Once upon a time, the original IRT stations were short. They didn’t span the distances they do now, and it made some modicum of sense to pack stations into Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. With rapidly increasing ridership in the 1940s and 1950s though, New York City realized it did not have the capacity to run trains long enough to meet service demands nor did it have platforms long enough to accomodate the maddening crowd. So they expanded.

Throughout the city, a decade or so the IND overbuilt to accommodate everyone who could ever ride the subway, the original IRT platforms were expanded to fit ten-car trains and many more people. As a casualty of the expansion program, some stations — 18th and Worth Sts. on the East Side, 91st St. on the West Side — were shuttered due to their proximity to nearby stops, but with more spacious platforms and long trains, those closures were a necessary trade-off.

Today, ridership has once again approached levels that warranted such an expansion. While the automobile and the general state of decay saw ridership drop from the late 1950s to a nadir in the 1980s, the MTA has seen a steep growth in usage over the recent years. That growth has not been confined to weekdays either, as historical ridership patterns have dictated, and now authority officials are trying to find ways to alleviate overcrowding along certain lines at all times of the day.

Yesterday, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota went to Albany to talk transit funding, and he spoke about a rough idea to expand subway stations in order to keep pace with demand. It is doubtful that trains would be lengthened, but the authority can make some access improvements to stations, particularly along the overcrowded L line, that could improve service. These little changes could go a long way toward improving the transit experience.

Pete Donohue of The Daily News had a bit more:

With the subways bursting at the seams, the MTA needs to expand stations in the century-old system, authority Chairman Joseph Lhota said Thursday. Lhota singled out the L line as an example of an overcrowded route that requires alterations to accommodate a meteoric rise in ridership due to industrial areas transforming into bustling residential neighborhoods. “Today, it’s the fastest growing line,” he said.

Stations in neighborhoods like Williamsburg were built with just one or two entrances, “whereas if we knew it was going to be residential as it is today, we would have three or four entrances,” Lhota said. “So, you’re seeing tremendous crowding on stations that are unbelievably narrow. We’re going to have to spend capital programs to expand those stations.”

It’s fairly easy to see where the MTA could include station entrances along the L. In Manhattan, a back entrance at the First Ave. stop that better serves Avenue A and points east would help alleviate uneven boarding patterns while cutting down commute times to the subway. In Brooklyn, stations east of Lorimer St. generally have but one entrance that leads to passenger bunching along the station. Even outside of the L, I see such behavior at 7th Ave. on the Brighton Line (which has a shuttered second entrance) and Grand Army Plaza. New entrances would help better disperse the crowds.

Of course, there is one giant problem: These types of system expansion plans cost money, and money is something the MTA has little of. The current capital plan doesn’t allow for such construction efforts, and the MTA may have to satisfy ADA requirements if it starts work on some of these stations. Thus, adding new entrances would not come cheap.

Still, it’s an idea worth considering. Better station access won’t help increase the frequency of trains or allow for longer car sets, but straphanger distribution can help ease the loads. Maybe those back cars wouldn’t be so empty if they were closer to the station entrance points.

Workers at 23rd Street were able to give the track bed a thorough scrubbing with no trains zooming by. (Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin)

For the millions of New Yorkers who rely on the city’s subway system at all hours of the day, the best time for the MTA to do its work is never. We don’t want weekend slowdowns; we don’t want overnight delays; we don’t want mid-day re-routings. We want the subways to run all the time whenever we need it.

That is, of course, a problem when you’re talking about infrastructure that’s around 80 years old at its youngest spots and over 100 at its oldest. To combat a decline that reached a nadir in the early 1980s, the MTA is, as we know, engaged in a never-ending battle to repair its system. We are stuck with weekend headaches, mid-day, off-peak diversions and overnight work. If the early returns are any indication, we might end up with once-a-quarter FasTrack shutdowns as well.

In a presentation to the Transit Committee earlier this week, MTA officials praised the results from this month’s four-day overnight shutdown of the East Side IRT. They spoke of the productivity gains and the money saved, and while a one-time trial along one subway line isn’t enough to judge a program, officials were optimistic that the program would be a successful one in the long run.

According to the laundry list of accomplishments the authority released, work crews identified and completed 324 tasks over the course of the four nights. This included removal of over 20,000 pounds of debris from subway tracks; installation of new tie blocks, plates and friction pads; 311 signal inspections; grout work at various points along the line; and retiling, repainting and repair work at numerous stations, just to name a few. “We’re able to complete work that we would not normally be able to do in our normal customary way of doing it,” Department of Subways head Carmen Bianco said. “The level of exposure [to danger] went down for employees, because we’re not running trains.”

Overall, the authority says it saved around $673,000 by turning off service. If that’s a projectionable figure, the MTA could save around $10 million annually while improving the physical plant in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. That, at least, is the long-term goal, and it’s going to take a few more pilots to see if FasTrack is a sustainable effort. “This is the first time ever in the history of this organization that we’ve done this,” Transit President Tom Prendergast said. “So we need to actually have three or four more experiences before we can ascertain how successful it is and how we can improve upon it, and what the impacts are.”

With the work accomplishments in hand, what of the impact on customers? Some praised the idea as a way to combat decrepit station conditions; others did not. ““This a bad plan that you have decided,” Thanisha Mitchell said to the MTA. “I have to open a gym at 6 am and I have to punch in by 5:30. I actually have to be to work before 5. This Fastrack plan is garbage and effects everyone’s schedule. Your ad says you are reliable, and I don’t believe so.”

Interestingly, the MTA claims that it did not notice increased use of parallel lines either. While the authority halted work on those parallel lines — in this case, the BMT Broadway trains — so as not to further inconvenience customers, the authority noted that extra shuttle service and the so-called gap trains on the Na and R “were not well utilized.” Transit is waiting for a full analysis on adjacent routes and bus lines until more data has been collected.

So now, we wait. In February and March, FasTrack moves to the West Side as the 7th, 6th and 8th Avenue lines get their treatment over the span of five weeks. Then we’ll reassess what it means to lose subway service from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. four nights a week for one week every three months. With the right results, it should be worth it, but the jury is still out on what those right results should be.