The Second Avenue Subway should have screen doors.
New York doesn't do a lot of transit; the transit it does do should be world-class.
New York is a great city, and it has great advocates. I believe that, if those advocates pushed hard for platform screen doors on what is the most important rapid transit project in the United States, New York could adopt a technology that has become standard worldwide and New Yorkers could have an even better Second Avenue Subway. Historically, the MTA’s resistance to screen doors has been centred on the difficulty of retrofitting them into a system more than a century old. This excuse doesn’t make sense for a newly built line, which can and should have them from day one. Even other English-speaking cities that struggle to build rapid transit—like London—have done this before.
New York’s subway is uniquely famous for being a bit … chaotic, so screen doors would probably be disproportionately beneficial—and if any city can afford them, it’s New York.
New York reminds me a lot of Toronto: a great city that could be something so much greater.
Many cities around the world have impressive infrastructure, but weaker arts scenes, cultures, histories, and economies. New York has quite the opposite problem: its bad infrastructure really holds it back.
Fortunately, over roughly the last ten years, there have been glimmers of hope. While improvements have often followed a pattern of two steps forward and one step back, they have occurred nonetheless. And there is a lot of legitimately exciting stuff on the horizon. The subway is slowly getting CBTC’d (communications-based train control), and all kinds of other bits and bobs slowly rolling over to something better, the Interborough Express is happening and will be more and more subway-like (it really ought to be an automated subway), the Port Authority Bus Terminal is being totally rebuilt and will be quite possibly the most impressive bus terminal ever constructed, and there’s far more—including the Second Avenue Subway, which is surging—well, plodding—ahead.
The Second Avenue Subway’s second phase is exciting because it will bring the line further north and back west to connect to the Lexington Avenue Line and Metro North, fulfilling the Upper East Side relief mission. This means that, when all is said and done (in maybe, like, a decade, or fifteen years?), further subway extensions may be breaking new ground, and in really interesting ways. For example: extending the Second Avenue Subway south for Phase 3 and introducing an exciting new train service: the “T.”
Of course, this project has all the usual problems you’d expect: It’s super expensive despite all kinds of work in relation to it having been done in previous decades, and a lot of not-entirely-rational design decisions have been made that will worsen service and, of course, make the project more expensive.
I know it’s hard to practice wishful thinking in times like this—and it’s hard to ask for something more when even your basic asks go unmet—but I really think New Yorkers should demand screen doors on the Second Avenue Subway. And not just Phase 2—Phase 1 as well. One of New York’s most powerful features is that it provides Americans with insight into things that are common elsewhere in the world, like extensive metro systems. For all that China has built, New York still holds onto a spot on any list of most impressive subways. New York suffers from being part of the Anglosphere and thus the high costs and poor project management that come with it; but even within the Anglosphere, New York is slipping.
Let’s take a brief look at the most significant transit projects happening in a number of major Anglosphere cities.
Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel …
Toronto’s Ontario Line …
Sydney’s Metro …
London’s Elizabeth Line …
And yet—this is the Second Avenue Subway …
Now, I can already hear someone typing, “Toronto isn’t going to have screen doors on its subway extensions!” And yes, at the moment, this is true, though I, along with others, will try to push for that to change, particularly because construction of the stations hasn’t truly started yet. The stations will also supposedly have all the necessary provisions to make adding screen doors much easier down the line, which means something like 35% of Toronto’s subway stations will either be equipped with them or will be “screen-door ready” in a decade from now.
But, you know, New York doesn’t have to do a bad thing just because Toronto is doing a bad thing—that’s not how the world works!
I can, of course, imagine other people saying, “Screen doors don’t matter!” and “Reece is obsessed with screen doors!” And I mean, no, and yes. I am a bit obsessed with screen doors; they help to make a subway station (which, when you think about it, can be quite dangerous) into something as benign as an elevator lobby. That need not mean that the stations are boring either, as the above examples show.
Screen doors are now standard around the world, for good reason. They improve operating efficiency by letting trains travel into and out of stations at full speed even with crowded platforms; they prevent waste—and people—from getting onto the tracks and causing disruptions; and they ultimately enhance safety and accessibility (imagine how scary navigating a subway station might be if you were blind, or even if you just had very poor vision). Nobody in North America would say that elevator doors are a “nice-to-have” or “superfluous” feature, and nobody in the rest of the world, where screen doors are common, would say these things about screen doors. When we have an obvious and simple way to prevent strollers and people from falling off of tall subway platforms, towards electric rails and in front of trains, we really ought to just implement this change.
Of course, screen doors would also be uniquely valuable in New York, where riders tend to throw trash on the tracks, pizza rats roam the tunnels, and a lot of craziness takes place down in the hole.
The question is, is it doable? Well, yes, obviously. In Korea and Japan, metro systems are already using screen doors that move back and forth to align with the doors on different types of trains. Installing standard screen doors on the Second Avenue Subway and, yes, committing to run a single series of trains—perhaps R211s—is entirely doable. You would also likely want to have CBTC installed on the line to allow for trains to easily align with the doors, but installing CBTC on a brand new line should be obvious.
None of this is unprecedented. The Jubilee line extension in London was built in the nineties and opened in 1999, a modern extension of a legacy tube line. It is the last major tube extension to open in that city, and perhaps one of the first dominoes to fall in the Anglosphere’s insane cost-escalation extravaganza. And yet, the line had screen doors from day one, 27 years ago. As with what I’d expect on Second Avenue, these doors were only installed on new sections of the line (I wouldn’t expect other stations on the Q to get screen doors, only the modern Second Avenue ones), but they were there and have been working for decades.
New York seems like it wants to be ambitious. Kathy Hochul is quite seriously talking about adding some sort of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2b project that would extend the line across the top of Manhattan, creating a third major east–west crosstown line that would be very well used. Building this and the rest of Phase 2, and putting screen doors on the rest of Second Avenue, could all be part of a coherent plan to build differently—to build expensive projects perhaps, but good ones that don’t feel inferior to Chinese metro projects from decades ago on day one. You could imagine carrying this ambition forward—for example, imagine if, when the “T” service and Phase 3 of the line launched trains, that the trains on that service were automated. This is entirely possible, but it would require ambition.
And ambition is what New York needs. The New York City Subway is perhaps the grandest example of resting on your laurels in world history. Folks back one hundred years ago were arguably more visionary than any subway builders of today and managed to build the most impressive underground infrastructure the world has ever seen; if that attitude were to return today I can’t even imagine the things New York could do.
Something I’ve said to a lot of people in Toronto about our transit projects as of late applies just the same to New York: Solving our cost problems is going to be hard, but at least we ought to try to start solving our value problems. Cities like Sydney also build transit for crazily inflated costs, but at least when you reflect upon the Sydney Metro, with its giant automated trains (the stations are built for up to eight cars, which is very New York—or perhaps very Great Society metro) and enormous spaceship-like stations with screen doors, you don’t question the price. They paid a lot, but what they got might just be worth it.
Edited by Connor Sziklasi
You are absolutely correct: the SAS should have PSDs, and it is feasible. This is not a technical problem, nor is it limited by the rolling stock or signals (though standardized trains and CBTC would make it much easier). It is 100% at the mercy of attitude and operational stubbornness of the MTA. The recent PSD pilot program was set up to fail and was ill-fated from the start.
I wrote a post about the PSD Pilot Program and why we will wont have PSDs until the MTA makes serious changes.
https://substack.com/@aaronshavel/p-160061956
By the time SAS2 opens, the entire B division should be 60-ft NTTs, so only a single door positioning. And CBTC for SAS 1 and 2 is planned for Phase 2, so that shouldn't be a problem either. There's literally no excuses not to do it.