Riding the MTA has become an almost frightening game of chance lately with miserable passengers expecting long delays and praying they won’t be the next victims trapped on a train.
The acting executive director of the MTA, Ronnie Hakim, called Wednesday for a “top to bottom” review of the entire situation to hopefully find some solutions that can restore sanity to straphangers’ lives.
“We understand that everybody is frustrated with this,” Hakim said at the MTA board meeting where she called for the review, NBC4 reported.
Things are getting rougher and rougher, with the MTA reporting as of May that an average of seven serious accidents a month were causing some 50 serious delays each month.
The MTA announced last month a six-point initiative to resolve service problems.
Half of the MTA’s $30 billion capital budget is allotted for the century-old New York City Transit system. The plan says 750 new train cars will arrive starting this fall through September 2018.
But it remains unclear how much time or money it could take to fix the MTA’s 837 miles of track and 13,000 train signals.
Mayor de Blasio has threatened that he’d rather have the city run the MTA if they couldn’t resolve the issues.
Also related to NYC transit, Gov. Cuomo and Amtrak have been verbally sparring over who can best handle the upcoming “summer of hell” at Penn Station as service is severely restricted to allow for major repairs.
On Tuesday, signal problems at Herald Square caused massive delays. Two fed-up passengers got off a northbound F-train and walked on the tracks to catch a train. Another group of passengers was trapped in a LIRR train for over an hour. And earlier this month, riders were trapped in an overheated, unlit F train for an hour, resulting in horror movie-quality imagery of trapped commuters trying to pry the doors open.
Service is so bad that the G train, formerly a ghost train, is now the most reliably punctual train in the city, along with the L.
