Federal Transit Administration Administrator Marc Molinaro today issued a final warning letter to Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s New York City Transit to address safety risks for track maintenance workers following tragic accidents involving NYCT employees, including one death.
FTA issued Special Directive 24-6 to NYTC in August 2024 after the transit agency failed to strengthen safety measures between the November 2023 death of a track maintenance employee and a second serious injury to an employee in June 2024.
The FTA’s Special Directive 24-6 followed an FTA audit in June 2024 of the New York Public Transportation Safety Board’s State Safety Oversight program, the agency designated by the State of New York to provide safety oversight for the NYCT rail transit system.
During that audit, FTA identified significant safety deficiencies in NYCT’s Rail Transit Roadway Worker Protection program and a noted increase in near-miss events involving transit workers reflecting a combination of unsafe conditions and practices. FTA issued a Special Directive 24-7 to the PTSB to perform additional oversight activities to address an escalating pattern of safety incidents and concerns affecting transit workers at NYCT.
All total, NYCT experienced 38 potential employee-near misses in calendar year 2023, a 58 percent increase from 24 incidents in 2022 and a 65 percent increase from 23 events in calendar year 2021.
In the last year, FTA has communicated to NYCT the need to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment of its RWP program, including information from recent safety events. After two tries of NYCT, FTA has determined that NYCT’s safety risk assessments failed to adequately account for a rise in risk levels and excluded critical data.
Specifically, several track worker events occurred from calendar years 2021-2023, representing an incident rate approximately 3.4 times higher than the preceding eight-year period, calendar years 2013-2020.
Through the issuance of today’s letter, NYCT must submit an updated revised SRA to FTA within 30 calendar days.
