On any given day, the New York City subway moves nearly six million commuters. But in the last several years, our system’s infrastructure has deteriorated significantly resulting in massive delays, overcrowded cars and recently, even a decline in ridership.
MTA’s New York City Transit recently released their Fast Forward plan to modernize transit. RPA’s newest report and companion website “Save Our Subways: A Plan to Transform New York City’s Rapid Transit System”, builds on research from our Fourth Regional Plan and offers ideas on how to bring the Fast Forward Plan to life.
“Subways are the beating heart of our region,” said Tom Wright, President Regional Plan Association. “We deserve a 21st Century subway system, and with the ideas outlined in our report and the leadership shown by NYCT President Andy Byford and his team, we finally have a gameplan to get there. Now we need the political courage to get it done.”
RPA’s report goes a step further and suggests ways for the MTA to leverage planned investments in new technology to improve rider experience. And in a nod to the future, we also explored areas of the City that would benefit from new subway service, above and beyond the capacity that the Fast Forward plan would provide. The centerpiece of the report is our ten priorities for investments to modernizing the subway which largely mirror the MTA’s Fast Forward plan, but suggest additional details.
They are the following:
- Aggressively address the “high risk” critical infrastructure backlog
- Implement and maintain preventive maintenance measures
- Accelerate modernization of subway signals
- Right-size and improve accessibility of congested stations
- Untangle and simplify services
- Standardize and assign fleet to services
- Add service to meet more humane train loading guidelines
- Expand deficient terminals
- Correct extreme track geometry issues and poorly designed junctions
- Ensure sufficient yard and power capacity
To learn more about the report, visit our interactive website here: /uploads/old-site/library.rpa.org/interactive/subways/
For the full report, visit here:/uploads/old-site/library.rpa.org/temp/files/RPA-Save-our-Subways-Draft.pdf