Transit leaders will discover the set up of platform boundaries following the horrific loss of life of a lady shoved onto the tracks on the Instances Sq. subway station, MTA appearing Chair Janno Lieber mentioned Tuesday.
However platform shove-preventing display screen doorways — which the MTA has beforehand derided as prohibitively sophisticated and costly — face important obstacles, Lieber cautioned.
“Platform doorways are an concept that works in lots of locations, however there are particular complexities in New York,” Lieber informed reporters. “That mentioned, we’re at all times in search of ways in which we are able to make the system safer.”
Lieber cited “the age of our system,” station air flow and sustaining platform accessibility as potential roadblocks. A transit spokesman additionally cited “prepare door misalignment” and “column placement.”
MTA leaders have beforehand knocked platform display screen doorways as a prohibitively costly and complex “multi-billion greenback resolution.”
On Tuesday, Lieber mentioned the MTA’s just lately shaped “monitor trespass” working group is exploring its feasibility amongst different potential responses to a current enhance in subway monitor intrusions.
Specialists mentioned the funding is price it.
“I’m certain it's possible,” mentioned NYU transit researcher Eric Goldwyn. “They're already retrofitting stations. In the event you throw platform doorways in, does that value rather more?”
New York Metropolis’s solely platform boundaries are on the JFK Airport AirTrain — however worldwide cities have found out methods to retrofit ageing stations with platform screens, Goldwyn famous — together with Paris, Hong Kong and Sofia, Bulgaria.
Transit officers have thought of, then dominated out platform door upgrades on a number of events. Former Transit President Andy Byford mentioned in an e mail Monday that he weighed display screen doorways throughout his MTA tenure however in the end determined sign modernization to hurry up service was extra necessary for enhancing service.
“The associated fee to retrofit platforms in NYC (and in London) could be very excessive,” Byford wrote. “The platforms have been most often, not designed to hold the load of the doorways, even half top variations. Add into the combo the truth that a good variety of NYC platforms are curved and you've got much more of a problem — you’d be a number of platform rebuilds.”
“We concluded that the associated fee and disruption … was not a practical consideration at the moment and that we should always focus our consideration on the signaling first,” mentioned Byford, who now runs London’s transportation system.
He mentioned platform doorways “shouldn’t be dominated out for the longer term” – significantly when constructing new stations.
But the MTA has up to now opted in opposition to putting in gates at its latest stations and saved them out of the present $55 billion capital enchancment plan. Advocates mentioned they're puzzled by the continued reluctance to embrace some type of platform barrier.
“Retrofitting stations with platform display screen doorways is a genuinely complicated job. However it's a problem that a rising variety of transit companies, reminiscent of Hong Kong, are tackling. To maintain up with international greatest practices, the MTA should drop the defensiveness and develop possible plans to make these upgrades occur,” mentioned Ben Fried of the Manhattan-based suppose tank TransitCenter.
Fried mentioned the MTA was proper to prioritize alerts and station accessibility given New York’s exorbitantly excessive building prices.
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