MTA Honcho Downplays Subway Platform Doors Amid Safety Outcry

NEW YORK CITY — MTA's head honcho tried to dampen growing calls to install subway platform safety doors after a straphanger's shoving death.

Installing platform doors across the entire subway system would present "serious challenges," Janno Lieber, the agency's chair and CEO, said Thursday on WNYC.

A 4,000-page study released this week by MTA officials found the subway's system mix of different trains, platform arrangements and other factors would make such safety doors feasible at only about 4o to 100 stations, Lieber said.

He then blasted Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and other local officials who Thursday called on the MTA to install platform doors.

“So I ask the politicians not to try to make hay out of this issue, but to work with the MTA for real solutions based on engineering reality,” he said.

But Lieber's mixed assessment of platform doors is unlikely to quell calls for subway platform doors — which reached a fever pitch in the two weeks since Michelle Go was shoved in front of an oncoming R train at 42nd Street and killed. Many politicians and advocates have had it with MTA officials downplaying the feasibility of necessary subway safety upgrades.

Indeed, the 4000-page report's release this week prompted many NYC transportation blogs to fault MTA officials for not seeking solutions to hurdles and potentially overestimating how much the platform door installations would cost.

And Levine and other officials said as much in a pointed letter to Lieber calling for a pilot program that installs platform doors at a Manhattan subway station before a wider rollout. They acknowledged challenges to building platform doors, but argued those aren’t “insurmountable.”

“In particular, the MTA’s Enhanced Station Initiative, which sunk around $936 million into mostly cosmetic station improvements, has proven the agency can find needs funds for initiatives when they are deemed a priority,” the letter states. “Platform screen doors must be given the priority they deserved, studied, and funded for installation.”

Lieber said he'd be open to exploring a platform pilot program for stations where officials deemed them "possible."

But he also called himself "disappointed" in Levine, the City Council's former health committee chair. Mentally ill people in the subway system are a potential safety issue too, he said.

"What was going on when they spend billions of dollars on mental health that left us with the conditions we're seeing in the system," he said.

Patch writer Gus Saltonstall contributed to this report.

Related coverage: These Uptown Subway Stations Could Have Platform Barriers: MTA