Could you imagine a subway ride where you're not confined to one car? What if the whole train was one car?
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is constantly looking for ways to improve their services, and one thing that definitely needs improvement is the crowding in the subway.
MTA is considering "Freedom Tickets," an unlimited rail, subway, and bus ticket for within New York City aimed at filling empty seats on LIRR and Metro-North trains to ease the crowding, but not only that because ridership is reaching highs not seen for decades, and crime is up underground.
One solution to some of these issues is more spacious subway cars, or rather no cars at all-- just one long tube of a train with the ability to flex at certain points, allowing it to slither through tunnels with ease.
The design includes "open gangways," which eliminate the doors between cars. It's basically an open floor plan for the subway, and any HGTV viewer knows, open floor plans are what's up.
It's unclear when at the moment, but the MTA will be testing some of the differently designed subway trains over the next few years.
The MTA's capital plan budgets for open gangway prototype trains for the subway, but doesn't disclose when they'll be tested or which subway line they'll be tried out on.
Spokesperson for the MTA, Adam Lisberg, recently announced in a statement, "We don't take major changes like this lightly. We really need to see some of these trainsets in service before we can evaluate how they work, whether they have unanticipated consequences..."
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New Yorkers don't take anything that happens to the subway lightly. If there are going to be totally new subway cars, New Yorkers will have opinions on this, and they will be strong opinions.
Whereas many New Yorkers are comfortably numb to the majority of the madness we face on a daily basis, if we walked into a new subway train that was one long tube, it would definitely register on the "WTF" spectrum.
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[Feature Image Courtesy NYBluePrint.com]