Subway platforms and stations in the city’s poorest neighborhoods are not kept up as well as those in more well-to-do sections of the city, according to a City Council investigation to be released today.

The council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigation ranked more than half of the 94 stations it surveyed as “dirty” and found that the 10 filthiest stations were located in low-income neighborhoods.

The survey, which was conducted between May 18 and June 2, rated stations based on litter and on how the basic infrastructure at the stations was maintained.

The survey found that Bronx stations fared worst, and gave the dubious distinction of the dirtiest station to East 149th Street on the no. 6 line in that borough. Though no Manhattan stations ranked among the 10 dirtiest, council investigators reported finding human feces at the West 4th Street station.

The committee chairman, Eric Gioia, a Democrat of Queens, said the disparities among neighborhoods was disturbing and called on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the city’s mass-transit system, to take action.

“This is confirming what most commuters know, which is that our subway stations are intolerably dirty,” the council member said during a phone interview. “Over the past two years, subway fares are going up and services are going down. The MTA is not providing the services that New Yorkers need.”

Invoking the Broken Windows Theory that Mayor Giuliani embraced to crack down on turnstile jumpers and squeegee men, Mr. Gioia said dirty stations were “an invitation to criminals” and “sent the wrong message to tourists.”

“We’ve seen over the last decade in New York that a real focus on the basics has a positive ripple effect. Unfortunately the opposite is also true,” he said.

The council member is calling on the MTA to increase the number of inspections it does at its 468 stations and to post those results on the Internet. That electronic SubwayStat is just the latest such system he’s proposed. He was also the lead sponsor on ParkNet, a law requiring the city to post parks inspection ratings online, and he is pushing to get the city to adopt CityStat, which would rank every city agency.

In this case the goal is to get the financially strapped MTA to deploy resources to stations that have the most severe cleanliness problems.

A spokesman for the MTA, Thomas Kelly, declined to comment on the survey, saying he had not seen it. “Obviously,” he told The New York Sun, “they gave it to you before they gave it to us.”