Great news for riders of the number 7 subway. According to the straphangers annual 'schmutz' survey, 84 percent of the cars on the 7 train are clean, making it the cleanest line in the system.
"I agree. I agree...compared to the others, like the six is really dirty," said Nadia Abad.
At the bottom end of the survey is the R line. The straphangers found three dirty cars out of every four, that's a miserable 'clean' score of only 25 percent. The R train we saw at Times Square corroborated the straphangers survey, and so did some riders.
"You see a lot of garbage, a lot of potato chips, cans, a lot of gum stuck to the seats and stuff like that," said Bobby Borjas.
The Transit Authority's 2010 budget calls for cuts in the cleaning staff. The straphangers worry that fewer cleaners could lead to dirtier cars. It's happened before.
"They cut car cleaners in the mid 90's and said they could do more with less. It turned out they could do less with less and things got dirty and they restored the car cleaners," said Gene Rissianoff with the Straphangers Campaign.
Meantime, a transit authority spokesman said the hiring of 400 additional cleaners is highly unlikely considering the current budget constraints. But he added, cleaning staff respond to subway trouble spots based on monthly monitoring reports.
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