New safety barriers installed in Brooklyn’s Clark Street subway station

February 5, 2024 Mary Frost

New safety barriers were installed on the platform in the Clark Street 2 and 3 subway station in Brooklyn Heights. Photo: Mary Frost, Brooklyn Eagle

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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — New safety barriers were installed on the platform in the Clark Street 2 and 3 subway station in Brooklyn Heights last week, as part of an MTA pilot program aiming to prevent people from falling or being pushed onto the tracks.

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber visited the subway station last Tuesday to inspect the yellow fences, he said at an MTA board meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 31. “Platform safety has been [a] major topic of discussion for a long time, especially since the tragic death — the murder — two years ago of Michelle Alyssa Go,” Lieber said.

On Jan. 15, 2022, Go was waiting for an R train at the Times Square-42nd St. station when Martial Simon, a 61-year-old homeless man, pushed her from behind onto the track, where she was run over by the train and killed.

MTA employees were on the platform in Clark Street station on Friday, making sure the gaps in the barriers lined up with the subway doors. (They did.) photo: Mary Frost, Brooklyn Eagle

“In the aftermath of that tragedy, I empaneled a Trespassing Task Force at MTA” Lieber said. The agency produced “a wide-ranging list of recommendations to keep people off the tracks and to make customers feel safer.”

MTA data showed 234 reported instances in 2022 of people “coming into contact” with trains — up from 200 one year earlier — a nearly 25% increase from 2018, when there were 189, THE CITY reported. In 2023, 241 transit riders came in contact with trains, and 90 were killed, according to The New York Times.

The partial fencing won’t block people who want to get onto the tracks, Lieber said. “You have to keep space for the doors to open because you have to get on and off the train. But it does provide a regular customer an additional sense of safety, and they can position themselves in an area where they would not be subject to risk. The folks that we see hanging onto the walls at our stations will appreciate this, we believe.”

This man discovered that the new safety barriers are a convenient place to lean. However, a sign on one barrier warns, “Do not lean on, sit on, or place objects on this railing.” Photo: Mary Frost, Brooklyn Eagle

The fences should also cut back a bit on the number of people who stand too close to the edge of the platform, only to get dinged by a fast-moving train. An incident like this happened on Jan. 24 at Downtown Brooklyn’s Jay Street MetroTech station, when a 36-year-old man was injured as he made contact with the side of a moving southbound F train.

Several MTA employees were on the platform in the Clark Street station on Friday, making sure the gaps in the barriers were lining up with the subway doors. This reporter watched six or seven trains come and go, and the doors and gaps appeared to be lining up properly.

In general, passengers stood behind the barriers while waiting for their trains, as intended. Others discovered they were a convenient place to lean — despite a sign warning, “Do not lean on, sit on, or place objects on this railing.”

Not fancy, but an improvement

While some commentators have sniffed at the utilitarian appearance of the barriers (“Couldn’t they come up with something a little more attractive?” one man in the station asked the Brooklyn Eagle), Lieber noted that the New York City’s old stations can’t handle the high-tech platform doors that modern systems in cities like Paris and Tokyo have installed.

“These high-tech systems … are hard to retrofit on our system, would take a long time, and for the vast majority of our stations, they simply cannot be accommodated because of the structure of our old platforms. We are pursuing some other practical, cost-effective strategies, including installation of those platform fences,” Lieber said.

Another set of the barriers will be installed soon at the West 8th Street/NY Aquarium’s F and Q station, he said. “We have a procurement underway — obviously subject to the funding dramas brought on by the congestion pricing litigation.”