Subway bathrooms will begin to reopen in January nearly three years after officials closed them to prevent the spread of COVID-19, according to a report.
Transit officials plan to reopen the facilities at eight of the 69 stations with public restrooms, Streetsblog reported on Monday.
The first round of reopened loos will include 161st Street-Yankee Stadium, 14th Street-Union Square, Jay Street-Metrotech, Flushing Main Street and Fulton Street in Manhattan.
Officials shuttered the subway’s 133 restrooms in March 2020, but declined to reopen even after studies showed COVID-19 primarily spreads through the air and not surfaces.
MTA CEO Janno Lieber blamed the continued closures on a lack of cleaning personnel and many cleaners’ safety concerns about entering the bathrooms alone.
The MTA declined to reopen subway bathrooms for months due to safety concerns. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Subway bathrooms were often closed before COVID-19. Gabriella Bass“The problem for us is during COVID, we lost a ton of cleaners, and we don’t have enough people to clean the stations, let alone the bathrooms, which is not just a cleaning issue, but honestly a security issue,” he said in an interview with CBS New York last month.
“Those cleaners are a little scared to go into those bathrooms sometimes.”
The authority has hired 800 additional cleaners in the past two months, MTA New York City Transit President Rich Davey told Streetsblog.
Restrooms at MTA commuter rail hubs reopened last year.
