MTA Mulls Banning Food and Drink Aboard Subways

MTA board members want straphangers to clean up their act – one of them calling a ban on food and drinks on subways “a swell idea.”

The idea floated Monday during a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee meeting comes just days after someone posted an online video showing a subway rider tossing spaghetti at another passenger.

Some board members were concerned not only about the cleanliness of the system, but also scurrying rats and delay-causing fires tied to litter on the tracks.

The MTA needs “to think about the availability of food products to passengers, who then discard some or all of it on the tracks, on the platform,” board member Charles Moerdler said at the meeting. “They’re the cause of rats. They’re the cause of the fires. We have to do something to make it clear that the public has to wake up.”

Board member Doreen Frasca, chairwoman of the NYC Transit committee, showed enthusiastic support for Moerdler’s comments with a hearty “here! here!” Frasca said prohibiting eating and drinking is a “swell idea” but later said she didn’t plan on asking the board to approve a ban.

The MTA’s NYC Transit division removes about 90 tons of trash from the system – a day, the agency said. Nearly 600 trains were delayed in January by track fires, transit data released yesterday shows.

Some riders, including Derrick Smith, 41, a custodian from Brownsville, Brooklyn, said they’d support a ban on food.

“How can you eat on the train?” Smith asked. “There are germs everywhere. People coughing, sneezing, and you eat your food?”

Robert Freeman, 56, of the South Bronx, was waiting for a No. 2 train in downtown Brooklyn. He doesn’t think the rules will ever change.

“People have to be respectful,” Freeman said. “Put the trash in the receptacles. Who wants to be around rats?”

Olga Holtuian, 50, a school bus driver from Washington Heights, said it’s pretty simple.

“If you are hungry, you gotta eat,” Holtuian said. “But people have to behave when they eat. They leave food on the floor. That’s not nice.”

The MTA encourages riders not to eat on subways and buses, but it’s not illegal. Dozens of subway platforms have kiosks that sell food.

An MTA proposal to ban drinking nonalcoholic beverages was dropped in 2005 after riders reacted angrily to the possibility of being ticketed for having a cup of coffee during their commute.