Straphangers Campaign survey: D train stands for ‘disgusting’

The subway might be more modern and safer and less full of roving gangs in matching outfits, but that doesn’t mean the car floors are clean enough to eat off of. Or any other surface of the trains really. If you need this shocking observation put into data for you, you’re in luck, because the Straphangers Campaign just came out with their Shmutz Survey for 2013 and found that basically every subway line in the system has gross cars. The worst? The D train, with only 17% of cars surveyed being classified as being dirt free or being lightly dirty.

The good news for the D train is that every subway line with the exception of the 7, the L and the E got dirtier between 2011 and 2013. Overall, only 42% of surveyed cars across the entire system were found to be clean 42% in 2013, compared to 52% of surveyed cars in 2011. Even the improvements in cleanliness for 7, L and E were deemed not statistically significant by the Straphangers Campaign, which means that no one really gets to brag about improvements.

Unlike the Straphangers’ previous report on subway platforms, this survey didn’t look at garbage on the tracks, only dirt, sticky spots, spilled food and those lovely pools of mystery liquids that sometimes appear and everyone agrees to just pretend aren’t there. I used to live off the D and didn’t find it any grosser than other lines, but that was years ago, and the only time I rode it recently was coming back from seeing the Rangers beat the Islanders, so even if someone puked on the train it still would have been fine by me. Do we have any frequent D train riders who’d like to stick up for it? Or pile on maybe?

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