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Manhattan borough president Mark Levine wants the MTA to make it easier to use bathrooms in the subway system. Yes, we know... hold your jokes about the MTA already being in the toilet. However, there are currently about 60 bathrooms available throughout the system, open from 7am to 7pm- and yes, one of them is, ironically, in Flushing, Queens. Levine wants greater accessibility, asking for longer operating hours and signs leading riders to the facilities.
Levine’s request does raise the question, however: would you use a bathroom in the subway if you had to go? WOR street reporter Natalie Migliore appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to ask straphangers at the 57th Street station the number one question on our minds.
Migliore found it didn’t take a whiz to address the main concern, that the bathrooms won’t stay clean or usable. One woman said, “I betcha there won’t be any toilet paper. They’ll be doing more stuff in that bathroom than people using the bathroom. There will be people sleeping in there, just doing nasty [stuff], taking baths in there.” Another rider expanded on that thought: “People sleep in them and do their drugs in them. You ever seen, you ever been to one of these bathrooms. They’ve got needles everywhere. It’s disgusting. Unless they going to have somebody who’s going to take care of it correctly, then there shouldn’t be no bathrooms in the subways.”
Another woman told Migliore it’s not the conditions inside the bathrooms that concern her; it’s the conditions outside them. “It not safe at all. It’s so not safe that I won’t even bring my son on the train to go anywhere. Friends invite me to go to birthday parties in Manhattan, I’m like, I’m not taking my son on the train. If my husband’s working, I’m not taking my son on the train, because it’s just dangerous.”
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