MTA Increasing Speed Limits For Subway Trains
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The subway is speeding up across New York City.
Newly revised speed limits have trains picking up the pace at 24 stations.
The MTA is about one third of the way through increasing the speed limit system wide – in some places, more than doubling how fast the trains travel, or removing a limit all together.
At the City Hall station, for example, the R and W trains were bumped from 6 to 15 miles per hour. In other locations, the increase will be more significant, jumping from 20 to 40 miles per hour.
Places like the 1 line, heading southbound north of Penn Station, there's no longer any speed restriction.
The MTA started the initiative last year.
"We've been looking at every territory in the system, specifically looking at our signals, trying to find where those signals are no longer calibrated correctly and fix them," Sally Librera, senior vice president for subways, said in December.
The agency has been sending teams to inspect all of the subway tracks and determine which can withstand higher speeds while maintaining safety standards. In their work, they've uncovered 320 faulty timers. So far, 59 of those timers have been fixed.
After a series of crashes, like one in 1995 where a motorman was killed, the underground speed limits were reduced.
Experts say improvements in train and track design, and technology, allow the subway cars to travel more swiftly and safely.
