By: Tomas Enrique
New York City is moving forward – but its subway system is another matter.
As the Big Apple prepares to reopen on June 8 following 12 months of lockdown, officials of the transit authority have yet to make their plans, if there are any, available to the riding public.
“We’re still not getting the answers we need from the MTA,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday. “We’ve got to make sure there’s maximum service levels; we’ve got to make sure there’s social distancing and limits on how many people can be in each subway car and in each bus.”
The next day, Governor Andrew Cuomo also sounded an optimistic note. As he told the press, “They’re disinfecting trains like never before but they have another week of work to do and they will be ready.”
Masks will undoubtedly be required. “If you come into the system and you’re not wearing one you should expect to either be told to put one on, or to leave this system,” noted New York Transit acting President Sarah Feinberg at the end of May.
Feinberg appeared on ABC News’ show “Pandemic: What You Need to Know” with Amy Robach to discuss the future of New York City Transit post-pandemic. “The first thing to know is we’ve been planning for this reopening since the beginning—so we’ve been planning for this now for many, many weeks,” she said. “The first thing that we’ve been doing is cleaning and disinfecting the system, so we now clean and disinfect the stations twice a day and we clean and disinfect all of the fleet of rail cars multiple times a day. So, we’re doing everything we can to make sure that the cars in the stations and the buses that people will be getting on are as clean and safe as possible. We’re also doing, taking a lot of other steps, making sure that we’ve got hand sanitizer on hand at stations. Masks will absolutely be required but we’ll also have a few masks on hand for those who for that first day or two forget their mask at home. So we’re trying to do everything we can to both make sure that the system is safe and clean as possible and also communicate with our riders about what they can do to keep themselves safe.”
Maintaining social distancing will naturally be a major problem, Feinberg acknowledged. “New Yorkers are used to being absolutely packed like sardines into subway cars in the morning and in the afternoon rush. That’s never ideal. So what we’re going to be telling people is you’ve got to be vigilant about your mask usage and you should put as much distance between you and the next person, you and other passengers, as possible. Obviously, six feet is ideal, if you can’t get six feet get three, if you can’t get three get one. You know, look, I think it’s going to take a while for ridership to really click back to where it used to be at so for a while it’ll be easier to get that distance. But the key is going to be to be vigilant about your mask usage.”
