The MTA is keeping straphangers on their toes.
The transit agency installed four new “leaning bars” at the West 4th St. station of the A, C and E trains in Greenwich Village over the weekend, part of a long-running pilot program that the MTA says is about cost.
The thin, slanted metal bars are meant to give riders something to lean against while waiting for a train, replacing at least one of the station’s traditional wooden benches.
MTA spokesman Tim Minton told The News Monday that the bars were put at West 4th because it was a station with a high volume of traffic and typically frequent trains.
“They cost one-tenth of the other benches,” Minton said — $455 apiece compared to more than $4,000 for a wooden bench. “We will see how it is received.”
A visit to the station Monday found four leaning benches at the A, C, and E stop — two on the uptown side and two on the downtown side. One wooden bench remained on the downtown platform, but the leaning bars were the only option besides standing on the uptown platform.
Downstairs, on the platform for the B, D, F and M trains, all wooden benches were still in place.
Evan Simko-Bednarski / New York Daily News
New “leaning benches,” which the MTA installed at the West 4th St. subway station over the weekend, are pictured on Monday, March 17, 2025. (Evan Simko-Bednarski / New York Daily News)
Leaning benches first arrived in the subway system in 2018, when they were installed at Brooklyn’s 53rd St. station on the R line.
Joe Rappaport, head of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled and a frequent transit advocate, slammed the structures as “a classic example of hostile architecture.”
“There should be benches on the subway, it’s as simple as that,” he told The News.
“It is clear that they are putting these in in place of benches to make it hard for people who might be homeless to lie down,” he said. “These don’t help anybody.”
Anne Lathrup, 27, an Atlanta resident visiting the city, leaned up against one of the bars Monday.
“I think it’s perfect for us,” she said of ordinary straphangers, “but the first thing I thought was this is meant to keep people from lying down.”
But Sander Duncan, a 38-year-old Brooklynite waiting near Lathrup, said he doesn’t feel safe leaning against the station’s track-side columns and finds the old wooden benches somewhat “gross.”
“It’s a happy medium,” he said of the new structures before boarding a downtown A train. “This has my vote.”
