КИЕВ, 29 янв - SV Development.  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has come up about an inch short in its bid for a January opening of a $500 million South Ferry subway station in Lower Manhattan.

The problem: the gap between the platform and the trains exceeds the three-inch maximum allowed by federal regulations guaranteeing access to mass transit to people with disabilities.

Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the authority, said that the gap is from four-hundredths of an inch to “about an inch” too wide in some areas along both sides of the platform.

To fix the problem, the authority plans to replace the brightly colored plastic strip along the platform edge, called a rubbing board, with a wider one. It will take three to four weeks to have a new rubbing board made, delivered and installed, he said.

Mr. Soffin said it was not clear who was at fault and who would be responsible for the cost, about $200,000: the contractor who did the work or the authority.

The gleaming new station will replace the current station, which is still open and has been operating at South Ferry for over 100 years. The tracks in the old station form a tightly curved loop and only the first five cars fit the platform, meaning passengers have to move to the front of the train to exit.

The station appeared all but finished in early December when Michael Horodniceanu, president of the authority’s capital construction division, guided members of the news media on a tour.

At the time he hedged on earlier projections of a late December opening and said the station would instead likely open in January. But on Monday, he told a committee of the authority’s board overseeing capital construction that the opening was being delayed again.

He said it was taking longer than expected to test the station’s sophisticated mechanical systems, including a fire alarm system that coordinated escalators’ movement in an emergency.

“It took us a little by surprise,” Mr. Horodniceanu told the board members. “It was much more complicated than we envisioned.”

After the meeting Mr. Horodniceanu was asked what had gone wrong in getting the station ready for passengers. “For the moment nothing is going wrong,” he told reporters. “The testing is just taking much longer.”

He never mentioned the problem with the rubbing boards, which Mr. Soffin acknowledged on Tuesday was the cause of the continued delay.

Mr. Soffin said that the platform measurements were still being taken on Monday morning. But two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the issue, had discussed the problem with transit officials and said the agency was aware of it as early as last week.

Officials said it is not unusual for problems like this to emerge in major construction projects, and the issue is only being publicized because the station’s opening is being delayed.

Over the summer, officials said there were problems with water leaking into the station and the subway tunnels. But Mr. Soffin said on Tuesday that those problems had been resolved and were not contributing to the delay.

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