New York City could make buses and subways reservation-only to cut down on crowding post-pandemic

• New York City subways and buses could go to a reservation system post-pandemic to manage crowding.
• Everything is on the table, the agency's chief said in interview this week, admitting reservations would be hard in the century-old system.
• In April, MTA employees told Business Insider they felt expendable as they desperately tried to get protective gear as hundreds of their colleagues fell sick and more than 100 died.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

New York City's iconic subway system has already done what was once unthinkable — closing overnight — and now leaders are warning that more drastic changes could be on the way soon.

"Everything" is being considered to implement safe procedures when businesses in the US' largest city begin to reopen, said Pat Foye, chairman of the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in an interview with local news this week.

Asked directly about reservation systems, he didn't rule anything out.

"We haven't made any decision on reservations but, the point of mentioning it is, everything is on the table and what we're going to do is develop a multi-layered, multi-dimensional plan which is going to include, first of all, of course, masks," Foye said.

Foye admitted that reservations on a system that serves some 5.5 million riders every day — at least, before the coronavirus hit — wouldn't be easy, but can't be ruled out.

"Reservations would be a difficult thing to achieve but we think we've got an obligation to look at it and we're going to look at everything that we think makes sense," Foye said.

But it wouldn't be impossible, and starting on buses would be the easiest tactic. Daniel Ramot, CEO of Via, a firm that operates on-demand bus services for cities around the world, says ticketed buses already exist and could be useful for social distancing while commuting.

"Maybe it has to be a very simple booking system because not everyone using it is going to have a smartphone and a credit card," he said in a March interview. "We've been able to adapt our system to provide a very basic, text-based booking system for traditional, fixed-route buses."

You can also assign seats on the bus, Ramot said, which helps with one of the most important pieces of recovery: contact tracing.

"Maybe it would be good to know who I was on [the bus] with and whether that person got sick so I could take appropriate precautions," Ramot said. "The future of public transit may still have a big piece of it that's running fixed routes, but they may not look quite like we're used to."

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