Riders Alliance Asks Straphangers For Their Subway Service Horror Stories
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Advocates for subway riders have asked straphangers to share their worst subway horror stories.
On Sunday the group Riders Alliance asked passengers at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station to dish the dirt on their subway system experiences.
Riders Alliance is gathering reports of long delays, crowded trains and other problems and plans to send them to the governor and lawmakers to show the need for more funding for the MTA, CBS2 reported.
"We had people this morning, people passing by, and we would ask them 'Do you have a subway horror story?' And people would write their stories out in marker and we put it up on a poster board so that people could also see other people's stories," John Raskin said.
Raskin, the executive director of Riders Alliance, told 1010 WINS the organization aims to make it known that funding decisions have "serious consequences" on subway riders' lives.
"(A rider) had to watch six L trains go by before he could get on one because it was so crowded," Raskin said. "Someone told us that the NYPD wouldn't let anyone else on the platform at Times Square because it was so crowded."
Raskin said the alliance is not looking for horror stories of stabbings, shootings or other kinds of violence, but rather "the stories that Governor Cuomo and members of the Legislature can do something about.
"And that's fixing the broken trains, fixing the broken rails, putting the money into the MTA so that we don't have all these service problems in the future."
Rebecca Bailin, senior community organizer for the Riders Alliance, told WCBS 880 the fear among riders and the alliance is that without more funding, subway service is going to get worse.
"We need to put an end to the constant delays that people are seeing; their service disruptions," she said. "We don't have new enough cars to have decent subway announcements or PA announcements in the stations when there is something wrong."
In response to the alliance's event Sunday, the MTA released a statement, saying "As subway ridership continues to grow past 6 million a day, fully funding the MTA's 2015-2019 Capital Program will let us renew, enhance and expand the MTA network."
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers have to decide by April 1 whether to fund the MTA's proposed $32 billion capital program.
