We need to get away from this idea that public transport systems need to break even or turn a profit. They are there to help make money in other ways. An efficient reliable transport system should cost the taxpayer money, but they will get that back in profit elsewhere through a thriving local economy.
MTA is broke because it costs several times as much for MTA to do anything compared to its counterparts in other Europe: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-....
Osaka (OMTB) 137%, Hong Kong MTR 124%, Osaka (Hankyu Railway) 123%, Tokyo Metro 119%, London Underground 107%, Singapore (SMRT) 101%, Taipei Metro 100%.
Clearly it is possible to have profitable subways, so I don't think we should drop profitability as a goal.
People need to see public transport as "roads that don't need cars".
Semis cause 1,400x more wear than cars [1].
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
American rail systems largely didn't develop around their stations, and if they bothered to develop around their stations they sold the land after construction and that was it. For them to do so today would require billions, if not tens of billions of dollars to provide fair compensation for eminent domain for land and property around stations. And that's before the legal costs to fight all the resulting litigation, if they even were allowed to do it.
This article from last year does a much better job of covering how things have gotten to the state they're in - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
In London that same fare in rush hour would be anywhere between $4 and $15+ depending on the length of the journey (and NYC has much higher GDP per capita than London, plus the £ is on its arse at the moment). Even Berlin is marginally more expensive, in a much smaller & less economically prosperous city.
Keep in mind also that if you don't raise fares you are effectively cutting them because of inflation.
Not a crazy idea considering how some systems operate in the East - Tokyo, Osaka and Hong Kong systems not only pay for themselves, but churn out profits along the way. Singapore’s MRT is designed to operate at break-even.
The trick is to allow the transportation authority to own and manage its own real estate. This way when a new station or line is built out, the sharp increase in land value is captured by leasing the space above it to a giant mall, office complex or a mixed-use megacomplex like Roppongi Hills.
The US model seems to reward random real estate developers who just happened to own the land near the future station. It also seems to frown upon the idea of concessions or any commercial exploitation - for instance, San Jose or San Francisco Catrain stations receive more foot traffic than many commercial centers in the area, yet choose to wow their visitors with a mediocre coffee stand and a dirty bathroom.
Well, that seems like a pretty major subsidy. So if a new line or station is built, the government uses eminent domain (or equivalent) to buy the land, and gives it to the transport authority?
I mean, it might be better in that it lets the transport authority operate without being dependent on government handouts that can vary wildly from year to year due to local politics.
> The US model seems to reward random real estate developers who just happened to own the land near the future station.
The government should apply some form of land value taxation to (partially) fix this. Would fix a lot of other problems too, but I digress.
Hence why the NYC mayor is so intent on funding worthless streetcars and ferries; they let him get out from under the thumb of the state.
The Tokyu Corporation (one of the 10 or so companies running trains in Tokyo) is currently building several 20 to 40 story buildings in Shibuya, one of which Google Japan will move into next September. They make money renting the building all of which are next to their station
> 'in 2017 there were 99 fare-free public transport networks around the world: 57 in Europe, 27 in North America, 11 in South America, 3 in China and one in Australia. Many are smaller than Dunkirk and offer free transit limited to certain times, routes and people.'
Once a public transit system is convenient and is used by a large percentage of the population, let's say 30-90%, then it will surely be profitable except if it's grossly mismanaged.
Incidental tip: buy stocks of Hong Kong public transit companies, they're doing amazing.
How about seeing that once the Subway was private and ran well and it ended up the way it did thanks to state intervention trying to make the subways out of business and then buying it out?
Private rail systems in Europe eventually were nationalized during the warring decades of the 1900s and remained that way longer than in the US, while in the US the government spun up Amtrak to relieve rail operators from passenger rail and its rapidly declining revenues, while letting freight railroads go through waves of mergers until only a handful remained. Soon after Amtrak, the airline industry was deregulated, and airlines proceeded to copy the idea: rack up costs, declare bankruptcy, sell, reset.
Truth is, big, ambitious construction projects, and big, ambitious service networks have always sucked, and the ones that remain went through many cycles of overruns and disappointment and service reduction before they stuck. Maybe what ought to worry us isn't that we've lost the magic touch of delivering ambitious, long-running deliverables (railroads, infrastructure, cities, government services...) sustainably, but that we never mastered it in the first place, and the things we have now are the much-recycled husks of former grand ideas that managed to eke by.
I'll make the case that, as a nation, we have lost the ability to deliver civil infrastructure projects on time and on budget, not to mention manage them once they are operational.
Regarding NYC MTA, I'll share an anecdote. I have a very close friend who worked on the second avenue Subway line a few years back. He's a civil engineer by training and was in middle management on this project, employed by the general contractor awarded this contact. His comment was along the lines of: "imagine dozens of dump trucks full of hundred dollar bills backing up to an incinerator and dumping the money. That's what the MTA does. Burn money." The sentiment was that these public institutions are chuck full of incompetence with no repercussions for mismanagement or incentive to excel. As a life long New Yorker, I don't have to work in the tunnels to know that he's right.
This is true, but only part of the story. The private railroads (and indeed much internet infrastructure) had two phases. In the first, early entrants made big profits by picking the low hanging fruit (i.e. most profitable opportunities) in a new market.
This created investor euphoria just as the opportunities for "easy" profits were drying up. So things turned towards speculative, even fraudulent investments that left the investors out of pocket. But, as you point out, even the second phase left some infrastructure on the ground that could be operated at a profit once bought at firesale prices.
Now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_map#/medi...
1968: https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/irvingtr...
1948: https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/system_1...
The problem is basic day to day maintenance is really not enough, infrastructure get's increasingly complex and expensive over time. Now compare this with you example city's 70 years ago and it's a rather different situation. Singapore for example did not even start construction on a subway system until 1982.
You own it, you maintain it. Good luck.
The A/C/J/Z lines still contain R32 cars, which were built 54 years ago, and are 20 years past their service life. These cars were built before the moon landing, have terrible brakes, have terrible air conditioning, and are, generally speaking, sweltering rattly deathtraps.
The Second Avenue line is 100 years in the making and has a grand total of...drum roll...3 stations. That opened in 2017.
But hey, they're getting WiFi in the tunnels and installing flatscreen TVs in the stations. Three cheers for more ad space! Personally, I'd rather have less station closures, less delays, and less stopping-and-waiting-20-minutes because of track congestion.
Consumer-grade connectivity within tunnels is likely piggy-backed on the connectivity required for the trains infrastructure. Currently the subway operates a system from 1930s to control the lights and detect train positions. It is based on mechanical / magnetic relays, and is prone to break often.
Replacing that with redundant modern electronics and fiber optics wold increase MTBF dramatically, lowering maintenance costs and wait times. One thing that the current antiquated system is limiting is train speed. Trains used to be faster, but were slowed down because of safety reasons. If the new connectivity allows them to run 30% faster again (or even faster, where the tracks allow), that would be a huge win.
(Written on a subway train crawling through the ancient tunnels.)
Installing countdown clocks on only the lettered subway lines cost $209 million. This doesn't include the numbered lines which have had them for about 10 years which also cost hundreds of millions. In all the project took 29 years. [1]
If you want to know how much it cost to install WiFi is was budgeted for $200 million and ended up at around $300 million. [2]
Remember how that healthcare.gov Website cost hundreds of millions and was a failure? It cost $250 million and came with a $75 million maintenance cost. And then a small group came in at the end and fixed it for $4 million with yearly maintenance of $1 million? Well, the MTA has a ton of these projects.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/engineering-against-all-od...
How many people die on them every year?
Are they really deathtraps? Or are they just old train cars?
Some of these are much easier fixes than others.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s planned to add amenities like new lighting and USB ports at nearly three dozen New York City subway stations, Completely side-stepping DeBlasio. In February, Cuomo put the vote forth to The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, (they control the MTA), voted 10-3 vote in favor, to approve 1 billion dollars of contracts to refurbish nine of the thirteen stations.
This is all apart of Cuomo's Enhanced Station Initiative which is entirely focused on cosmetics.
It's a shame.
But this is the first comment that points out that Cuomo owns the MTA, is responsible for maintaining and improving it, and has a long history of looting the MTA's funds for other projects, or forcing them to spend money on cosmetic changes (does no one remember his big announcement last year that he was going to take 200 million from the MTA to force them to make NYC bridge lights multi-colored? Really?). Service was fine before this man got elected, and plummeted afterward.
It might be that Cuomo's not to blame, any more than any other possible cause. I don't know, I'm not an expert.
But you know what I never hear? Any form of leadership or direction that makes it sound like his people are trying to fix this issue. Which again, means in some sense, Cuomo is still to blame. We don't have reliable transit, and Cuomo's answer is: "Maybe we can get a very controversial new tax passed to pay for it?" From the guy who has a habit of stealing funds from the MTA? Deblasio's condition for more funding was that Cuomo had to promise it will go to the subway and not another one of Cuomo's upstate pet projects... and Cuomo said no.
Until we have a governor who cares, I don't have much hope here. It just doesn't appear to be a priority for him. He declared a state of emergency, and promptly followed up with no headline making changes. Unless I missed something (pls link me! : )
He did, however, name a bridge after his father. Maybe the ceremony would have been better if the bridge sparkled in more colors.
Contrast that with NY state, where the state legislature and governor can interfere with MTA affairs. Cuomo is a huge part of the problem.
There's another option: disband the MTA Union, the primary driver of operations costs. They have blocked technology and safety upgrades for decades to keep 'those darn computers and robots from taking jobs from poor workers just trying to make a living'.
* Unionized workers make very good money in New York.
* Unions are a primary political driver behind those expensive contracts.
* There's more to unions than conductors. Construction and maintenance, for example.
* The unions routinely put up strong opposition to any meaningful expense or quality control. They also strongly oppose any modernization attempts that might threaten their jobs. They've opposed electronic signaling and control for decades. The worse the subways are, the better it is for them.
* Unions are politically untouchable. No matter what the consequences for the public, people are willing to leap to the defense of the noble workingman. Actually, the noble workingman who needs a "living wage" is riding the subways, not maintaining them. The poor and desperate are found among the five million people who ride the subway every day. Transportation is a public good. It shouldn't be beholden to a small group of highly paid laborers.
That being said, paying union construction workers $1k/day (!) to do nothing is pretty egregious as well [3]
[1] http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-... [2] https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MTA-... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Unions work on both goals simultaneously, increasing wages but also providing job security to their base, inserting strong restrictions on who can perform certain labors etc. The more employees, the higher the power of the union, it's not like a competitor could spring up and kill their host.
It's not a white/black issue, laborers need protection but should not use a privileged position in the economy to seek a rent at the expense of everybody else.
There’s also some arcane areas of NY law that drive labor costs dramatically in NYC versus other places. I think a tunnel boring machine in Paris (hardly corporate paradise) operates with something like 80% less manpower than the NYC equivalent.
https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2018/08/15/an-open-se...
Without all the bailouts, the MTA would have failed decades ago and would have had to have been restructured. Because NYC's political priorities have been to conserve past structures and agreements at the expense of the present and the future, you will see performance go down and down to the point to which 1950s performance will look like 1950s science fiction.
I don't think I would expect anything to change until a major accident kills a large number of people in one day. You should expect the people in charge of the system as it exists today to keep getting millions of dollars as service continues to degrade. But the MTA knows this, so they stop the trains constantly when there is any chance of a collision, so you get the slow motion choke for money that you have had for decades.
There's a great option if you are not happy with New York City and its governance: leave! NYC is a machine for fleecing young people who want to move there with heads full of movies and TV and rich foreign potentates with more money than sense. It's not a great place to live if you want to have a comfortable middle class lifestyle. It might have been that 30+ years ago, but not anymore.
Eh, I'm actually not so sure about that. Salaries in NYC are a lot higher than in other parts of the country, so provided you're doing well (say you're in tech, perhaps!) you're not being fleeced at all.
I am a little more optimistic than you are that the subway may one day be fixed. Unfortunately its fate rests in the hands of New York State, not the city, and many in NYS government couldn't care less about fixing it (Cuomo, here's looking at you). But it feels as though we're reaching a breaking point where citizens will demand change without anyone needing to die.
This does not make MTA's efficiency any better, though. NYC's subway and buses enjoy a lot of daily ridership, sell ad space, and sell commercial space underground. Still these, rather large, sources of income are not sufficient, and MTA eats a lot of subsidies, because the expenses are enormous, and incentives to save are likely not there.
Cost-cutting is likely politically hard, because of pork-barrelling, the unpopularity of firing workers (especially unionized workers), and likely plain corruption.
NYC had 2245 murders in 1990 and 290 murders last year. Every category of crime has fallen dramatically over that time period. NYC is less affordable today, but it's without a doubt more "comfortable" and livable for all income levels.
Are there, though? You can play armchair city planner all you want, but where is the political, legal, regulatory, etc, environment that allows this "very clear" fix to proceed? Who's to say that even with a big fare increase and a lot of money pushed in, that money won't mysteriously disappear while things don't get any better - as has happened historically?
Sometimes an entity DOES need to fail, and fail hard, before it can really be restructured entirely.
NYC is not just for rich yuppies. The city is home to a lot of middle and lower middle class families as well as the working class who can’t just leave and rely on public transportation for work or school. Look beyond midtown and north Brooklyn and you’ll see that.
It’s entirely fair for people to want to improve things.
Payroll: $5,392
Overtime: 811
Health & Welfare: 2,129
Pension: 1,354
Other Labor: 400
----------------------
Total Labor: $10,086
Non-Labor: 4,205
Debt Service: 2,692
BTL Adjustments for Expenses: (251)
=====================================
Total: $16,732I was a daily rider of the DC metro for 8 years. This is exactly what happened there. Reliability plummeted, then ridership, and all the while major fare increases.
I think this is connected to the constant weekend problems you mentioned. The trouble before was that they weren’t maintaining the system properly because they didn’t want to cause disruptions. They finally realized that maintenance isn’t actually optional and started doing what it takes to get it done. The system doesn’t have enough capacity to have sections out of service for maintenance without major disruptions, but at least now they happen at a time of their choosing.
As for the alternative options like Lyft and Uber they mentioned, those are only viable for privileged upper middle class commuters, so it really can't go that far to explain a claimed drop in ridership. And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.
As soon as you cross the Potomac into Virginia there may be high-rises, but everything is built for cars, not transit.
Also, quite a bit of the metro system is cut and cover and quite shallow. A few spots were tunneled deeper to cross waterways.
I keep hearing this with zero justification. Why? I’m sceptical of New York’s public agencies asking for lots of cash. I assume there are legitimate projects, but the MTA has been horrible at showing the public this demanded money will be well spent.
I have no trouble holding both ideas in my head at once.
I believe both are and will be. But to what degree? If it’s billions on bloat, then we need a cost cutter at the top (in addition to new funding).
You may not be able to achieve both goals at once. Tackling MTA efficiency will involve a lot of confrontations with the union. And you know they won't back down on a single thing, so service will degrade further.
Having said that, maybe now is the time, when things are crumbling to take them on, with the hope of having the popular will at your back.
I'm confident officials have neglected long term maintenance costs when planning and building all the various infrastructure of major cities. The modus operandi is always underfund the project, get people to rely on it (or at least make the case of not just throwing away the first $x when all you need is $y to complete it), beg for more funding.
Maybe the problem is NYC is an overpopulated crap-hole and there's no amount of money to fix it. Plenty of other real estate in the US that businesses and people can move to. NYC is obviously past carrying capacity if we have to resort to boring holes into bedrock to shuttle people around like rodents.
NYC's fantastic. It's one of the safest major metropolitan areas in the world filled with a tremendous variety of culture. It's the most diverse place on the planet with only London even being at a comparable level.
And the level of contempt for people riding subways? Where do you get off? Not only are they better for the environment, they're one of the great equalizers. Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day.
They get people to work during odd shifts, and allow those without so much to reach the same places those with so much can.
What a weird, haughty, better than thou comment.
The real misallocation of resources are sleepy suburbs where people hide in their bedroom watching tv, while the city road and water infrastructure costs orders of magnitude more than the tax revenue or productive capacity of the land is capable of supporting.
> The number of annual revenue car-miles per subway employee in New York was 14,000 in 2010. In Chicago this number is somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 ... On Tokyo’s Metro, the comparable figure is about 18,500.
[1] https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/13/16455880/new-york-subway-mt...
Fast forward to living in Tokyo, the difference is night and day (except for the rush hour crowdedness). Maintenance is done every night (somewhere) and all lines shut down between 12 and 1 am. It's super inconvenient, and this is where I applaud NYC for allowing me to get home every late night I spent out. I would hope there's some middle-ground in there, though.
The MTA is looking at this in such a primitive manner, though. I know (from my time there) that track work is not efficient. It looked to be a lot of sit and wait until something is ready. Tokyo metro workers are _always_ doing something. It's almost if they have clear defined goals that they must accomplish before their day starts.
(Some lines aren't yet upgraded to walk-through trains, but they're ordered. Stuff like speed regulators is decades old.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Even in the face of the financial crisis and budget shortfalls, the M.T.A. has given concession after concession to its main labor union.
Members of the Transport Workers Union got a total of 19 percent in pay raises between 2009 and 2016, compared with 12 percent for the city’s teachers union over the same period.
The labor contracts also gave members lifetime spousal health benefits and free rides on the Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road. (They already were allowed to ride the subway for free.)
Particularly insane:
Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually.
A cursory search shows a train driver making $31/hr, which doesn't seem excessive.
I am also wary of the tactic of showing MTA workers as over-paid compared to a notoriously underpaid profession (e.g. teachers, who in this case held barely above inflation).
A quick look at glassdoor.com for MTA transit jobs [1], I'm seeing drivers and conductors making ~$22/hour. Presumably this is an entry level rate. Some searching points to a high of ~$30/hour.
Project managers and programmers, of course, are making >$100,000 k. I have doubts that they are represented by the union, though. Of course, quietly lumping their salaries in with the blue-collar folks pushes a particular political narrative.
It seems that if you really want to trim the fat at the MTA, cut wages for the white-collar, un-unionized workers.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-conductor-s...
Anecdotally, given how cheap Uber and Lyft are in Manhattan (typically $4-5 for a shared ride), I often find myself opting for that instead of dealing with the hassles of the subway system. Both are unreliable when it comes to timeliness, as ride sharing services often take longer than expected (especially Uber Pool and Lyft Line). And as painful as the subway system can sometimes be, I do appreciate the rich history and incredible performances you'll often come across in subway stations. I'm torn, to be honest.
Looking at the article's linked presentation [1] and the MTA's most recent financial plan [2] it seems like all the hurt is coming from really huge declines in projected revenues - labor costs seem to be growing pretty reasonably but there's basically zero projected growth in fares. If someone can give me a layman's explanation of what "Capital and Other Reimbursements" is, which accounts for about a $500mm decline between 2019 and 20222, I'd be much obliged.
So I am curious how sensitive riders are to the increased service problems, how much that makes them switch out, to get some sense as to how much the signal improvements will help solve this problem. Also how much to a fare hike, which seems like the more straightforward answer in a vacuum (i.e. other than taxes or other government infusions). The MTA says in [1] that even "draconian service reductions would have a relatively small impact on the deficit."
[1] - http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-... [2] - http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-...
In fact, cutting off-peak services would probably worsen the budget outlook long-term, since the marginal cost of an off-peak service is very low.
they love to tout huge mileage numbers because it sounds impressive but when compared to the whole of what is driven its one percent or less. better yet a large amount of ride sharing is off peak.
the reason of course is money, the subsidies to mass transit systems are in the tens of billions which in turn allow for existing systems to not have to be competitive or even maintain their lines because they know they can grab more cash. if anything beyond the hundreds of billions in deferred maintenance many light rail systems have there is nearly similar in pension liabilities.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/can-andy-byfor...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone...
It’s nearly insignificant.
But I agree with the lead comment. Public transport should be seen as an enabler, and should be made free, or affordable, in order to maximise the benefits.
We spend how much on roads? All from tax payers, and some people don’t own a car. Yet the idea of paying for public transport out of taxes seems to grate some people.
This is the exact same argument that we have when it comes to education, health care, defense, and so forth. Some argue that it's because government spending is inherently inefficient, and while that may be true, that doesn't explain how governments outside of the United States still seem to be a lot more efficient than governments inside the United States, nor does it explain similar phenomena in things like housing.
This seems like a very broad problem that is currently beneath the public consciousness. SSC's "Considerations on Cost Disease" (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...) is the first general discussion I've found of this, though Scott Alexander cites a paywalled Tyler Cowen piece in Bloomberg.
(Fair warning: while SSC doesn't mention defense spending as an example of this, the US has a ridiculously high defense budget without actually having the quantity or quality of troops and ships and aircraft that such a budget would imply. If China's defense budget were the same as ours, they would whip our ass in a conventional war.)
Whatever the shared root cause or causes are, they need to be addressed. Just giving MTA, Medicare, the Pentagon, universities, etc. more and more money isn't going to be sustainable. And, despite the ramblings of certain conspiratorially-minded folk, I also don't really think this is inflation in disguise, because then you'd also have to explain why there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the costs of e.g. basic groceries.
I don't have any answers here; I just don't think we're asking the right questions if we just restrict the discussion to the specific areas where we see this happen.
When you look at the NY State workforce, more effective negotiation essentially eliminated overtime, and you just don’t see the pension padding that you see with MTA. Most of the state workforce is in the provincial lands upstate and the unions are pretty weak.
Additionally, with trains, legacy regulations allow for systematic abuse of disability. Not sure about subways, but at one point 97% of LIRR retirees were getting more expensive disability pensions.
This is good in some ways — effective bureaucracies got their start as support for monarchial ambition, in an era of unprecedented government expenditure and military devastation — but it means the US never developed a strong, effective state, either bureaucratically or socially. The US retains many of what Huntington calls “Tudor Institutions” — institutions like a powerful court system that can effectively determine public policy, a decentralized approach to military forces (including the right to bear arms), and the sometimes handicapping balance of power among the different branches of government and the states. When absolutism collapsed in absolutist countries, all the decentralized institutions had been cleared away; but the bureaucracies survived, and with them a strong civil service tradition (modeled on military service), a notional trust in government, and a wide variety of effective and efficient public agencies.
Still, it’s a very fascinating phenomenon. The US is culturally and constitutionally more robust against tyrannical government, but at the expense of undermining the possibility for effective government. This really gets at the root of some of the discussion about American exceptionalism, too.
I'm probably being cynical but maybe not.
If you are doing city planning you want as many people on the Subway as you can get. It enables greater density at ground level and is much cheaper to maintain (if you maintain it) than overcongested road networks and the required parking.
It just seems the margins for error get ever thinner as your system scales. Other systems have figured this out, like Tokyo where they change over a major-use track in one night. Meanwhile, MTA shuts down the L for 15 months.
1) The businesses pay to get their human resources to work
2) The travellers pay or
3) Central taxation pays
So who should pay in New York?
Last night I watched his talk "Transit Truths" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5AHJA2-lAc - which also summarizes the ideas in his book well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
"Span 2003b. "No one sought an answer to Quinby’s most penetrating question (referring to the 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act), "Who Is Behind This Campaign To Separate The Obviously Economical Combination Of Electric Railway And Its Power Plant?"
If there are less riders to serves doesn't logic dictate service levels be adjusted to fit market conditions?
Given that this might be the key fact in the whoke article, the article should have detailed why rider volume is down.
But that's not drop in service (as it will be spun). That's just a common sense response to the needs of the market.
The problem is, any elected official who champions such common sense won't get elected / re-elected. Simply because it will be sold to the public as a drop in service. This why public programs always grow and too rarely never re-adjust (smaller) when appropriate.
Note: The article did __not__ say why ridership is down. It mentioned the reliability issue but doesn't name it as the sole reason. For all we know more people are walking because the need the exercise. Or perhaps those at the bottom of the economic ladder can't afford to ride.
Obviously, the former is good news. Healthcare is expensive. Obesity is a real issue.
Obviously, the latter is bad news. And few elected officials what to be the ones to say they haven't been doing what they said they were doing.
Or perhaps tourism is down? Which again, is not a feather in any politician's cap.
Anecdotally, I live in Central NJ. To take the train to NYC I have to pay approx $10 to park. That makes the round trip approx $40. In my mind, at $40 p/p p/trip, that's coming up on $50, opposed to a (psychological) shade over $25.
The article makes no mention of possible external factors.
I, at least, heavily depend on public transportation in NYC and would be more than happy to pay more to the MTA in taxes if it meant cleaner, more efficient, and more reliable service.
https://www.businessinsider.com/second-avenue-subway-cost-ny...
When the company adds "new blood", everything that the new blood proposes gets tossed out for "legacy reasons". Periodically, someone floats a plan for a gigantic multi-year "keep X service but rewrite everything inside it from scratch" software engineering project. Those future "rewrite from scratch" projects are used to justify not making any incremental improvements.
The typical effect of absolutism was to introduce an efficient and effective civil service, as part of the general centralization of authority. Absolutist states were monarchial, militaristic states; the combination of taxation and destruction was hard to endure and eventually they had to transition to something else as a result of revolution or defeat. After either event, though, the civil service stuck around and with it a norm of publicly provided services.
The US got off the train at just about the time that absolutism was getting going in Europe -- indeed, because it was getting going in Europe -- and thus retains a decentralized -- not necessarily selfish -- structure and outlook more characteristic of medieval Europe. These "Tudor Institutions" are discussed by Huntington in Political Modernization: America vs. Europe: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Huntington%20Political%20Mo...
FWIW Biking has become more viable in recent years, with a good amount of bike lane coverage even in the outer boroughs, but that's still not viable for the less physically able, and I don't know if it's actually cheaper than public transit once you factor in bike equipment/maintenance costs and increased travel times. Also the weather gets fairly extreme in both the summer and winter.
Taxing rideshares sounds like a good idea, though I'm sure Uber would fight like hell against it.
Put all that ML and AI expertise to some public use.
Like most other civilized societies who have a functioning and well-maintained metro system.
That is really all there is to it!
Then suddenly they have to find a way home or two work that will be much more expensive and eat into their earnings.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but "that's really all there is to it" will affect very negatively hundreds of thousands of people in NYC.
NYC is unique in that there are LOTS of people whose working hours fall into that range and they rely on the subway. Just shutting down the whole system is unfeasible.
It's another huge City. Besides having a horribly mismanaged public transport, it's not unique.
Except that it's, you know, the center of the universe of course. ;-)
Betting someone clever on HN could invent a new signalling system for far less than $40 billion, perhaps $4 billion.
Once it's proven in New York you could roll it out anywhere in the world.
Is this a satirical comment? It doesn't matter how easily a clever HN reader could devise a new, greenfield signaling system, you can't just build and cutover to a new subway signaling system in one of the world's densest cities, atop an existing subway with over 100 years of accrued legacy signaling technologies. The MTA has tried to modernize it's signaling system twice, and each initiative was a multi-decade, multi billion dollar morass. It's just not a problem that can be solved by throwing a shiny new framework at it - not that many real world problems can be.
One datapoint: I live in Rhode Island. Recently I attended a concert in Brooklyn. The obvious way to travel there was Amtrak to Penn Station and MTA (train or bus) to the final destination. However, I was warned that MTA service is unreliable. I decided to drive. Next time I probably won't go at all.
Usually when public transit networks start showing strain, it's during rush hours, when they're handling massive spikes in ridership. To give an example from Chicago: If you're trying to get on the train downtown at 6:00pm, you'll get on the next train, and probably get to sit in a seat. If you try to do it at 5:00pm, you stand a good chance of waiting 30 minutes for a train that you can even physically get on to. When you do, your ride will probably also take 50% longer than the 6pm ride would have. And maybe even 100% longer than a ride at 7pm would have.
You naturally get all the complaints from the rush hour riders. And yeah, if your concert were starting at 6 in the evening so that you'd have to brave rush hour traffic, then that would be a problem. But so would driving.
If, like most concerts, it was starting a bit later, you'd very likely have experienced smooth service.
* planned work every weekend and most late weeknights which reroutes half the trains and is described in terms guaranteed to confuse visitors. A complete map of the changed routes would help massively; instead, you get a long list of textual descriptions such as "Brooklyn-bound F trains are running express on the E track between Court Sq and W 4th St and local on the D track to Stillwell Av" which scares and confuses tourists who barely understand downtown Manhattan geography, much less how it relates to the rest of the city.
* occasional unreliability at any time of the day, typically either due to signal failures in century-old analog wiring, or because of paramedics or cops shutting down an entire station to take care of a rowdy or injured passenger.
Locals have learned to adapt. They know what the cryptic planned work descriptions mean and in which situations next station alerts are lying. They have learned to understand the static-y conductor announcements on a loud train. They know that on some lines, if you must to be at your destination on time, you ought to leave 30 minutes early just in case this ride is the 1/20 when something happens.
Visitors don't know such things, and I can empathize with their apprehension.
What line are you describing? I take the L every day from downtown around 5 and I can reliably get on the first train and it will arrive in < 10 minutes (and there's a good chance I'll have a seat). If a train takes more than 10 minutes, it will almost certainly be packed full, but it will also almost certainly be followed by another nearly-empty train in ~1-2 minutes.
Unless it was on the weekend when there are a multitude of service interruptions and station closures.
And, so, should they complain? Yeah! There's nothing wrong with expecting more from the MTA. But these stories are generating comments like yours here and that's absurd.
By what metric?
But they shouldn't have been downvoted for expressing that sentiment.
The MTA has problems, but it still usually gets you where you need to go.
A certain political figure with strong (both bad and good) ties to NYC has harped for a couple of years about a federal infrastructure bill. I think the phrase "third world" was used to describe the problem.
No reason why America's Greatest City (tm) could not wring a couple of bil out of the feds to start upgrading their subways. Move back to the first world, you might say.
In turn, because we're talking about a transaction, the MTA might also need to move out of a "third world" mentality. We can safely assume some of their payroll is spent on political favors. Maybe this "death spiral" talk will motivate the agency to make a least a token gesture towards good use of their riders dollars.
Maybe.