By Philip Newman
If straphangers can’t find a trash can, will they take their empty soda cans and burger wrappings with them when they leave subway stations? The MTA is hoping so.
So far the transit agency’s new no trash can policy has been working so well in a pilot program that it was expanded this past weekend from two to 10 subway stations.
It was nearly a year ago that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority took all the trash receptacles out of Manhattan’s 8th Street station, on the N and R lines, and the Flushing-Main Street station, on the No. 7 line, in Queens.
The 8th Street station is 50 percent cleaner and Flushing-Main Street had 67 percent less garbage. There was no increase in track fires.
The newly trash can-less stations, with their boroughs and lines, are as follows:
• Queens: 111th Street (A) and 65th Street (M, R)
• Brooklyn: 7th Avenue (F, G) and Brighton Beach (Q)
• Manhattan: 57th Street (F) and Rector Street (No. 1)
• Bronx: 238th Street (No. 1) and East 143rd Street (No. 6)
MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota said the idea worked in London’s Underground. If the concept is successful system-wide, all the trash cans could eventually be removed.
Refuse-littered floors are bad enough, but the MTA says the food in the trash attracts rats.
“No food means no rodents,” proclaim signs in no-trash-can stations.
The MTA hauls 14,000 tons of trash from subway stations on an annual basis.
“However, the trash sometimes accumulates in storage rooms and on platforms while waiting to be removed,” the MTA said. “We have taken several steps to make the trash bags less accessible to rodents, including adding more frequent refuse train collections, reinforcing storage rooms and using new, tamper-proof receptacles, but the problem persists.”
The MTA says the discarded trash also causes track fires, which brings delays in service.
The Port Authority Trans-Hudson trains, which run from Manhattan’s West Side beneath the Hudson River to New Jersey, have been without trash receptacles for years.
Reach contributing writer Philip Newman by e-mail at timesledgernews@cnglocal.com or phone at 718-260-4536.
