So, I haven't been to New York in a while, but I'm guessing that you were poorly informed.

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.

That's really silly and a sign of how overblown this story has become (in some contexts). You would have been fine. When a system like the NYC Subway gets 20% worse for everyday commuters, that's a really big deal and something those commuters are going to talk about a lot. But a NYC Subway that's 20% worse than it was 10 years ago is still a massive, complex, incredible, useful machine, no matter how much New Yorkers complain about it.

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.

Apparently the commenter isn't much of a city person, and may have overreacted a bit.

But they shouldn't have been downvoted for expressing that sentiment.

Why not just go to Penn Station planning on taking the train to the final destination, then Uber on the off chance there ends of being a problem with the train?

The MTA has problems, but it still usually gets you where you need to go.

The problem with urban transport systems is that no one sees them for what they really are... an expensive thing that drives the economy. There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself, but the reality is that a few billion invested in better public transport results in a lot more billions being made elsewhere.

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.

This is a really depressing story to read. I've always believed that a good indicator of a country's health, is its ability to tackle complex large-scale projects. Projects that require coordination on multiple fronts: politics, bureaucracy, technical-know-how, civic sacrifice. In the old days when all this infrastructure was built in the first place, we showed our ability to do so. But now, we've gotten to the point where even maintaining it is proving too challenging. When you look at other countries like Singapore, China, Korea and Japan, it's clear that our political and governmental institutions are lagging far behind when it comes to "getting things done". I wonder what this portends for the coming century.

It's bad.

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.

This has little to do with the MTA Union and everything to do with Blasio resisting committing more money to the MTA unless he was guaranteed by Cuomo that the money would go towards the subways and subway throughput, and not other MTA services. Cuomo Controls the MTA; Not the City, or the City Mayor, that's 99% of the problem.

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.

> Drastically cut service or increase fares

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'.

Cities like NYC are overcrowded and dysfunctional, but our financial system allows dysfunctional and failing systems to continue to operate up until the point to which they physically collapse and start either entering prolonged periods of obvious mechanical non-function and/or killing people in embarrassing numbers.

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.

Expressed in Millions:

    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: $16,732

“The subway service and the bus service has become unreliable enough for people to stop using it. If people aren’t using it, there’s less money, and they have to keep raising fares without delivering better service.”

I 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.

> Turning things around will require a huge infusion of cash

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.

While looking for more information, I found this article [1] which gives more detail into the costs of the MTA compared to other cities. Regarding operator efficiency:

> 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...

I lived in NYC for five years and the decline in metro service was significant between 2016-2018. From most reports, it was due to faulty switches or expiring subway cars.

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.

Not surprised. Not only are we lacking in physical infrastructure, but also technological infrastructure. I still don't understand how we do not have stations like in developed Asian countries like Japan or Hong Kong. The trains are "one" unit and the stations are doubled door with people at each station assisting (or ticketing..) you if needed. The train practically drive themselves. The conductor is there for emergency purposes. We didn't even have speed regulator installed until recently (and not all trains have them!) until a bunch of trains kept on crashing because of human error. We spend billions on ONE new station, but we can't invest a couple billion to fix the infrastructure.

The NYT had a great article on how the subway got in the situation it is in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

The article briefly mentioned competition from ride sharing services but I wonder to what extent it's made an impact.

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.

Over the summer The New Yorker had a story on the president of the NYC Transit Authority. Entitled Can Andy Byford Save The Subways[1]? I found it interesting. They had a rather optimistic take, but this article 4 months later makes me think its not going well.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/can-andy-byfor...

You can market a 2.75 to $3 fare increase on the convenience of not receiving change.

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.

A ride in NYC is crazy cheap compared to other parts of the world. I live in Europe (grew up in NYC) and a single ride costs $4.50 where I am. But the public transport is clean, well-maintained and safe.

New York City's walkability and public transit are easily one of its greatest, most important, and most valuable features. It's a shame that there's been such a revolt against local taxation over the last 30-40 years. Our big cities are the lifeblood of our modern technological economy. And yet we are under-investing in them drastically. But it's absolutely an affordable problem, we have the money we just balk at talking on the responsibilities properly, we want to pretend that if we temporize and half-ass our way there the problems (not just transit but housing and opioids and so forth) will just take care of themselves or spontaneously disappear. That is an immature and unrealistic stance. We need to govern ourselves, we need to take care of and maintain our own cities and our own people. If we continue to fail to do so it won't just be public transit in one city in a death spiral, it'll be the whole entire country headed the way of a failed state. And it'll happen a lot sooner and a lot faster than you might expect.

The MTA claims that New York City's transit system doesn't have enough funding to keep up with requirements. Critics of the MTA claim that the transit system has more funding than ever, and just isn't keeping up because of some vague inefficiencies or incompetencies.

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.

I haven't noticed. In fact, it's been a several weeks since my commute was interrupted severely. I hear the green line is doing pretty badly though.

$2.75 sounds really cheap to my British ears. How far can you go on that?

For people here who are interested in transit, I highly recommend Jarrett Walker's book "Human Transit". He really focuses the conversation around a few ideas that almost everyone can agree on (and uses them to focus & have productive conversations in transit agencies) https://humantransit.org/

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.

"experts"

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?"

"The system’s financial straits have gotten worse in part because it has fewer riders, and is collecting less money in fares."

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.

The cost of a single trip has always been the cost a pizza slice. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/12/nyregion/nyc-beware-the-p...

I don't disagree with this sentiment, but it's worth pointing out that nearly all transportation projects from the "old days" around the world were done by private companies, and often met a swift end in bankruptcy. Creditors lost a lot, but the assets were then picked up by others, and refined through years of trial and error into endeavors of modest profitability. Only our sepia-colored glasses and the survival bias of remaining parts makes it look like people back then had it figured out, and we don't.

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.

These problems are really common with 50+ year old infrastructure. Looks at the NYC subway from 50 or even 70 years ago and it looks about the same as it does now:

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.

New York subways were sort of stolen. They were privately built, then the companies were forced into bankruptcy by price caps. The companies were not allowed to raise fares, inflation happened, and thus the government took control.

You own it, you maintain it. Good luck.

Mobile reception and wi-fi on stations, and displays with helpful info and arrivals / departures are very welcome additions, and likely did not cost a lot.

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.)

The Second Ave line is a disaster like you'd expect in any multi-billion-dollar infrastructure in the US, but it's not fair to call it "100 years in the making". It was proposed and planned 100 years ago, but cancelled. Then they worked on it for three years in the 70s, but the recent work wasn't begun until 2007. Again, still a disaster, but an order of magnitude less than how "100 years in the making" makes it sound. They weren't working on it steadily since 1919 :)

> are, generally speaking, sweltering rattly deathtraps

How many people die on them every year?

Are they really deathtraps? Or are they just old train cars?

> WiFi in the tunnels and installing flatscreen TVs ... less station closures, less delays, and less stopping-and-waiting-20-minutes because of track congestion

Some of these are much easier fixes than others.

Not to mention the state of the stations. I don't think they've been maintained or even cleaned in years.

This is the rub for me. If you scroll through this page, there's lot of talk about finances and upgrades without much context or understanding. And there's the usual union bashing, which may or may not be warranted.

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.

Seattle has kind of a similar problem. They can't just raise local taxes to pay for local transit. So instead the state has to decide on most Seattle transit projects (and their funding), and of course all of the conservatives east of the mountains bridle at the idea of their money being spent on those big city liberals instead of locally even though the balance of tax revenues and spending means money flows the other way. It's infuriating.

Paying conductors a living wage isn't nearly as expensive to the agency (and the state, and we the taxpayers and riders) as mismanaged and corruptly nepotistic multi-billion dollar contracts for construction.

"disband" a union without considering the consequences or alternative ways of ameliorating a problem is unfortunately what I've come to expect on highly up-voted, top-level comment here when it comes to matters of public policy. This is a more complicated issue than you presume.

You have a source for any of that? It's one thing to say labor costs are a primary driver of costs. It's quite another so say Labor Union costs are the primary driver.

i think that's literally ones of the objectives of under-funding. then privatise. then monopoly rents for those that can own shares. while still under-investing - who cares about trains? just uber a private jet/helicopter.

> 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.

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.

Cities like NYC are fine WRT density; Manhattan specifically did see a much larger population in the past.

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.

> 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.

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.

"If something's not working well, abandon it" is pretty pathetic advice. There are very clear ways to fix the problem, the only cause for pessimism is whether the people in charge will do the right things.

This is somewhat ignorant.

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.

If you haven't been back, I think you'd be surprised at the (weekday) reliability of the metro now. The metro is almost always terribly messed up on weekends (with single-tracking and line closings), but they make a damn good effort to get weekday commuters to work on time. I've been living in the DC area for the past two years and it seems like they have really been making the metro a priority. I have a transfer during my commute during rush hour times, and I hardly ever have to wait more than five minutes for either of my trains.

Can ridership in NYC really plummet? It's not like everybody there has a car that they can take to work.

The ridership is definitely not plummeting. A lot of people have started moving to deeper parts of Brooklyn and Queens because the rents are rising, so they depend on trains even more. The only people who've stopped using trains and buses on a regular basis, are people who can afford Uber or Lyft.

I just commented to someone the other day- I loved how clean the metro was but hated the prices for sub-par services. I hate the distance based pricing.

NYC is nowhere in the mess that DC is in. Mostly, because Manhattan, at least, is well-shaped to be navigated efficiently by rail. Because of height restrictions, DC has a relatively sprawled, 2-dimensional core, which means many common routes require transfers (also, the metro being so deep means a nontrivial amount of time is spent on escalators). For me, I often faced the decision of "$6, 10 minute Uber vs. $3.50 1 hour metro". Manhattan is long and skinny -- there's almost always a 0-transfer ride that can get you from point A to B + the wait is almost never longer than 10 mins. Every time I've said "I'm running late, I'll take a cab", it turned out to be a mistake. The situation is certainly different in the boroughs, though.

Both things can be true. 1) It probably does cost a lot of money to increase headways, run more trains, install positive train control, and otherwise upgrade and maintain tracks; but also 2) the MTA is a bloated, wasteful organization.

I have no trouble holding both ideas in my head at once.

There are two separate problems here: making the MTA meet demand and making it efficient.

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 keep hearing this with zero justification. Why?

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.

When even the NYT is willing to implicitly criticize unions, you know it's gotten bad:

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.

Yeah, I'd be very interested to learn about anything about the sensitivities of ridership to other external variables in general.

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-...

ride sharing services are the new bogeyman and politicians and others are simply relying on the old mechanism of, say it enough times and people will believe its true.

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.

I think ride sharing services will be facing their own reckoning soon. With so many cars and the prices so low, it’s not sustainable for anyone to make a living. And the medallions were created to address both this problem and the problem of too many cars on the roads, which is also turning into a huge problem.

It’s a very simple story. Health costs increase 15%/yr, and hiring slowed in the 1990s, leading to more overtime, and poor labor negotiations allowed MTA staff to apply overtime to pensions.

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.

The United States had a different path to development than most other developed countries. How different, is a theme developed in an essay by Samuel Huntington from the 1960s: Political Modernization: America vs. Europe. In a nutshell: the US never underwent a period of state centralization, like that associated with the age of absolutism in Europe.

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.

When I see stories like this one I take it with a grain of salt because I'll be the MTA and state legislature are basically just fighting their budget battle in the media. If the MTA makes a big stink in the media, they can swing voters to demand more funding and more restrictions on ride sharing.

I'm probably being cynical but maybe not.

It's a flat rate to get to any transit station in the city, no matter how far away. In NYC, the neighborhoods at the edge of the transportation network have historically been less wealthy, so this is a nice pro-economic mobility thing, and pretty unique among transportation networks. I expect people to say that this should change, but I think it's probably part of new york's secret sauce for economic success.

Public transit shouldn't be expensive. It shouldn't pretty much ever run outside the red. The whole point of it is to incentivize its use and promote efficient means of travel. The only reason to charge at all is to disincentivize unnecessary consumption of it.

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.

The NYC system isn't composed of "zones" like the systems in such cities as London and Paris. Essentially, once you pay your $2.75 you're free to travel to any subway station in the system. There's also a bus system with limited transfers.

Up to 31 miles: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/nyregion/10atrain.html

It's not a zoned system. $2.75 gets you in, then you go wherever you want within the system.

Unlike the tube it's not zone based pricing. One price no matter the distance or time.

Your analysis is exactly backwards base on history. One of the main drives to create corporate campuses outside of cities was to prevent competing firms from recruiting employees. Same goes for creating company restaurants and dry cleaning etc. keep employees on your campus and a way from competition. When they work downtown and walk out into the community they bump into people randomly and those unexpected connections can create new relationships.

The fraud of the subway on society? Lol. Okay.

The trains also run the other direction, you know that right? It's the same cost to commute to Far Rockaway as it is to commute to Manhattan, and there's plenty of workers out there too.

Not seeing too many big office buildings there though.

digitaltrees has it right - those unexpected connections, it turns out, not only form great new business relationships, but are a great source of revenue for local businesses. Trivially, you can think about a group of coworkers walking on a sidewalk and unexpectedly bumping into a cafe or boutique, making a "serendipitous" purchase they weren't otherwise planning to while on their way to a lunch meet. You don't go to a mall for that lunch meet.

Take a look at any place in America that has higher than its surrounding average real estate price, even in less heard of towns like downtown Hunstville, Alabama or Ogden, Utah - what is true about the most consistently profitable, lucrative pieces of real estate? They're home to mixed use development [1] (One case study of this effect - [2]).

It turns out, all those "new" (assumed good bc of their newness) models of urban development, with single use office OR home OR shopping zoning, with square miles on miles of tract housing, with islands of empty parking lots (for that one day a year that they're full) between huge hulking shopping centers, necessitating car use for even the smallest of toilet paper purchases... well, those ideas ran contrary to the organic structure of towns and villages for all of human history.

And while those ideas were so new and fashionable, yes, places like New York suffered. But eventually the novelty wore out. The ticky-tacky houses started looking all the same (that is, depressing - but that's my opinion).

New York didn't die in the '80s and certainly won't because of some subway hiccups. Dense urban models work. For all of human history they worked, in 1950s America, for a brief moment, some people thought they no longer did - but it looks like they still work, and will always work. And tunnels are a great way to keep that valuable mixed use real-estate - for commuters and city dwellers alike.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-use_development

2 - https://www.property24.com/articles/mixed-use-developments-b...

Most of the people who ride the subway are not poor, and the average subway rider is probably richer than the average NYS taxpayer. Why subsidize the transportation of all the middle class and rich people who ride the subway every day?

Why? Transport for London is close, if not past, covering operational (and some, but not all, very significant capital) expenditure from fares, property and advertising revenue. MTR in Hong Kong also is profitable, as I believe many Japanese networks are.

Being run entirely from fares means you are not at the whim of politicians for subsidies and grants that can change overnight with an election, which makes it very hard to think longer term.

I think this is what NYC should be aiming for - operationally covering its own operational costs from fares, advertising and property revenues with then state/federal grants for larger capital projects.