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What Does the Subway Smell Like Today?

The increase in the price of fuel has led citizens to turn in their steering wheels for public transportation, especially the subway.  However, subway…

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The increase in the price of fuel has led citizens to turn in their steering wheels for public transportation, especially the subway.  However, subway facilities in Philadelphia are not always the most sanitary.

Without meaning to, as a subway user, I was surprised by what one can find in the city’s subway.
One Wednesday evening, at around 9:00 p.m., I got on the subway at the Spring Garden station going West, and a piercing smell of onion impregnated a whole subway car; when I tried to identify the smell, I realized that it was coming from a piece of cheese steak lying next to my feet.
One can stand bad odors, but finding blood on the stairs at the Independence Hall station on 5th and Market Streets on a Saturday morning at around 9:00am was alarming, especially during the summer when the use of sandals  is quite commonly.

Finding old nut shells on the floor of a subway car on Market line running from West to East was even more surprising since I had seen them freshly lying on the same spot a week earlier.  Yes, they were exactly the same nut shells that were never cleaned up.

On another occasion, on a Friday, at around 11:00 p.m. in the tunnel connecting the North of Broad and Market lines, users were forced to step aside to avoid  human feces lying in the middle of the path, probably left their by a poor person.

“Keeping the vehicles clean has been a priority for our new manager since he assumed this position in February”, stated SEPTA spokesperson, Felipe Suárez.

He affirmed that the agency urges passengers not to leave garbage or food in the vehicles by using signs, but such measure seems insufficient because despite the fact that food is prohibited on the buses and the Frankford-Broad line according to SEPTA’s rules, people break the rules.

“The train operator is in charge of making sure that people do not carry food on the vehicle, as are those located at the subway entrance booths”, Suárez stated.  However, when asked how often the stations are cleaned, things turned a bit hazy.  “I don’t know exactly how often they clean a station, but all the vehicles have to be cleaned at night so that they are ready for the following day”, he answered.

At a short distance, the Washington DC metro stations must be cleaned at least every hour.  With a $2.200 million budget and 811,559 users a day, the public transportation system of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is the envy of metro users such as those of Philadelphia.

Stevens Tubankibel, the WMATA spokesperson, affirmed that this is due to the strict cleaning standards imposed on the 10 thousand employees working there.  “We have supervisors that must clean the stations at least once every hour; the station managers are also in charge of ensuring that no one enters food or beverages.  In the event that the manager is busy attending another user, one of the supervisors of the surveillance officers can tell users that they cannot enter food.  We have maintained these standards since the subway was open in 1976”.

For its part, SEPTA, which has been operating for over one hundred years, serves around 750 thousand passengers with nine thousand employees, much like Washington’s figures, but all this with a $1,000 million budget.

Suárez, who reported a 6% increase in the number of passengers during the last year, indicated that a $10 million dollar increase in the entity’s annual budget will be allocated to 65 initiatives to improve its services at the end of August. 

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