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100 Ingenious Ways to Fix New York City's Broken Subway System

At least we can dream.

If you live in New York, chances are you have some beef with mass transit. The city’s subterranean train system may be comparatively cheap, but it’s also very old, built on infrastructure that predates Henry Ford’s Model T. Trains are noisy and sticky, stations are grimy, and riders are often in the dark about when, or if, their trains will ever arrive. Hurricanes Sandy and Irene dramatically exacerbated these problems, delaying system improvements and creating fresh headaches for commuters and the already overworked and under-budgeted MTA.

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New York designer Randy Gregory has some ideas to fix these problems, or at least make the experience of riding the subway a little better. The 29-year-old Phoenix native, who recently graduated from the master’s program at the School of Visual Arts, spent 100 days this summer coming up with 100 ways to improve the subway. The renderings, originally posted to Tumblr, were on display at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Arts Tuesday night, in a pop-up art show hosted by the commuter advocacy group The Riders Alliance.

"This is supposed to be the greatest city in the world, but our subway system isn't. It's far from it,” Gregory said in a recent interview with Motherboard. “It's cheap and it's effective, but it's nothing like the European systems or Asian systems, where everything is run on a dime and it's super clean."

Some of Gregory’s plans are pretty fanciful, like air piston cooling, subway car wind turbines, and a suction garbage system. Gregory even devoted a few of his 100 days to “entertainment” suggestions that he says would make the subway “feel a little more grand,” like tunnel lighting for cars entering Time Square and Grand Central Station, or No. 89: “Showtime!” Cars, modeled after Tokyo’s Yamanote Halloween Train.

Other ideas—like USB charging stations, bike racks, and car density monitors—are fairly ingenious, but expensive and unlikely to gain much traction with the cash-strapped MTA. And some ideas, like hand sanitizer and exit/enter-only turnstiles, are so obvious that it’s hard to believe the MTA hasn’t implemented them already.

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Gregory concedes that some of his ideas are “pie-in-the-sky,” dreamed up in a fantasy world of unlimited budgets and friendly bureaucracies. “But that's really the core of innovation—you come up with big ideas, and then you distill them down into something that's workable,” he said. Plus, he added defensively, “a lot of my ideas are workable, through co-branding and sponsorships, or just by getting politicians to sit down in the same room."

The project has attracted the attention of senior MTA officials, who recently met with Gregory to discuss the feasibility of his ideas. MTA spokesperson Adam Lisberg told Motherboard that the agency is looking at implementing some of the “actually doable ideas” that can be done at little cost, but declined to give details on which specific proposals have piqued the city’s interest.

“There is an openness here to considering things that are more practicable, that can be done without a lot of cost, and that can be done without interrupting our ongoing program,” Lisberg said. “Nothing is simple, but some of the ideas that come for our customers really can be put into place, and of course, we want to do that.”

Beyond offering creative solutions to some of New York’s transit problems, Gregory’s project—and the interest that his ideas have generated—offer glimpses into the future of urban innovation.

Over the past few years, programs like Cities Pilot The Future and OpenIDEO have popped up to crowdsource solutions to strategic challenges facing US cities. In San Francisco, for example, the city government crowdsourced a fix to its open-data problem; in Detroit, OpenIDEO is asking citizens, non-profits, and businesses to come up with ideas to fix the city’s myriad issues, and subsequently to refine those ideas and figure out ways to implement solutions.

In New York, Gregory’s MTA project has inspired a kind of spontaneous crowdsourcing, creating new dialogue about local transit solutions. As it turns out, New Yorkers have a lot of ideas about their public transportation, and they are very eager to share.

“Starting a Tumblr feed is a great way of reaching an audience that is not usually involved in community activism,” said John Raskin, the executive director of the Riders Alliance. “What we need to do now is make sure that audience then also participates in some of the grassroots politics that are required to actually make the changes.”