This week's journey. Andrew Cuomo has his own free transit pitch; A greenway master plan would connect a bunch of paths; Hoboken PATH station closing, again; Summer Streets continue, and more.
New benches at Grand Central Madison add to 'hostile architecture' trend that deters homelessness
After years of hand-wringing, MTA officials are adding seating for Long Island Rail Road riders at New York City’s newest train station.
The transit agency this week unveiled 21 new benches at Grand Central Madison, which opened in early 2023 with no public seating on its mezzanine. Each bench has two seats separated by a curved handle to prevent someone from lying down. The MTA also imposes restrictions on the seats: They’re reserved for ticketed LIRR riders, who cannot sit on them for more than 90 minutes.
They add to the 14 benches the MTA installed at the station’s mezzanine last October. LIRR President Rob Free said the move is a response to the station’s growing ridership.
“I like the ergonomics behind it. It sits your butt pretty well,” said LIRR rider Steven Gonzalez, 33, who commutes into the station from Rego Park in Queens. “For the working man that’s in New York City, the working woman, I guess it’s pretty comfortable.”
Ramsey Khalifeh/Gothamist
The new seating is worthy of a headline because city planners have in recent decades designed train concourses to thwart homeless people and loiterers. The end result: nowhere to sit.
The city’s other shiny new railroad station — Moynihan Train Hall, which opened in 2021 — is a high-profile example of the trend. Riders there often sit on the ground while they wait for their trains.
“I understand wanting to maintain a sort of certain aesthetic,” said Tim Poovey, 42, who was sitting on the floor of the station waiting for a train to Cold Spring Harbor. “But I also don’t think that having benches here would create an environment that invited in unwanted loitering.”
The limited seating is an example of “hostile architecture,” a design trend that dates back to the 1970s and architect Oscar Newman’s concept of “defensible space.” The theory drew a link between crime rates and design. Newman found high-rise New York City housing projects had higher rates of crime than their low-rise counterparts.
Jon Ritter, a clinical professor of architecture and urbanism at NYU, said the addition of seating at the “barren and bereft” Grand Central Madison station was much needed. But he said the seats at the station were a prime example of the city’s hostile public design.
“It's certainly clearly designed so that you can't lie down on it or sleep on it, which is the thing that they clearly want to avoid,” he said. “They want to keep people moving through there.”
Ritter added that by the 1980s, city planners were designing public space with homelessness in mind.
“ The fact is, these places were burdened with tremendous problems, social problems of people living there, homelessness, dirt and decrepitude,” he said. “So I think these leaders of these institutions are still fearful of that worst-case scenario that did exist in the past. But with increased policing, with increased security surveillance, to some extent the presence of social services, these are perhaps battles we don't need to fight anymore.”
He might be on to something. The MTA has other ways to keep homeless people out of Grand Central Madison: It’s closed to the public from 2 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. every day.
Curious Commuter
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“Why do the fare gates not display your remaining balance on your OMNY card? If you don't have enough money on the card for one fare, it does not say that but "card invalid." With the machines, it seems they decided to not bother with anything to make them user-friendly in any way even up to standards of 30 years ago.”
- Michael from Brooklyn
The MTA acknowledges that there are limited displays on the OMNY screen. Agency spokesperson Eugene Resnick said: “OMNY readers are designed to be fast, simple and secure.”
The MTA now expects riders who use OMNY to check their card balance at an OMNY vending machine, online or at one of the Customer Service Centers located around the city. That’s not as easy as a MetroCard, which is being retired at the end of the year. But the MTA hints that when the MetroCard is fully phased out, the OMNY screens will be updated to give riders more information about their account balance. “The MTA is looking at options to provide more visual cues to customers,” Resnick said.
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We're also talking about...
Andrew Cuomo’s free transit pitch. The independent mayoral candidate is seeking to one-up Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s free bus plan by proposing free buses and trains — but only for New Yorkers who currently qualify for half-priced fares.
“Why is government supposed to be subsidizing the rich?”
- Andrew Cuomo
Transit planners told “On The Way” earlier this year that Mamdani’s proposal could inadvertently create a two-tiered transit system that pushes low-income riders away from the subways, which are far more efficient at moving people.
We’re walkin’ here. Foot traffic in Manhattan has surpassed pre-pandemic levels for the first time since the city shut down more than five years ago.
New greenway master plan. City officials this week released a plan to add dozens of miles of bike and pedestrian paths that would fill in major gaps in the existing network of waterfront greenways. See a map of the proposed additions.
Astoria bike lane drama. More than a dozen business owners along 31st Street in Astoria have sued the city in a last-ditch effort to halt construction of a new protected bike lane under the elevated N and W tracks, arguing that the street redesign would interfere with their ability to receive deliveries.
