Transit Authority
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Q: Does the MTA add extra trains for special events?
A: Last week, I discussed scheduled events such as Yankees games. This week, I’ll talk about enormous annual events that attract hundreds of thousands of people, dwarfing baseball and hockey games.
The three biggest are the Fourth of July celebration, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in Times Square. The main problem is figuring out how many people will attend, said the MTA’s director of operations analysis, Shoshana Cooper.
The Millennium New Year’s Eve party in New York attracted more than a million people, according to police estimates at the time. The MTA had to rewrite its entire schedule that day to get people to and fro.
Weather plays a huge role in turnout and in determining when people leave. A cold New Year’s Eve means Times Square revelers want to flee once the ball drops; on a warmer night people will stay and party.
“The Fourth of July is tough, also, because it happens in different places every year,” Ms. Cooper said. “When the fireworks are done, people want to leave.”
The MTA copes by arranging for extra trains through the appropriate parts of the city, typically an additional three to four trains an hour on any given line. Booth clerks watch the crowd and call operations headquarters if there’s an unusual surge at their platform. Just like at the end of sports events, extra trains are set on middle tracks, ready to roll into service to get people off platforms.
Every year, observers watch the affected stations to see how efficiently the extra trains move people along. The data is used to fine-tune the schedule for the following year. The problem, though, is that events like these attract too many people for the trains and buses to keep up, no matter how many extras are run, Ms. Cooper said.
New Yorkers who attend these events would find it valuable to walk over to another train line that may not run right next to the event – Thanksgiving Day Parade-goers can walk over to the nos. 2 and 3 trains rather than trying to take A and C trains, which are right on the parade route.
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