collection truck and nondescript man in green “uniform” whisks away my unwanteds. It is also done so seamlessly and (at least to an occasional observer like myself) effortlessly. In my experience, and in my days of being a GAP employee, seamless service is the sign of truly excellent service. On an infrastructural level, the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY from here on) seems to have it down pat; except for a few items that escape faulty trash bags, the garbage always gets picked up and rarely is anything left behind. In recent weeks, when learning about the history and complexity of the DSNY, I started comparing in my head how it and the MTA manages the volume of city garbage. While it might at the outset look like I am comparing apples and oranges, the reasons for removing garbage from public areas—subway platforms and residential sidewalks—are ultimately the same: prevention of attracting disease-carrying vermin and pests, prevention of garbage entering sewage systems, and prevention of the build-up of harmful gases that are produced when garbage begins to decompose. And although the DSNY is only marginally older than the MTA, it seems to have gotten a solid handle on both the importance and efficiency of removing garbage in a way that the MTA is clearly still struggling with. The main problem, which I will use as the lens through which I will evaluate the issue of subway garbage, is one that recently hit home but did not receive much attention: the severe delays and suspension of nearly all subway service after a severe rainstorm on August 8, 2007.
On the morning of August 8, I was rudely awakened by the sound of a fairly intense thunderstorm, though it seemed nothing out of the ordinary given the rainstorms the city had been graced with earlier in the spring. By the time I left home to go to work, around 8:30AM, it was hot and the sun was shining brightly as if nothing at all had happened. By the time I reached the Steinway Street subway station in Astoria (serviced by the R, G and V subway lines), it had been shut down entirely, and lines for the Q101 bus to Manhattan had snaked all the way down Broaday back to 37th Street (see map). Clearly, all was not as if a severe thunderstorm hadn’t happened.
Not realizing the full impact this seemingly brief storm had had, I proceeded to walk to my car and drive to work. I made it to the office only about fifteen minutes later than planned. Several of my colleagues, with access to a car or not, were not so lucky. I quickly learned that the entire subway system had been shut down because of flooding, leaving people stranded at home, extremely late for work and/or soaking wet. Since I have never personally observed a flooded subway track, I have always wondered how this happens. What causes tracks to flood? With seemingly endless space for the water to go, where could there possibly be such excessive flooding that the entire NYC subway system was ground to a halt? I never thought much about investigating the causes, and no one in the public eye seemed to want to talk about it either. Other than mass chaos the flooding caused, the only other distinct memory I had of that day, or possibly the day after, was a news broadcast in which some higher-up person at the MTA blamed the mayor’s office for not allocating enough money to upgrade the sewage and drainage systems, and in turn, Bloomberg blamed the MTA for not using the money City Hall had in fact allocated for the purpose of upgrading sewage and drainage systems. Neither party stated the direct causes of the flooding and subsequent suspension of subway service, and neither party offered any comforting hope of quickly resolving the issues. And just shy of one month after this whole mess, I started taking a graduate course about garbage…
As I mentioned, my awareness of garbage on the subway was heightened months ago. But, whether out of obligation to support this bit of research or out of morbid curiosity, I began to photograph the sheer volume of garbage on subway tracks, and I will discuss them with respect to several things: number and placement of garbage cans on the subway platform, the makeup of the garbage itself, and the intensity of traffic that the subway stop or station in question receives on a given day. The following images were taken from the N/R/Q/W subway platform on Wednesday evening, September 26, 2007, at approximately 9:20-9:25PM:
The first image seemed contrary to what I had suspected: this high volume subway stop appeared to have not too much garbage littering the tracks. However, as I continued down the track, I came upon an incredibly disturbing sight (image 2). Who knows whether or not a drain lies beneath this pile of garbage, but this pile is clearly not going anywhere, and there were no MTA employees around making any attempts to make it go away. Anyone who has been forced to take the subway after hours knows that this is when the garbage collection takes place; however, does this happen nightly? or does this happen on an “as-needed” basis? Short of contacting the MTA directly, an initial search of MTA website and a Google search turned up very little in the way of disclosure about garbage removal on subway tracks. There were also few garbage cans along the platform, and only seemed to appear where there were benches. As if people only think of getting rid of their garbage when they’re sitting or standing near a bench! Though the actual platform itself appeared to be relatively clean and the few garbage cans there were did not reek or overflow, the sad reality, as I came to see, was that 1) people seem more prone to tossing their discards on the subway platform rather than throwing them in the provided cans, and 2) the buildup of garbage on the track appears to be way more than the MTA can handle.
My second observation is perhaps far more incriminating, and more germane to the issue at hand. (So incriminating that a police officer who witnessed my activity on the platform strongly “encouraged” me to stop taking photographs). On September 28, NYC was once again hit with a terrible rainstorm. Though the intensity was less than the storm on August 8, and the length of time it rained drawn out throughout the late afternoon/early evening, the subways were nonetheless affected by the deluge. The storm ended somewhere circa 6:45 that evening, and I came to observe this incredibly disheartening situation at the 59th Street/Lexington Avenue Station around 11:15PM:
Like 14th Street/Union Square, 59th Street/Lexington Avenue is also a heavily trafficked station and a transfer point for five subway lines. However, this N/R/W platform by contrast was populated with several more garbage cans (as there were also significantly more benches). Yet at least 50% of the track, if not closer to about 65%, was plagued with these mini cess pools filled with stagnating rain water and floating garbage. The light bulb went off! On top of the already poor drainage the subway system has to deal with, apparently loads of garbage just sits on top of the drains while the water collects, soaks up goodness knows what, and takes it good sweet time exiting stage right. After attempting to find some explanation for what I was seeing, I discovered a report produced by Elliot Sander, the MTA’s Executive Director, on the MTA website, issued on September 20, 2007, entitled: “August 8, 2007 Storm Report.” While the first ten or so pages of the report detail why the MTA reacted in such a slow and clumsy fashion (“inadequate warning” about the storm was cited extensively), Sander alluded to a very uncomfortable reality that has existed for years prior to this specific storm:
At some locations the existing drainage and pumping capacity could not operate as designed because of the accumulation of sediment blocking the drains to pump rooms and gravity flow sewers. Blocked drains restricted removal of water and increased the duration required to restore service. Contributing to the accumulation of debris was the decline in track cleaning resources due to budget cuts and the proliferation of new sources of litter in the system, such as free newspapers.1
While budget cuts are a tough cookie to swallow, I think even George Waring wouldn’t skimp on resources to make sure that the trash got collected. It is even more impressive to me that DSNY seems to beef up its workforce during inclement weather like snow, not scale back. The MTA should start taking a few lessons from their brother agency, namely the key factor upon which all other city infrastructure rests: if garbage doesn’t get cleaned up, nothing else can happen.
Reading this MTA report, news articles written around the time of the storm and forcing myself to collect these images was an incredibly eye-opening and yet enlightening experience. One to which a solution seems rather obvious to a lay person like myself, yet one that seems to have so many obstacles that it seems at times an impossibility. But as Ben Miller so eloquently summed it up, “…this disgust-inducing stuff has played crucial, if largely unseen roles in determining some of the most basic features of our physical environment, has helped shape our transportation systems, our land use patterns, our land itself, while the conflicts it has induced have helped to mold the political and economic environments in which we also live.”2 It is clear that MTA is no less a victim or culprit in this situation; however, what solutions it eventually will come up with and how quickly they will be administered seems sadly a question for fate. The NYC subway system has fallen increasingly victim to service suspensions—temporary to indefinite—as a direct result of poor drainage systems aggravated (as evidenced by the images here) by excessive garbage. I admit that my own ignorance about MTA operations forces me to be perhaps more critical, but with some 6 times the amount of employees as the DSNY, there should be no reason why the MTA can’t keep its tracks clean. A basic necessity, period.
1 From “August 8, 2007 Storm Report,” authored by MTA Executive Director and CEO, Elliot G. Sander, p. 17. Full text of the report is available online at: www.mta.info/mta/pdf/storm_report_2007.pdf
2 From Benjamin Miller's Fat of the Land, p. 14.