Subway chief pledges to crack down on filth

Transit has had enough of the mountains of paper, coffee cups and plastic bags littering subway stations.

The subway system’s new chief pledged Thursday to do a better job keeping stations clean, despite the agency’s lack of manpower.

“We’ve got to ensure that those stations are getting cleaned,” Carmen Bianco, NYC Transit’s senior vice president for subways, told the New York City Transit Riders Council. “We are going to maintain them at a higher level going forward.”

As amNewYork previously reported, transit has increasingly left cleaning shifts unfilled to save on overtime when workers callout. Dozens of shifts for day-to-day cleaning and deeper scrub downs have been skipped at major hubs like Herald Square, Times Square and 14th Street, transit documents show.

“I’ve noticed lately the stations I’m in are noticeably trashier,” Sharon King Hoge, a riders council member.

Bianco said he recently happened upon a station that wasn’t cleaned for 18 hours on the weekend after shifts were missed.

“We’re talking about the bottles, the paper … That’s not a standard I want to live to,” Bianco said. “We’ve got to be able to cover that job.”

Transit is reorganizing its subway management to try and better maintain stations with existing resources, including addressing long- ignored defects and rarely cleaned surfaces, Bianco said.