New Subway Train Makes It Impossible to Escape That Smell
MTA Introduces Its Newest Addition With Fanfare
NEW YORK CITY — A bold innovation in NYC Subway technology took to the rails this week as New York State Governor Kathy Hochul and her entourage boarded the first Subway train where you cannot escape the enigmatic smell for which the MTA is so well known.
Whereas the brightliner cars, built in the 1950s, allowed straphangers to risk their lives to change cars when trapped in one with a corpse, pool of feces or faint smell of crack cocaine, the new trains open straight one onto another, eliminating the terrifying and illegal life-risking journey between cars that were a rite of passage of New Yorkers for so many generations and allowing odors to waft all the way through the train. Instead of making one car of a train empty because of a horrific odor, now whole trains can be rendered husks by a single mobile homeless encampment.
While most New Yorkers look forward to the ability to move freely between cars, some opinions are mixed.
“I appreciate not having to look into the face of death every time I go from one car to the next,” said panhandler Philip The AIDS Guy, a fixture on the 1 local train since 1994, “But how is my routine going to work when each car can hear my speil delivered from the…
