Are you are like me, constantly irritated that subway service declines even as rate hikes pile up...and the MTA keeps two sets of books, one to plead poverty so they can increase our fares, one to plead plenty so they can pat themselves on the back, and who knows which is true? Well, your perception of the declining subways may be true.

According to the Straphangers Campaign, subways have gotten dirtier for the second year in a row.

The number of clean subway cars decreased for the second year in a row, according to the eighth annual “subway shmutz” survey by the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign, released today. The survey was conducted on 2,200 subway cars on 22 subway lines between September 2, 2005 and January 5, 2006.

Campaign surveyors rated 47% of subway cars as “clean” down from 61% of cars rated clean in a survey released in the spring 2005. This continued to reverse an earlier trend of improvement found between 2000 and 2004, with the percentage of clean cars going from 32% in the campaign’s 2000 survey, to 47% in 2001, to 59% in 2003, to 66% in the 2004 survey.

Cars on 15 of 22 subway lines saw significant deterioration since last year’s survey (2, 7, A, B, C, D, E, G, J/Z, L ,M, N, R, V and W), while cars on only three lines grew better (1, 3 and 4). Cars on the remaining four lines were largely unchanged (5, 6, F and Q.)

Straphangers Campaign is the advocacy group for those of us who use NYC mass transit. They are an excellent group and I recommend you check them out, 'cause goodness knows NYC commuters need an advocacy group! For the record, I have used the Japanese transit system and the Moscow subways. Neither run as late as NYC, but both work better and more reliably than NYC's system. Moscow's system has stops much further apart than we are used to, but runs far more frequently. Japan's system is a mish mash of private and semi-private systems, so can be confusing, and is more expensive than ours, but you can get practically ANYWHERE in the country by mass transit and the system is on time practically to the second.

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