New York City subway cars are cleaned by hand — and it takes one person 3 and a half hours to do it

pulse

April 3, 2018 8:47 PM

New York subway cars host over 5 million people on a typical weekday, and it shows. But MTA workers fight the grime by hand.

New York City subway car interiors are cleaned by hand.
The New York Times found that it takes a single worker three and a half hours to clean a subway car interior, and it's done every eight to ten weeks.
The New York subways serve a massive population that presents numerous operational challenges, and are generally much-maligned.

In Tuesday's "New York Today" column in The New York Times, author Jonathan Wolfe stumbled across an extremely interesting fact: The interior of a New York City subway car is cleaned by hand — and it takes one person three and a half hours to do it.

Wolfe shadowed 47-year-old

Wolfe's Times column is by no means an extensive profile, but it gives another perspective to the difficulty of maintaining the much-maligned New York City subway system, which regularly makes the news for egregious service interruptions — the most dramatic of which will be its 15-month shutdown of the L train starting in 2019 to make needed repairs to the East River tunnel after it was damaged in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy.

In fact, Business Insider's Josh Barro reports that Cynthia Nixon, who will challenge Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary election to run for governor of New York, has made improving the MTA one of her key campaign issues.

New York City has one of the oldest public transit systems in the world, and charges $2.75 per ride — although it plans to phase out the current MetroCard system in favor of card readers that can accept payment from a contactless phone, bank card, or smartphone by 2023, reported Business Insider's Antonio Villas-Boas.

Despite the subway's growing pains, global consultancy Arcadis still ranked New York City's public transit the best in North America, thanks to its extensive reach and high ridership. And as Business Insider's Emily Cohn has argued, its round-the-clock operation sets it apart from shinier, admittedly cleaner systems in other major cities. It might not be perfectly clean, but at least it's running — so far.

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