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Governor Andrew Cuomo approved a new state budget this month, which ponied up roughly half of the funds for the MTA’s $836 million Subway Action Plan. After nearly a year of quibbling over who will pay for the initiative, the move forced Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hand, and he’s since agreed for the city to contribute the other half.
Now, with the plan fully funded, Cuomo and the MTA are beginning to roll out much-needed initiatives to improve service on New York City’s subway system. On Thursday, he held a press conference with New York City Transit president Andy Byford at the 9th Avenue D stop in Sunset Park, where he announced the rollout of a relatively new technology to fix the system: magic wands.
The wands aren’t actually magical—they’re magnetic, and they are used to efficiently pick up metal shavings and other conductive materials that cause insulated joints across the system to fail, which can lead to false red signals and delays.
“As part of the Subway Action Plan, we brought in consultants from all around the world,” Cuomo said. “One of the devices they brought to us were these magic—er—wands, the magnetic wands, which are very useful in helping to clean the joints.”
Insulated joints are electrical connection points that are used in the subway’s arcane fixed-block signaling system. Throughout much of the system, when a train is in a section of track, it activates a relay that turns signals in sections behind it red, according to the MTA. But when one of those joints is “compromised by conductive material such as steel dust,” it causes a falsely reported red light signal that forces trains to halt even though there is no train traffic ahead. The MTA says this kind of failure is one of the most common causes of signal-related delays.
As a part of the announcement, Cuomo said that insulated joints across the system will be replaced and the authority will deploy 700 new magnetic wands in addition to the 300 it already has. The MTA plans to use those new pieces of equipment to clean 11,000 insulated joints, accounting for half of those across the system, by the end of November.
These wands, however, are only a short-term solution to the subway’s signaling issues. The MTA is working to deploy new technology to bring the system’s signal system into the 21st century, which would allow trains to run closer together and therefore increase capacity.
“I don’t want New Yorkers to think, Oh, we just have to wait until we get new signaling,” Byford said. “What we're doing is going to make a real difference.”
The wands are already used in the United Kingdom, where Byford hails from (he’s a 14-year veteran of the London Underground, where he was general manager of three of the network’s busiest lines).
Photograph: Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
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