NEW YORK — Hundreds of homeless people were found camping out in subway tunnels and stations across New York City earlier this month, MTA officials said Thursday.
Transit crews and homeless outreach workers found 29 “homeless encampments” in subway tunnels and another 89 in stations when they surveyed the city’s more than 650 miles of subway tracks and 472 stations over 12 hours from Feb. 2 to Feb. 3, officials said.
In all, more than 350 people were living in the encampments, Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief development officer Jamie Torres-Springer said during the agency’s monthly board meeting.
Transit officials said outreach workers quickly reported the encampments’ existence to police. The homeless people in the tunnels were promptly removed, said MTA chief safety officer Pat Warren.
Representatives from Mayor Eric Adams’ office and the city Department of Social Services on Thursday were unable to determine how many of those people were met by homeless outreach workers when they were taken out of the tunnels.
The underground encampments were found as the city has seen an uptick in the number of people believed to be homeless found dead on subway trains and platforms this year.
MTA board member Andrew Albert said the number of people living in tunnels revealed troubling security flaws.
“I always said my biggest fear is that somebody would pretend that they were a homeless person and when nobody was around they’d walk down the steps and set off something,” said Albert. “People are doing crazy things today.”
The New York Police Department does not have the authority to remove everyone sleeping in publicly accessible areas of subway stations, but the MTA officials said the agency relays locations of encampments to police and the Bowery Residents Committee, which is contracted by the city to do homeless outreach in the subway.
“We’re doing it on a regularly scheduled basis,” MTA chairman Janno Lieber said of the subway surveys. “The definition of an encampment is a little hazier when you’re in a station. Sometimes it’s people who just lay down on benches as well as actually setting up housekeeping, which we’ve all seen.”
The tunnel sweeps came as Mayor Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul formed an initiative to crackdown on homeless people who turn to the subways for shelter.
The pair last week vowed to increase homeless outreach on mass transit, and in some cases rely on mental health workers to diagnose mentally ill people and force them into care. The NYPD has also been instructed to enforce subway rules, like a ban on large carts on trains and a requirement for riders to exit a station when a train reaches its final stop.
The MTA is working on its own project led by Torres-Springer to keep people out of the subway tracks.
Unauthorized people went onto subway tracks in 1,267 incidents reported in 2021, up from 1,094 in 2020 and 1,062 in 2019. Torres-Springer said 200 people were struck by trains last year, and 68 of them died.
A majority of the people who go onto subway tracks were not shoved and did not slip, MTA data show. Torres-Springer said there were 160 track intrusions in January, and a quarter of them were by emotionally disturbed people.
The MTA has some technology in place to detect when unauthorized people enter the tracks, and officials said they are looking to add more to beef up security.
Torres-Springer said the agency seeks to expand its use of laser technology that sends alerts whenever someone enters the tracks — and he’s considering hiring a vendor to install thermal detection to help identify unauthorized tunnel dwellers.
Every one of the city’s 472 subway stations have been equipped with cameras since last year, and Torres-Springer said he wanted to mount high definition cameras on the fronts of subway trains to further monitor the system.
“Video analytics and artificial intelligence will allow us to remotely monitor footage in real time to flag potentially dangerous behavior or conditions for interventions,” Torres-Springer said.
The MTA also plans to install platform security gates at three subway stations that only open when trains arrive to keep people off of the tracks.
