Commuting via mass transit in New York City could wear on you — especially on the subway, which tends to turn straphangers into a squished pack of sardines.
Well, the good news is that there could be some relief on the way in the Big Apple. The New York Daily News is among the media outlets reporting that the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be launching a $52 million test-run of 10 open gangway train cars — for two full-length trains — with the prototypes expected to be delivered in 2020.
The roomier gangway cars could improve passenger capacity around 10 percent, transit experts told the Daily News, providing some much-needed congestion relief for New York City's subway system. The advantage of these centipede-like trains is that they let passengers spread out throughout the length of the train instead of being confined to cramped cars.
"We're using this project as an opportunity to just test that technology and see if it works for New York," NYC Transit's subways chief Wynton Habersham declared in an MTA board meeting, as reported by the Daily News.
The MTA also released these design renderings of the more open gangway train cars, as posted on the Daily News' website.
MTA spokesperson Adam Lisberg added to the Gothamist: "We don't make major changes like this lightly. We really need to see some of these trainsets in service before we can evaluate how they work, whether they have unanticipated consequences, how the advantages balance against the disadvantages, etc."
The open gangway train cars are already being used in London, Paris and Toronto.
