The MTA’s effort to cut down on subway fires has so far failed.
Despite an expensive, yearlong effort to prevent a rash of blazes like the one that plagued the system in 2017, the number of fires increased slightly over the past year.
According to statistics released Tuesday by the MTA, there were 963 fires in the 12-month period ending July 1 — an increase of three from the year-ago period.
The number of fires on the tracks — which are most often caused when trains pass over piles of litter — went down slightly from 698 two years ago to 671 last year.
But that’s not much of a result, considering that the effort to stop fires was part of an $836 million Subway Action Plan introduced on July 25, 2017, in response to last summer’s series of blazes.
One of the incidents was a fire on D-train tracks in Harlem that caused major delays and injured nine people on July 17, 2017, during what became known as commuters’ “Summer of Hell.”
As part of the plan, the MTA started imploring straphangers to discard food and wrappers in garbage cans, and the agency put several new track-vacuum trains into service.
“It’s debris on the track bed,” Carl Hamann, acting vice president of system safety for the MTA said at an agency transit-committee meeting. “A lot of it has to do with litter.”
The agency also convinced the state Department of Environmental Conservation to raise litterbug fines from $50 to $100 and the NYPD said it has issued 134 subway-littering summonses through June 30 — up 74 percent from the 77 issued over the same period last year.
When the plan was announced, Chairman Joe Lhota briefly considered banning food consumption on the subways, but decided against it.
MTA board members lament that the number of fires has not decreased, with one, Charles Moerdler, saying, “What are we doing about allowing food to be served in the system?”
An agency spokesman said that since the plan went into effect, some 3,000 tons of debris has been removed from the tracks — and more are being implemented “that will allow us to address litter more aggressively and drive the number of all fires down more significantly.”
Part of the upcoming plans include the use of three new vacuum trains to clean the tracks and instituting a “group station manager” in charge of coordinating station maintenance.
Additional reporting by Tina Moore