Inaudible Announcements in Subways Are Endangering Riders, Critics Say

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority may be putting riders at risk by failing to upgrade the subway system’s communications network, critics said yesterday.Despite an $833 million surplus and the availability of technology that would improve vital communication with passengers, MTA officials testifying yesterday at a City Council hearing said it would take 10 years to fully replace the antiquated public address systems.William Henderson, the associate director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, a riders’ advocacy organization created by the state, said communicating with passengers “is not an integral part of New York City Transit operations and clearly does not rank as a top agency priority.”“If there was a sense of urgency, they could figure out which steps to take,” he said of the stalled plans to replace the address systems.The MTA officials said they shelved plans to replace all the address systems throughout the subway by 2009 when they revised their budget earlier this year. The director of government affairs for the MTA, Michelle Goldstein, said priority was given to a project that would install computer systems to track the location of all trains and their arrival times at stations.Transit officials said the new technology was a prerequisite for installing address systems with computer-generated announcements and text messaging. However, transportation advocates, citing studies conducted by an engineering firm hired by the transit authority, Carter Burgess, said the new address system could be installed without train location technology.There are no public address systems in 131 of the system’s 468 stations. The current public address system uses copper wiring and produces inaudible announcements 76% of the time during train delays and disruptions, according to another advocacy group, the Straphangers Campaign.“At least you can say those unintelligible announcements don’t penalize people who don’t speak English well,” the chairman of the council’s Transportation Committee, John Liu, said. “No one can understand them, regardless of what language you speak.”The new system would use fiber optics to communicate announcements generated by a computer in much the same way audio is conveyed on new subway trains. With the use of train location technology, those message boards will be able to tell riders the estimated arrival time of trains.The new address systems would have benefited riders who waited nearly two hours during rush hour yesterday morning when the nos. 4 and 5 trains were delayed because of a bomb scare. Under the new system, which will debut at 24 stations of the L line by the end of the year, computer voice and text messages will be generated, replacing the garbled messages usually heard on subway platforms.The executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, Beverly Dolinsky, said Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road put a higher premium on communicating with passengers, especially during emergencies, than does the MTA.In a report published in August, the group said subway conductors and token booth clerks are told by a central command center what to tell passengers during an emergency. Critics argue that more training should be given to conductors in case communication with a command center is broken.MTA officials, who received high marks for successfully evacuating hundreds of thousands of passengers on September 11, 2001, and during the blackout of August 2003, defended their record.“It offends me to suggest we don’t take communication seriously,” the MTA’s deputy executive director of corporate affairs and communications, Christopher Boylan, said.By the end of next year some improvements will be seen, Mr. Boylan said. About 130 more stations will have the new address system. The majority of stations on the lettered lines, though, will not receive improved communication systems until the next capital program, which begins in 2010 and runs until 2015, MTA officials said.Mr. Liu suggested part of the MTA’s unexpected $833 million budget windfall be used to upgrade the address systems and dump plans to use the money to build a platform over the Hudson Rail Yards on the far West Side.A council member of the Bronx, G. Oliver Koppell, demanded that all subway stations have some form of a public address system within six months.

Inaudible Announcements in Subways Are Endangering Riders, Critics Say

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