Though they were overwhelmed with requests for information about service disruptions after last month’s Chambers Street subway fire, officials of New York City Transit have no plans to offer e-mail alerts that would notify subscribers of changes in service. Those kinds of alerts are being made available to customers of Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road, the other large components of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The fire January 23, which crippled both the A and C lines, sent commuters scrambling not only to seek alternative routes to work, but also to call the subway agency’s hotline, which offers up-to-the-minute reports on service changes. The surge in calls, however, temporarily froze the hotline in the initial days following the fire, a spokesman for New York City Transit, Charles Seaton, said.

Providing e-mail bulletins on service changes could alleviate that demand during service disruptions, a spokeswoman for a subway riders’ advocacy group, the Straphangers Campaign, said. It would also alert riders to service resumptions. On Monday, the A and C subways began running at 80% of rush-hour capacity, though service disruptions are to continue during the weekends.

“It’s not just the Chambers Street fire,” the spokeswoman, Neysa Pranger, said. “Every single weekend or evening, there are diversions going on that the MTA knows in advance they should be getting out to their customers. The key is advance notice. There’s nothing worse than showing up to your subway station and seeing your train is not running. Email can solve that, and relatively speaking, it’s a cheap way to go.”

The Straphangers Campaign has been asking New York City Transit for five years to provide such a service, Ms. Pranger said. After two years without a response from the transit authority, the group began sending its own weekly email in October 2000 by pasting service-change announcements posted on the subway authority’s Web site into an e-mail program. The group now has nearly 31,000 subscribers.

Mr. Seaton said given the immensity of daily ridership, which the authority says is 4.7 million, the potential demand for such a service would entail a significant expenditure on computer infrastructure and administrative costs. And the 2005-09 capital program of the MTA seeks to fill a $9 billion budget gap. “We don’t have any plans right now, but we are exploring it,” Mr. Seaton said of the e-mail updates.

Said Ms. Pranger: “If we’re able to do this, then the transit authority should be able to do it. Clearly, they can do it if the MTA Metro-North can do it.”

The Metro-North Railroad has provided regular e-mail updates and alerts since November 2003. The commuter railroad serves 120,000 people every day, of whom 10,000 have subscribed to the free weekly e-mail update.

“This has been doable and has worked very well,” a spokesman, Dan Brucker, said. “We always try to get an alert up there as quickly as possible to update our customers to changes.”

The Long Island Rail Road, which is slightly larger than Metro-North, plans to launch its e-mail notification service this spring, using the same system developed by Metro-North, an LIRR spokesman, Brian Dolan, said.

“That way, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Mr. Dolan said.

Technology managers said the greatest cost comes from developing the infrastructure that would, for example, take the service changes posted on the transit authority’s Web site and publish them as text messages in an e-mail program.

“Then all you have to do is press a button,” one technology manager, Alexi Villedrouin, said.