New York braces for ‘Summer of Hell’ as city’s subway system faces perfect storm of challenges
One of the thorniest features of the problem, for those trying to fix it, is the sense that everything is breaking at once
There was a time – somewhere between the 1990s exorcism of violent crime from much of New York City and Thursday, when a “state of emergency” was declared for the city’s transit system – when a nightmare scenario on the subway meant a rat crawling up your leg, over your chest and nearly into your jacket.
That remains a vividly awful prospect. But in the summer of 2017, rats are competing with a ballooning number of alternative potential torments for commuters (the term is used optimistically) who venture into the city’s ageing underground.
Dangerously overcrowded platforms. Chronically delayed trains. Terrifying and injurious derailments. Tunnel strandings. Signal malfunctions. Fisticuffs. Electrical outages. Garbled announcements. Knockout stenches. Non-rat wildlife. Stairs, shoulders, backups, backpacks, bad attitudes and bad breath.
A particularly unlucky group of rush hour F-train riders last month were stuck inside overheating train carriages for so long that video of their desperate fingers prising open fogged-up doors looked not so much like the scene from a commute as footage from a zombie film.
Veteran straphangers will recognise none of those headaches as particularly new, although derailments, like the one on Tuesday in Harlem that injured 34 people, are still thankfully rare. The increasing frequency and scale of such breakdowns, however, will combine on Saturday with major track closures at the Pennsylvania Station transport hub to create what observers on all sides are predicting will be a “summer of hell” for riders in 2017.