If cleanliness is next to godliness, then the New York City subway has long been in need of a few prayers.

So trash-weary officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are trying something new: in a counterintuitive plan, a pair of subway stops, one in Queens and one in Greenwich Village, have been entirely bin-free for the last two weeks.

The idea is to reduce the load on the authority’s overtaxed garbage crew, which is struggling to complete its daily rounds of clearing out 40 tons of trash from the system.

But it also offers a novel experiment: will New Yorkers stop throwing things away in the subway if there is no place to put them?