Cleaning up after New York City’s new streetcar tracks is a tedious task of scaling down the Big Apple’s tunnel system, as NY1’s Jennifer Burstein reported. The grid’s 1,000 track sections, which are arranged to move trains through the system, need to be picked up by personal trash disposal or placed in dumpsters strategically placed in strategic spots.
“It is extremely tedious,” a city official told Burstein. “And that is not New York City’s intention.”
In the Amazon age, with its algorithmic advances in logistics, it might be difficult to conceive of how a system that moves people around the city could be maintained without an online storage solution. It’s just so much easier and less disruptive to have everything on one system.
As Burstein wrote, the workers who haul the tracks out to the service hub — where they are then placed in the massive underground depot — often don’t have enough time to actually clean up the tracks, which often makes for a mess. They might be given two minutes to clean the tracks of soap, bug spray, flower pots and other trash they have piled up. The problem, as Burstein points out, is that the stakes are so high in getting the tracks in place for a first station for the Morris-Jumel-Moffit line, that no employee would want to delay their work and see them all cleaned up.
Before the city bought its first streetcar, workers created stations for the tracks with fire hydrants and to shield the tracks from the elements. But as construction work grinds on and the system gets out of the testing phase, there might be room for a new interim system that’s not so labor-intensive.