It is not the first time in the subway’s 116-year history that the system has ground to a halt. It happened in the wake of September 11 and after natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. But every night now, in New York City’s new coronavirus reality, all trains are stopped, cleaned, and sanitized between 1 and 5 a.m. The homeless population that has overwhelmed the system, particularly in the wee hours, is cleared out and cleaning crews jump on board with bleach and other disinfectants. Not that there are riders there to see the results.
Since COVID-19 shuttered offices and schools and restaurants and theaters and stores around the city in mid-March, ridership on the city’s transportation system has dropped more than 90%. Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, had a hard time on her daily commutes, adjusting to the new normal of near-empty cars. “The place just felt so desolate,” she told me on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive. “The few people who were out were individuals who were either experiencing homelessness or real mental illness...Everyone else is home.”
The transportation system caught heat when the New York Daily News ran photos of subway cars filled with homeless New Yorkers and bags of trash as they slept on the trains overnight—a sight Governor Andrew Cuomo called “disgusting.” Feinberg said she was “relieved” when the paper ran the photos. “For a year I was holding this problem and asking how come the transit agency is the one holding the bag on the homeless problem in New York City? We have a mayor who talks about solving the crisis all the time, yet the MTA seems to be the one housing everyone.” She said she has repeatedly asked Mayor Bill de Blasio to meet about the issue, but hasn’t had any luck. Having the images on the front page would be a “forcing mechanism” to get these conversations started, she said. “I think they have a lot of problems on their plate and, either consciously or subconsciously, felt like the homeless problem on the subway was underground and out of sight and out of mind…The mayor doesn’t ride the subway. A lot of the people who spend time with him may ride the subway, but they don’t ride it at night.”
Feinberg, who served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president and senior adviser to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel during the H1N1 pandemic, was also dismayed by the federal government’s response to the public health crisis. The CDC’s early guidelines telling Americans that they did not need to wear masks left the 51,000 people she oversees vulnerable to the virus. More than 100 of her employees have died as a result of the coronavirus, and many more have fallen ill. “I’m still so personally angry about it,” she told me. “Having worked in a White House and worked closely with the CDC, I couldn’t believe where we found ourselves, because I know that the CDC is better than that. I don’t know why I’m surprised, because this is what government has been like the last few years. They’re not on your side. They’re not here to help you. I can’t tell you how much it pains me as a government official to have to remind myself that the federal government is not here to help you. You are on your own. They don’t care. Obviously that’s too sweeping, but that’s how it felt during this crisis, for sure, and that’s how it’s felt under this administration for a long time—for New Yorkers, for women, for parents, for regular people.”
The New York transit system has since passed out millions of masks, gloves, and bottles of hand sanitizer to its employees. It’s also put into place a number of policies to stop the virus from spreading on trains and buses, like eliminating cash, asking riders to enter buses through the back so that they don’t pass by drivers, and creating a barrier between passengers and drivers to try to keep social distancing measures in place. Still, Feinberg’s employees are exposed. “When you become a police officer or a firefighter or a nurse or a teacher or a doctor, you sort of know what you’re signing up for. You raise your hand and you say, ‘I am deciding to go into a line of work where I will put other people’s lives in front of my own.’ That is not necessarily what transit workers signed up for,” she said. “All of a sudden, here we are in the pandemic, and now you’re on the front lines of fighting a global crisis, and you have to show up and have to be exposed to the public. It’s constant exposure.”
The MTA has also been exposed to a great deal of financial strain. Most of its revenue comes from drivers paying tolls and riders buying MetroCards, so with ridership and commuting having cratered, the system has received nearly $4 billion in federal aid so far, and it has already asked for another $3.9 billion. It remains to be seen how much it will take to stop the bleeding, particularly as companies begin to assess whether they will ever have employees return to working in offices as they had pre-virus, or if they’re able to let workers do their jobs from home permanently.
“The MTA is probably too big to fail,” Feinberg told me. “That will be like fingernails on a chalkboard to some people, but that’s the reality. New York City just doesn’t work without a functioning transport system. That doesn’t mean that we should do anything other than be incredibly mindful of every tax dollar that gets spent, but I just don’t think it’s an option for the MTA to go bankrupt. It’s not an option for the subway system not to operate. We can increase fares. We can cut service. But that’s all nibbling around the edges, because the losses are so significant. At the beginning of this, I thought that this could be as bad as the financial crisis. And of course the financial crisis was a drop in the bucket compared to what we are all living through now.”
One silver lining is that when riders do come back, the trains will look good as new thanks to the extra cleaning. “They sparkle,” Feinberg told me. “They shine like the top of the Chrysler Building...Right now, having executed this overnight shutdown, which is totally unprecedented, and throwing all the resources at cleaning, it has made all the difference in the world…. It’s a sight to behold.”
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