MTA sees Increase in Garbage at Subway Stations

More riders. More trash.

There’s more litter in subway stations and that may be because more people are using the system, an MTA spokesman said Monday.

But some riders blamed the increase in filth on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for removing trash cans at some stations as part of a pilot program to clean up the system.

“Since they took the garbage cans away, people just throw garbage on the platform or the tracks,” said Quomethia Knox, 45, a legal assistant from the Bronx.

She said conditions worsened at her home station at 238th St. in the Bronx on the No. 1 line, one of the stations in the program.

The MTA removed garbage cans from 12 stations in 2011 and 2012 for a pilot program that seeks to encourage riders to dispose of garbage before or after leaving the system.

The move actually reduced garbage in stations, officials said when expanding the program late last year to another 29 stops.

The MTA began the pilot program as a way to reduce the gargantuan effort to remove the 40 tons of trash each day from the 3,500 garbage receptacles in the system. About half of it is recycled.

According to the MTA report, moderate-to-heavy amounts of litter were observed at 28% of subway stations during early morning surveys that authority staffers conducted between July and December.

During the same months in 2013, staffers observed moderate to heavy amounts of trash at 19% of stations, the report states.

Those ratings were based on observations made before the morning rush hour commenced.

During daytime hours last year, station conditions were worse: 34% had moderate-to-heavy levels of litter, up from 24% the prior year, according to the report.

“They’re just not clean at all,” Gissette Gomez, 32, a receptionist from Brooklyn, said. “They need to correct it.”

Weekday subway ridership rose about 2.5% last year to nearly 6 million riders per day on average. That’s the most since 1949.