| Simply wouldn't work - each train has a driver and a conductor, the driver does not interact with passengers at all (and for safety reasons, probably shouldn't), while the conductor can only oversee his/her immediate surroundings. The issue goes beyond simply wheelchair-bound passengers, but also the fact that the elderly also ride the trains. There are a large number of people who aren't fully disabled but for whom having a seat is important, so it's not enough to simply reserve a few places for a few individuals. The 4/5/6 trains are a clusterfuck because they're vastly oversubscribed. The serve the entirety of the Bronx and the hyper-dense Upper East Side, not to mention the entire east side of Manhattan. The solution to this isn't "leave a large demographic of riders in the cold to gain marginal capacity", the solution is "build the f'ing 2nd Ave subway". There are a large category of improvements to the subway that, while valuable, offer only marginal improvements to capacity. Open-gangway trains can increase per-train passenger capacity by ~5%. CBTC digital train signaling upgrades will get you ~10-20% more capacity by packing trains closer to each other safely. Even stacking a bunch of these improvements together will not resolve the massive capacity deficit the MTA suffers from system-wide. Only new track, new trains, and new stations will. IMO standing-room-only cars fit in this category. It would give us a bit more capacity, but nowhere near enough to make a real dent on the capacity problem - and this particular "improvement" has a high cost in excluded passengers. Even if we made all the cars standing room only, you'd still be packed like sardines into the 4/5/6 in the morning, and you'd still have to watch helplessly as multiple trains pass by packed to the brim. |