NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say | Hacker News Reader

NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

theguardian.com

347 pointsricardoreis456 comments

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.

The ideas you're saying are quite common in the West, as you say, but that's not the attitude in NYC. Everyone realizes it's worth funding and fixing. The disputes are about the who, what, how, and paid by whom.

The issue is really that the MTA is funded and controlled by the State of New York, while it predominantly serves the City of New York. Since the population (especially the voting population) of the city is <0.5 of the state population, but the city is an outsized chunk of the state's total economy, the state uses funding of the transit system as a weapon to get the city to acquiesce to other demands.

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.

> Hence why the NYC mayor is so intent on funding worthless streetcars and ferries

I'm assuming you're using the "worthless" adjective only for the streetcars - I use the NYC Ferry regularly (a stop opened near my apt last year) and it's way better than the subway. I have to walk a bit further on the other side, but it's still way more comfortable.

It may be useful for you but in the grand scheme all the new ferries cover only a trivial percentage of the total number of daily trips.

And the ferries are heavily subsidized and very expensive to operate, and they pollute quite heavily.

They don't compare remotely favorably to the subway along any axis except start-up cost (it's cheaper to buy a boat and build some piers than to build a subway tunnel).

except start-up cost

Which is, well, hugely significant when you think about it.

Cities should have a planning timeframe for infrastructure improvements with a horizon longer than a couple years.

Well, yeah. And they should probably be having discussions based on something beside snarky retorts and popcorn-throwing too, I guess.

But I guess those discussions will need to happen elsewhere.

Even if you could afford to run enough ferries to make a dent, which you can’t, they simply don’t have the bandwidth.

Some people tried to make the math work for the L shutdown and even if you had a line of ferries just following each other as close as safely possible it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Subways are incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people.

I use it as well but it moves far fewer people at a much higher running cost. I love the ferry but it's not a viable replacement.

No one would consider suggesting it as a "replacement" for surface transport.

However, it is a valuable augment to the surface system. The point is that it helps "connect the dots" (providing more options for people to get from A to B) - hence making the system more effective as a whole.

Streetcars aren't even necessarily worthless. They're called trams in Australia and Sydney has recently rolled out a network after seeing how heavily utilized they are in Melbourne, and how convenient they are for short-distance travel. Pretty much everyone who works in the city has a tram trip somewhere in their commute. Provided the tracks run past places people need to go, there's no reason they need to be worthless.

Melbourne trams are awesome! Sure, they're not everywhere or go everywhere but for near the city center and some main routes they make so much sense.

Same in Brussels. And in Lisbon they're also touristic attractions: http://www.lisbonstopover.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/lx-...

MTA was looted by the state. It is reasonably profitable but all those profits are being spent by the state for other non MTA activities.

https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/infrastructur...

The best public transport model is the one in London.

Incorrect. According to the NYT, redirection of MTA funds amounts to about $1.5 billion over 20 years. That’s $75 million per year, or what MTA spends in 2 days.

>Since the population (especially the voting population) of the city is <0.5 of the state population[…]

I did a quick and dirty check on Google for "new york state population" [0] and " "new york city population" [1] and the percentage I get is 43%.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/2zkmdjm

[1] https://imgur.com/a/904hwM2

EDIT: As did a few others, I read "<0.5" as "<0.5%".

You're both right: 43% < 0.5, 1 = 100%

I read his statement as .5% first as well and then realized that he meant 50% because otherwise there would have to be 1.6B people in NY state to make the number work.

.5 = ½ = 50%

People keep saying that the street car will be worthless, but I simply don't buy it. It connects all of the fastest growing neighborhoods in the city, where there have been increasing large amounts of effort around economic development within the areas that these places connect, where it will massively increase the value and in turn ability to build real estate along the waterfront, as one of the key determiners of land value in NYC is access to transit.

What does a streetcar do that buses (or articulated buses) can't if they're provided the same traffic priority?

Trams run on metal rails because steel has a much lower rolling resistance than rubber, and suffers less wear and tear. So you can carry more people more frequently with less maintenance.

To me, the problem is poor connectivity to the rest of the train network.

Hence why the NYC mayor is so intent on funding worthless ferries;

Worthless? The ferries are one of the few unequivocally positive things to have happened to the city in recent decades.

Surely the city could give extra funds to the MTA if it wanted to?

The state would take them out. It controls the MTA.

Absolutely -- and you can see this even in the article. They talk about raising fares and cutting service, with no acknowledgement that their primary source of income shouldn't be fares, and their primary budget cuts shouldn't come from reduced service.

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-...

NYC subway fares are insanely cheap compared to the rest of the (developed) world. $2.75 single for any distance is incredibly low.

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.

I've always thought that fares should be more symbolic than a real source of revenue. They should definitely be low enough that even the poorest residents of the city can easily afford to travel on public transportation.

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.

I have no argument with transit systems being self-sufficient, nor with fares providing a reliable source of funding. But what needs to happen, ethically, is for the relief valve to be elsewhere when it comes time to balance the budget. Maybe that means more advertising, maybe it means cutting costs. But it shouldn't be taken from the users of the system, because their demand is flexible (as we're seeing in NY), and the inflexible ones are the people who already have no alternative and are hit the hardest.

I think the conclusion from this sub-thread is that the London subway is insanely expensive compared to most of the rest of the world. There might be local reasons that afford it such price gouging power, like the lack of any reasonable transport alternative and the nature of London's road infrastructure, congestion and parking fees etc.

A fee increase to that level in other cities might have the opposite effect of reducing ridership and total revenues, against a largely fixed expense base, condemning the subway to a real "death subway".

The externalities of transport are massive, if a small number of people device to spend 15 minutes more in traffic to save the 8 pounds subway fare, the costs to society are simply astronomical because now everybody else has to spend those 15 minutes more too to get to where they need to go, even if they don't have the option of public transport for their route.

London is priced as it is because from this year or next, I forget which, it has no government money. All running costs must come from fares and advertising. Prices have changed accordingly.

Unlike roads which are entirely funded by government. So a comparison is always going to make "public transport" (ironic considering it's the transport not receiving public funds) look more expensive.

Ironically in London the trunk road network maintenance will be paid out of TfLs public transport fare budget, as TfL has a legal duty to maintain the major roads in London but has no government operating grant. Hopefully this will be resolved soon!

The other way to look at it is that it is a high quality reliable product that can charge a "premium" so to speak. While people in London complain, all lines will have CBTC in the next couple of years (the vast majority already do), running at 30-36trains per hour per direction across rush hour depending on the line. It is very rare for there to be major service issues on more than one or two lines at a time, comparing that to service status in NYC which often has dozens of lines with various issues.

My point really is that "even" £8 isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. And that money going into the system allows it to work well.

The Underground is cheaper and/or more reliable when compared to the national rail network many use to commute into London. Ridiculously so. I think that contrast helps those in London value the Underground. Also the reason many choose to still live where there's a tube line.

It's also worth noting buses are much cheaper than the tube and quite accessible compared to a lot of places, though much slower.

Are you seriously asking why public transit should be affordable for poor people?

I guess they should just buy a car instead, right? Or live in Manhattan and walk to work?

No, not at all. It is a very blunt tool to say fares should be cheap so that poor people can afford them.

There are much better ways to do this, eg offer discounted trip cards to people on certain social security programs (Medicaid eligibility comes to mind). Price differentiation 101. This should be funded out of social security budgets, not transport budgets IMO.

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?

Shuting down the subway would affect everyone. The poor are stuck on buses and the traffic would make their lives worse.

It's not insanely cheap compared to the rest of the developed world. Paris metro costs 1.90 Euros or more likely 1.49 if you buy books of 10 tickets or whatever.

I've been to plenty of developed world cities where the cost is under $3.

Paris has a zonal system though that goes up past €10, which NYC doesn't do. I'm not saying that 'central zone' fares aren't ~$3 in many cities, it's very odd to only have one zone and the fare be that low.

Keep in mind the distances that the subway does (and has express service on) make it similar to the RER in Paris more than the metro.

It's been a while since I took the Metro but I had been all over on it including to "end of the line" stops outside the boundaries of Paris and it was always the same price, EUR 1.40 (back then).

You might be thinking of the RER, that has different pricing.

I understand your point now though: it's the long fares that are insanely cheap, due to the flat pricing model. There are only a few comparison points I guess since very few cities have a "subway" system that large (some may have large transit systems that reach the suburbs, but they are often separate from the subway and with a different pricing structure).

> NYC subway fares are insanely cheap compared to the rest of the (developed) world. $2.75 single for any distance is incredibly low.

Europe isn't the only "developed world," mate. My morning commute in Hong Kong (which is roughly the same distance as Brooklyn to the LES or, say, King's Cross to Paddington) costs around $0.50. I can go all the way to mainland China for ~$3.00.

$2.75 is roughly the maximum fare in Tokyo (where an unlimited day pass can be had for $5.25), and $3.00 in Seoul will take you 145 kilometers away.

Calm down, he didn't say it was the absolute cheapest, just that it was cheap.

As a side note, there sure are a lot of people in China that get prickly about the definition of "developed".

I'm neither upset nor in China; just pointing out that if you expand your definition of the "developed world" beyond Europe and the US, the NYC MTA goes from "insanely cheap" to comparably priced or even mildly expensive :)

> My morning commute in Hong Kong

> I'm neither upset nor in China

The fuck

There’s an international border between Hong Kong and mainland China. A Chinese citizen needs a visa to come here and a Hong Kong citizen needs (what is basically) a visa to go there.

There may be a border, but it's still China. Did you miss the handover ceremony?

The maximum fare in Tokyo is nowhere near 2.75 USD. It's kind of a moot point because there is no such thing, lol. But for example the fare from Nippori to Kichijoji, which are both comfortably in Tokyo, is almost 5 USD.

Not exactly a valid comparison. Nippori to Kichijoji requires a change of systems (JR to Keio), and therefore multiple fares -- it would be like MTA+LIRR or MTA+PATH in NYC.

I'm only talking about the Tokyo Metro, not including transfers to JR or Toei, etc. The most expensive Tokyo Metro ticket is 310 JPY.

> $2.75 is roughly the maximum fare in Tokyo

You don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Tokyo, mate. 600 yen covers a day pass for the Tokyo Metro only, doesn't cover any JR lines at all. And even then, it is only for the local/regular express trains not commuter express trains. Additionally, Tokyo metro lines mostly only cover, well... the metro area. Not the suburbs or places where a lot of people live.

One way to work for me in Tokyo is about 500 yen and I live relatively close by, I just have to switch train operators twice (you get charged both on distance, and a flat fee by each train operator). Many of my coworkers who live out in the suburbs with families pay a lot more, but luckily most Japanese companies cover transportation fees as part of your salary.

As far as the rest of what you are talking about, you are very much ignoring the difference in economies between those places. 10 HKD goes a lot farther in Hong Kong than the equivalent would in New York.

> You don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Tokyo, mate.

As I said elsewhere, I'm specifically only talking about the Tokyo Metro. I didn't include JR just like I wouldn't include the LIRR when talking about the NYC subway.

> Tokyo metro lines mostly only cover, well... the metro area. Not the suburbs or places where a lot of people live.

The same goes for the NYC subway. If I took the A train from one end to the other (uptown to queens), it's about 45km - only 5km more than going from Wakoshi to Shin-kiba, or riding the Yurakucho line end-to-end.

> 10 HKD goes a lot farther in Hong Kong than the equivalent would in New York.

I don't know how you're coming to this conclusion; Hong Kong is one of the most expensive cities in the world.

2.30$ CAD in Vancouver for 1.5h, you can easily cross the entire "city" on that price-tag.

Why is city in quotes?

I guess that's because the greater Vancouver area is made up of multiple localities officially designated as cities, even though in many cases there are no visible gaps between them anywhere other than on the map. The transport system is divided in zones, so travelling to, say, Coquitlam will cost you twice as much as travelling within the Vancouver downtown.

I believe London's GDP per capita is comparable to NYC.

It's also interesting how people don't see public roads in the same way—people don't expect roads to cover their own expenses directly, expect free parking as a human right and bridle at toll roads or gasoline taxes.

People need to see public transport as "roads that don't need cars".

One feeds into the petroleum economy and one doesn't. Guess which one is "preferred"?

The one that provides people (the illusion of) liberty through movement.

Cars and roads have plenty of problems, sure, but I have no idea what you mean by this "illusion of freedom".

He's likely referring to how (some) people enjoy driving because of the sense of freedom & control it gives them. But he is asserting that this is just an illusion.

Honestly, I feel the same way, since most time I spend driving I spend sitting in traffic or something.

That's right (I'm the OP) - I love driving and work in the auto industry. The biggest pitch of the car(look at the commercials) is that your car defines you, and provides you a lifestyle and freedom.

However, there really is an element of freedom. You can drive where you want when you want. It's just that the average person sits in bumper to bumper traffic.

I guess you just don't care about the 40,000 people killed every year.

There are few things I get more enjoyment out of than driving a car that corners well through a beautiful mountainous road like the Blue Ridge Parkway through the Appalachian, or up through Yosemite from Fresno.

When I need to clear my head, I still hop in the car and go for a drive with music. Not also afraid to admit -- I've had some of my most cathartic, emotional-cleansing crys in the vehicle by myself.

In this day and age where there are fewer and fewer places to go to truly be alone with one's own thoughts, sometimes my vehicle is my own personal sanctuary.

Of course other countries with excellent public transit also have plenty of scenic country roads. It's not like we have to pick between the two. (I don't think you were claiming we do, I just wanted to highlight that argument.)

How many of the miles driven are cornering on interesting roads in the mountains and how many miles are dull city traffic during rush hour? I'd wager that most people never drive a road that you'd find interesting in a car that would make it worth their time.

Sounds like your typical car commercial. I wish cars were only used for these types of infrequent trips, rather than for nearly all of one's transportation.

I used to feel that way, too, but since I moved to Seattle, I traded my car in for a motorcycle, and that feeling of freedom has returned in full force. Maybe it is just a different illusion, but the wind and the noise on my morning commute wake me up better than any coffee I've ever had. Getting forty-some-odd miles to the gallon on a vehicle that can go 130 MPH ain't bad, either.

Yeah, plus you don't incur the health risks associated with dangerous coffee.

If you always need a car to go places (work, groceries, visit friends, church, etc.), is it still freedom?

And additional public transport reduces the need for roads and road maintenance as well.

People might see roads different from public transportation because they are directly affected by poor Management on the part of public transportation companies. If your bus is always late, you can't sit on the subway because the seat is soaked in piss, and there is no customer support for the $100 card you just purchased which isn't working, you might become disinclined to defend the exorbitant costs of public transportation. As paradoxical as that might seem.

At the same time, I've yet to see an American complaining that the government is spending too much money on roads because it's riddled with potholes.

I would be in favor of many country roads returning to gravel, and the savings used to make more bike and foot paths.

Usually the complaint is that road money is misallocated to surface fixes that result in more potholes in the long run. In some states and municipalities, this has to do with how government employees steer construction contract awards. I see wanting to change this as analogous to the desired reforms in public transportation.

Roads have a marginal cost near zero.

Except that most of the wear and tear on our roads isn't caused by people's cars. People pay much more than their fair share of road maintenance via gas taxes etc than the industries that cause the most damage to the roads.

Semis cause 1,400x more wear than cars [1].

[1] https://www.lrrb.org/pdf/201432.pdf

> People pay much more than their fair share of road maintenance via gas taxes etc than the industries that cause the most damage to the roads.

Maybe. Reduced transportation costs to businesses permit lower cost goods to end consumers. Your car transporting you to work isn't your only reliance on the road grid.

You are correct, however, I was refuting the post that said that those paying gas taxes and tolls aren't covering their own maintenance costs. We're all subsidizing the industries that cause the most damage to roads, whether you commute by car or by train.

it is my potatoes in the trucks. I can pay the road tax, or more for potato. doesn't matter.

To me it matters a lot. Capitalism only works when the true costs of things are accurately reflected in their prices.

If the road maintenance cost of transporting the potatoes is priced into the potatoes, then the potato company might opt to transport the potatoes in a different (cheaper) way.

But if the road maintenance costs appear free or near-free to the potato company, they have no incentive to care about it. Also it makes drivers who don't eat potatoes subsidize the potato consumers.

I believe you’ve just justified my french fry habit!

The price is included. Potatoes are sold and the proceeds taxed. Those taxes go to pay for roads. If we didn’t have to fix roads, taxes could be lower, resulting in higher profits for the potato farmer.

So in your model, road wear is priced into the costs of all goods, no? That's one way to do it, but the problem is that then a single potato logistics company has no incentive to use a (presumably more expensive) transport method that causes less road wear, because the benefits are spread evenly across everyone, and costs are borne entirely by the switching company, so nobody would switch. (unless you made some rule forcing everyone to switch, which is another way to do it)

If road taxes are directly tied to the things causing wear, then every company causing that wear has an incentive to find a transport method that causes less wear (assuming that the additional cost of that transport method is lower than the cost of the road wear - that's why some people argue that using markets is better than using rules; if you've properly priced the market, the market will balance between road and rail based on cost.)

That's why it's important to make sure that all externalities are directly tied into the cost of whatever is creating those externalities.

> To me it matters a lot. Capitalism only works when the true costs of things are accurately reflected in their prices.

That's actually not true. Capitalism always works, no matter the problem. However, free markets don't account for externalities, and in some cases supply/demand constraints create unacceptable non-economic problems. Thus, to avoid the effects of non-economical problems then it's preferable to create economic incentives that reflect the non-economic constraints.

Hrmn. Maybe.

Then again, if everyone in my apartment complex splits a water bill, there's not much incentive for me to use less water.

If it's truly the heavy vehicles ruining the road, and so we somehow charge the much more, then perhaps measures will be taken to address that cost...

Or the externalities are properly priced and the vast majority of the miles of transport are done by train, which would be cheaper if trucks had to pay for the road maintenance they cause. And cause less pollution (both in ton-miles and from reduced emissions during repaving). And the potatoes end up costing what they cost to get to you?

I'm not sure the potato subsidy is worth distorting the transport economics.

Also potatoes are easy to grow! And ship in powdered form for cheap!

Trucks do “pay.” They move goods that are sold and taxed. Until subways start shipping things other than people, they can’t be considered the same as roads. A subway can move people around; roads also move significant goods around. Every single thing in a store has arrived by road for at least some portion of the journey. Farmers aren’t shipping carrots via tram.

What in the world are you talking about? Are you claiming that farmers never use trains to ship produce? Because that’s just patently false.

I said trains, not subways. I said "majority of miles" not "to the store". The tax is the same on goods shipped by other methods, so you can't count it as somehow balancing out the economic distortions caused by subsidizing trucking infrastructure.

The problem is that non-truck solutions cost more relatively due to government intervention, messing up the market's ability to find more optimal solutions. This one is simple, it doesn't even require you to think about carbon taxes to do the math. It's direct costs, subsidies to a certain technology. Don't pick winners and losers, create an environment where capitalism can function and find the actual best solutions.

Charge trucks for damage they directly cause to roads. Simple.

I don't think these are your potatoes...

"Talk about a ‘superload’! Check out what just crawled along Washington highways"

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/talk-about-a-superl...

Or your potato truck could simply have more wheels and not be overloaded.

It actually matters quite a bit.

If the potato trucks had to pay for the full cost of roads, then they would be incentived to drive that cost down.

Aligning incentives is important.

> If the potato trucks had to pay for the full cost of roads, then they would be incentived to drive that cost down.

More realistically, potato prices would go up to reflect operational costs.

At which point people would buy less potatoes, or buy more locally produced goods.

Which is the entire point. To incentivize people to change their behavior.

It does matter though. If the cost of road wear was added to the products that caused them those products would become more expensive and sell less. Suddenly there's an incentive for Potato Inc. and friends to figure out how to transport such that there's less wear etc.

Grow locally, get rid of FarmCorp, reduce the carbon footprint by eliminating the need for transport. Boom, world saved.

Or, if potatoes had to be shipped at market cost, potatoes from far away would be less competitive to potatoes grown closer.

Net result would be better prices for local farms, less road maintenance needed, no impact to the end consumer overall (less taxes to support less roads).

A trucker can cut road damage 10x just by adding more axles. This saves you money. But they'll only do it if they save money too. If everyone has to pay for wear, then the truckers have a reason to make those upgrades.

Semis do pay more. They pay many thousands of dollars in road and fuel mileage taxes. Not sure it's 1400x more, but they do pay much more than cars.

Right. So they massively underpay for the costs they incur.

We need semis. We all rely on trucks for everything we buy. We don't need cars. There is always an alternative to cars, not so for trucks.

Subsidized car travel is a convenience for ordinary citizens; subsidized truck travel is an advantage conferred on businesses that move a lot of stuff by truck, making their goods unfairly cheap compared to more local alternatives, or alternatives moved by more efficient means like rail and sea.

Buying less stuff > spending tens of extra hours per week getting from place to place.

Misleading as this is just the direct marginal costs, you have to account for the indirect costs. Weather and water obviously play a massive factor in wear, a road would not last 1400x longer if used by 1 car rather than 1 semi.

It’s actually non drivers who pay. Gas taxes cover less than 50% of road cost on average.

Well businesses and truckers/lorries should pay more to use the roads. They cause the most damage.

And they do pay more. Many thousands of dollars more.

But do they pay proportionally more, matching the impact?

It’s not bad for the service to fund itself in ongoing costs, Transport for London is self-sufficient for instance, as long as the money goes back into the service. That’s a good discipline to maintain an efficient service. But agree that initial capital investments should be thought about in the way you’re discussing.

In Tokyo, the rail transit system (including subways) is operated by a network of private companies. These train operators make a net profit from fares and other revenues, and the system is generally well liked by its customers. Even if the idea of privatization makes you cringe, the idea that public transit is inevitably a money pit or loss leader is misguided.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...

The key difference with Tokyo probably isn't privatization, but that the rail operators own the land around the stations, so often get to charge both ends of each trip: the rider and the business the rider travels to.

Sounds like a smart policy: the railway operator is pressured to serve areas where there is actually demand for the service, thus avoiding wasteful spending building non-performing lines, and is pressured to provide quality services to keep real estate prices up.

It's worth noting that they got there because at the time of development, the rail companies were able to buy up the surrounding land and develop that. They reinvested their real estate profits into more rail and more real estate, creating a virtuous cycle. (Hong Kong, one of the only other profitable systems, did something similar by having the government effectively transfer land for free initially.)

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.

That’s actually the same model the Hong Kong MTR company applies for the subway lines it manages in mainland China (like lines 4, 14, and 16 in Beijing). Buy land right where lines will pass and near stations and develop it.

I don't disagree. But the MTR is able to do that in China because they already make money in Hong Kong.

No North American transit operator makes money, so they have no way to buy up land in the first place.

so American rail in the 1870's

Well, Japan privatized rail in the 90s, well after the majority of the rail was built using billions of dollars of investment by the Japanese government. So I don't know if it's really correct to call this a success of privatization, considering that the major costs were basically socialized.

Nobody expects the NYC subway to "break even or even turn a profit." The subway historically recovers less than 50% of its operating expenditures from fares, compared to 70% for Berlin, 88% for Amsterdam, and over 100% in Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio.

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-....

The article should have mentioned this, as well as why rider volume is down.

Sorting that wikipedia table by recovery ratio, I see most of the profitable ones are in East Asia and distance based:

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.

Yeah, but they offer extensive coverage and are reliable - also somewhat expensive. To get such thing for NY - you need to drill a lot more tunnels and fast and make sure trains run on time.

I don't think you need to drill tunnels. That hasn't happened (much) in London, yet there's been a marked improvement in the core service over the last 20 years.

London's network is older and has smaller tunnels. It also only has single tunnels in each direction (so if a train breaks down the whole line stops).

The difference is that the network has had steady investment under single management for a prolonged period. Londoners have suffered through closures for engineering work, but ageing systems have been upgraded and gradually the benefit is being felt.

Never been to NYC but I think that the MTA rail coverage is way lower especially in the non Manhattan boroughs compared to the London Underground, Overground, DLR and National rail. You could get from any point in London to anypoint for less than an hour only by rail and walking.

Yea, MTA also includes Long Island RR and Metro North. NJ has Path and NJ transit.

NYC isn't circular so going from Bronx to Brooklyn is 30 miles.

> You could get from any point in London to anypoint for less than an hour only by rail and walking.

Whilst in general I agree with the sentiment of your comment, this is not true. Lots of residential areas in Greater London will have ~20 min walk to nearest tube or overground, and if you're going across the city, the train part of your journey can definitely be > 40 min.

As an example, I've got two friends, one lives in Wimbledon (far south), the other in Barnet (far north). It takes quite a bit longer than an hour for one to get to the other's house.

> I've got two friends, one lives in Wimbledon (far south), the other in Barnet (far north).

That isn't a fair assessment. Metro lines are used to enhance mobility within urban areas. Their goal is to replace cars and 20-30min walks with a 5-10 metro ride with an additional 5min walk. That's why typically subway stations are placed about 500m to 800m apart, and the system's commercial speed is designed to be around 50km/h.

For long commutes, such as going from far north to far south, there is an entirely different system: commuter rail. Their stations are further apart, their commercial speed is higher, and so is the passenger volume.

Just to provide an example, Madrid is served by both rapid transit network (madrid metro) ans a commuter rail system (madrid cercanias). It takes between 30 and 40 minutes to cross Madrid riding the metro network, but the commuter rail takes about 15 or 20 minutes.

That's an ideal and not actual reality.

Taking London as an example, there aren't many ways to cross London in such a way using commuter rail (ThamesLink currently and Crossrail in the future are probably the only two?). Most people would still use the tube.

That's why 1hr + journeys in London are not uncommon.

(edited to add) London and New York are also much much larger cities than Madrid. It's not really a fair comparison.

It is a fair assessment, because I did take into account commuter rail, which is not any faster - a quick Google maps check says both tube and rail (of any form - overground, national rail, etc.) journeys come to around 1 hr 40 mins.

I don't know about the others, but Hong Kong's system has far fewer stops and is mostly cheaper (it's distance-based and exceeds New York's flat fee at the high end) than New York's. The reliability difference rings true, though.

> also somewhat expensive

Ha, what? My old commute on the Singapore MRT - 5 stations - cost me the grand sum of SGD$1.07 (USD0.78). Even to the airport is only a couple of bucks.

Tokyo isn't quite as cheap but it's still very affordable.

The statistics are misleading. I can say a bit about Japanese subways; they generally have handful profitable lines (e.g. Midosuji line in Osaka Metro---previously known as OMTB---, or Ginza line in Tokyo Metro) and lots of non-profitable lines. For private subways like Hankyu, the codevelopment of subway lines and neighboring metropolitan area was crucial for their long-lasting profitability (in this sense, Hankyu is not a subway corporation). If we want profitability as a goal, we should just drop those non-profitable lines or subways in general, but of course that would be a public disaster.

Just because a profitable subway exist does not mean it's possible anywhere in the world. The location, geography, culture and population density all affect profitability.

> The location, geography, culture and population density all affect profitability.

I would argue none of these should be issues in NYC except for the "culture", if in that you include mismanagement culture.

The business entity that owns the subway being profitable is not the same as the subway being profitable. MTR for instance is a real estate developer as well as a subway operator:

"As compensation for the cost of building railway networks, the government grants the MTR Corporation land development rights along its rail lines, stations and depots – an increasingly lucrative business in recent years amid a red-hot property market."

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2136403/...

Isn't that part of the problem? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall hearing from someone that the MTA sold a good portion of its real estate and so lost sources of income.

I'm not all knowledgeable in this, so if someone who knows more of its history can chime in please do.

It's well understood by the locals that the Hong Kong (and possibly other Asian cities) system reaps most of it's revenue from land rights around/immediately above the stations. In

In Asia transit hubs are often also retail hubs and the commercial rents become profit for the public transit system. This makes perfect sense as the retail value of the nearby land can most obviously be credited to the transit system.

I'd imagine that the problem with the United States is that this real estate was sold early on or was never owned by by the transit system allowing the spillover benefits of transit hubs to be captured by private interests.

Yeah, majority of Hong Kong subway stations has malls on premise. Not sure it's owned by MTR too, but it's there.

Farebox recovery ratio is not a measure of net profit, it is a measure of operating profit specifically for transit assets, with only fares counting as revenues. In other words, the MTR's subway lines are profitable entirely by themselves. The real estate profits are just a cherry on top.

Its true subways have lots of positive externalities not captured by the fares, that it would actually be better to have a deficit subway system than to not have it at all, both for economic reasons and plain welfare, but there's no need to abandon the profitability goal for that.

IT is possible to devise a tax system that will capture some of that positive externality and make the subway better. It should be intuitive that the properties that got amazing value increases due to the subway should have an increased tax burden on them. A subway-proximity tax could be enough to turn subway profitable: and to easily fund expanding it!

That's fuzzy accounting. For example tax revenue from NYC subway-generated activity isn't counted (and missing taxes on subway generated windfalls are ignored completely), but Japanese commercial profits near trains is counted. The Subway is a multi billion (trillion?) dollar handout to landowners.

I expect it to break even or turn a profit. It's the most perfect way to gauge it's true economic value. Unfortunately for tax payers, it's only subsidizing otherwise intolerable commuting conditions, and acts as a strong subsidy to downtown property owners.

> It's the most perfect way to gauge it's true economic value.

Seems like an incredidibly narrow-minded way to gauge its economic value to me.

Well, why? The OP has asserted that NY transit delivers vast economic benefits that offset its loss making nature. Fine, I can buy that to some extent, but how big exactly are these benefits? How do we know they're actually so big and not in reality quite small?

Well, we could do some one-off studies and hope that Excel is used properly, but why? We already have mechanisms that figure out the value of things and allocate resources appropriately, they're markets. The unviable nature of public transit suggests systematic resource allocation problems, created politically. If there were really such huge beneficial side effects, it wouldn't matter if ticket prices rose a lot, that'd just get priced in to other things like cost of goods near transit stops.

For instance maybe every ride in NY should be 2x or 3x the current price for the costs of the system to be worthwhile, but public transit is usually government owned and politicians aren't willing to bite the bullet on that.

(This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...)

I don't disagree that it's hard to quantify the exact economic value, but you can't use a free market to solve coordination problems like public transit.

Coordination failure in stages:

1) A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time.

2) Having a second means of travel on hand (e.g. a car) means that you're less likely to use the transit line when it would work for you.

3) Lack of use of the transit line leads halted growth and reduced service.

4) Reduced service further drives users away

5) Evidence of failure causes a loss of investor/government support.

6) Transit line dies slowly to the extent that political inertia allows.

Or to put it another way, asking a transit line to pay to for itself is like saying "if human beings really wanted world peace they could have all just disarmed!", ignoring the fact that until everyone else is disarmed you'd be a fool to disarm yourself.

And if you succeed and build a critical-mass, sustainable system you've just swapped your market problem for a natural monopoly and have to use non-market techniques to deal with the monopoly service provider. (And now we're back to NY)

> (This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...)

This is the entire point. You cannot dismiss it. What conditions allow the costs to rise so high in NYC?

> A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time.

Why should anyone want to go any place, and what makes them so entitled to receive such a transportation service? People, like businesses, will follow economic incentives. I'm sure landlords and real estate developers love the metro system, it brings great value to the otherwise less desirable realestate. For ever dollar someone doesn't pay to ride the metro, that's a dollar more in rent an apartment can charge.

You have to look at the big picture and figure out who these mass transit systems actually benefit.

Everyone wants to go everywhere - because people live Everywhere and have jobs Everywhere and their friends live Everywhere and there are stores Everywhere.

No one is entitled to anything - you added that word apropos of nothing in my post.

Thank you for the link. The ratio in Paris where I live is 30%, but I think it's not just subway that's included, but also light rail around the city, tram and buses. Still with the price we're paying I would have though the ratio would be higher. It must be caused by fare jumpers and the work for renovation/new lines. It's also not helped by the yearly strikes by the local union for political reasons.

Right? The economics of fare enforcement are a great illustration of this. It's probably more efficient to just abolish fare collection altogether.

I wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning herald about 15 years ago saying, OK, starting today, let's make all public transportation free, by not paying for it anymore. All it takes is everyone acting together. They didn't publish my letter. I really shouldn't have given up so easily - I still think it's a good idea. Just need to set a date and get everyone talking about it.

This been attempted in quite a few places: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/15/i-leave-the-c...

> '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.'

I am not sure why you intend it to make a loss, even though I agree with you on benefits to the economy.

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.

> There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself

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.

> The trick is to allow the transportation authority to own and manage its own real estate.

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.

If by subsidy, you're implying that the transit system is receiving freebies they don't deserve, then I'd have to disagree with you.

Transportation hubs create far more value via their impact on nearby real estate values than from the fares they collect. Asia cities correctly capture the value created by public transit by having major retail hubs above or surrounding subway stations, all of which is paying rent to the transit authority.

Even this is a generous compromise, because the benefit to real estate value really radiates outward to the entire walkable radius, it's just the immediate retail hub that could attribute most of it's value to the station.

So if anything, the problem with the US is that public transit is just a massive economy handout to private landowners, leaving just the scraps (the fares) to the transit authority.

I’ve seen people in Seattle ballyhoo this sort of thing as a subsidy to whoever the transit company would let the real estate to and consolingly they’d rather keep their car

I am not sure how land ownership typically works - it seems that governments anywhere pretty much have to own a large chunk of the land to bore tunnels, build the station proper, accommodate parking, onramps, roads, pickup zones, etc. E.g., how did BART pick the location for San Jose Beryessa extension?

Public transport in Singapore is privatised (well less of it has been as of last year) and it's the cheapest, cleanest, and most reliable system in operation today.

OTOH, if you let go any rationalization for its cost, then you get 2 billion dollar bills for bus stations that don't work. (SF transit center).

Except you are deadly wrong. Your interventionism ideas area probably thanks to a dead economist.

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?

I agree with you in principle, but in practice, attempting to break even puts some accountability on the system. If it’s a money pit, then taxpayers are getting cheated. I strongly support national defense, but if you want an example of a public good that is a money pit, that’s a good example. A P/L statement on public transport helps prevent endless spending without accountability.

Why it drives the economy compared to private trasport?

Because roads don't have the capacity to replace the subway system. A subway can move an order of magnitude more people than a road.

NYC wouldn't last a week without its subway and light rail. Everyone uses it, except maybe for the billionaires who have private helicopters. Its critical infrastructure just as sewage system and powerlines.

Japan is doing pretty well I believe because they privatized the transportation system and set up the incentives so the better the transportation does the more profit the transportation company makes.

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

Can you (or anyone else who knows and reads this) explain a bit more about those incentives?

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.

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.

Indeed, the problem is that money hasn't been invested in modernisation.

The subway systems in London and Paris are pretty old but work reasonably well. You have to properly maintain and modernize the system then the age of the original structures doesn't matter as much.

As an example for Paris, the oldest subway line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_1) is fully automated.

There are some of the cars on other lines (like line 10 I'm taking to go to work) are more than 40 years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_67), but they've been through some refurbishment since then.

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.

> 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... 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.

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.

In NYC specifically, the problem was the city government introduced price caps that made the privately owned lines unprofitable, then refused to raise them. So, of course the trains went out of business. It was set to 5 cents in 1904 and remained there for over 40 years. Not even the lowest hanging fruit could survive such a thing.

Yeah I believe you, I had taken temp-dude's comment to be more about railroads in general and not suburban railways or NYC in particular. And those are different, always were more government related.

I'll take issue with your thesis. I was once standing in Marin county overlooking the Golden Gate bridge, there I read a plaque describing how the bridge was built ahead of schedule and under budget - in the 1930s (no computers!). Behind the Golden gate bridge in the distance you see the Bay bridge, built with tremendous cost overruns and delays measured in billions of dollars and many years, respectively.

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.

It’s called worker safety, for one thing. Eleven workers died during construction, and this was considered better than average for its era!

Just two years ago in Seattle, the University Link Tunnel was completed ahead of time and under budget, while all media attention went to the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel (Bertha) which was over budget and massively delayed.

The former was a relatively standard tunnel using standard machines, while the latter was the largest single-bore tunnel ever attempted.

I take issue with your thesis. Every day, I ride to work on the Metro Expo line, which was built on time (actually early) and only delayed opening because a private company couldn't get its shit together and build the rail cars on time.

I'll make the case that, as a nation, we're doing fine with the ability to deliver civil infrastructure projects on time and on budget, and to manage them once they are operational, in those regions where they actually care about their infrastructure. See, e.g., LA Metro, Denver's metro, Cleveland's RTA, our utilities grid post-Enron. These are all things done at a scale and density that have been equaled or exceeded only by authoritarian states.

LA Metro is quite an expensive program. Cleveland has been working on the cost-coverage-service balance and arguably making the right choices, but not everyone is happy. I think Chicago might be a better example of a large system run efficiently. Overall, there is not any debate whether the US pays more per mile/capita than other countries, just whether that is something that can be improved.

We're not doing fine.

"New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile... The approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100 million per mile, at the lowest end, and $1 billion at the highest. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile."

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

I think the point is that while you can find your pet example of an over-budget project, other people can find examples of projects that didn't have those problems.

Rushing to post "but what about the Second Avenue Subway" in any thread on this topic is not useful, since you've provided no evidence that it's representative enough to generalize to all infrastructure projects in all cities of all states of the US.

It's well known that infrastructure projects in the US overall cost way more than comparable projects do in most of the rest of the developed world. Here's just one link, from a cursory Google:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-31/the-u-...

You only notice the broken ones.

As a nation we have delivered a massive and continuous civil project for the past 70 years: our sprawling suburban road & utility network. Nobody ever notices it because roads are just background at this point.

You may be speaking from the US point of view there. Internationally, many of the biggest projects were government-built and then only later given over to private firms to run

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.

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.

> 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.

Fair point. How about a drain/pump system to prevent stations from flooding every time it rains? Or cleaning the tracks more frequently to reduce fires? Or fixing the broken intercoms in the cars, so I can at least be warned about surprise service modifications?

To do more cleaning you need more station closures and delays

How hard is it to build a vacuum/sweeper car and run half a dozen of them during the slowest times at night?

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.)

> 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.

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...

> 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.

Except that none of this money came from the MTA. The complete project was funded by private entities. Most of the cost was passed through to the four major wireless carriers. Those carriers continue to pay, on a monthly basis, for their ability to offer services in the Subway and the MTA receives portion of that payment. So, from the MTA's perspective, this project generates revenue. Same goes for a number of similar projects.

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?

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

The not being cleaned is concerning ne a lot. The 34th herald square stop air smells like infection, avoid that station at all costs.

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.

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.

And during an interview on NPR yesterday, Cuomo said something along the line of "Well, I don't know if 'The MTA' really exists'." This is not a man who should be in charge of the MTA. And the fact that he and de Blasio are feuding again, just as they did when they were involved with HUD during the Clinton administration, really proves that the MTA troubles and the NYCHA scandal are 100% connected - and it's because of two people who can't get past their own nonsense.

Is there a link to this interview?

https://www.wnyc.org/story/the-brian-lehrer-show-2018-11-19

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.

Except for that $53 billion dollar light rail extension that was voted for and is funded by tax payers in the three counties it runs in.

Yes, and it was like pulling teeth to get it done, it should have happened much sooner.

Seattle has no such issues, as the voters directly voter for initiatives that come directly from property taxes. The governor and Olympia have very little say in what Seattle area builds, which is a good thing.

Contrast that with NY state, where the state legislature and governor can interfere with MTA affairs. Cuomo is a huge part of the problem.

Seattle's ST3 transit plan is funded from a mixture of tax sources including sales taxes and car tabs, it required a state wide initiative measure. It's not as bad a situation as NYC but it's still much less than ideal.

> 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'.

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.

On the other hand, paying living wages to thousands of unnecessary workers is quite expensive, regardless if they are employees or contractors.

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.

This is an agency that still uses fabric-wrapped wire and vacuum tubes. Those people are far from unnecessary.

Though I'm sure the MTA will pay billions more in contracts over the next few years to halfway automate a few small parts of their jobs.

The MTA's union has kept unneeded workers employed. One of the main issues is having two people per train employed when almost every other transit system in the world uses only one person per train.

On top of this, but actively lobbying against having driverless trains and other cost-saving technologies leaves NYC with the most expensive and antiquated system in the world

But isn't this exactly what you're supposed to do in capitalism? Use your privileged position in economy to earn money (by definition at the expense of other people)?

Now, I agree that it's not a very moral position, but we don't expect property owners in SF to keep rents reasonable. They should charge as much as they can, that's the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective!

The thing about this is that the MTA and NYC Subway are NOT for-profit businesses. They're part of the public sector and shouldn't be held to a profit motive. Similarly, the Unions connected to City transportation should recognize that the system they're vampirically draining isn't about profit, and working for it should be in the mindset of a public service, not a 'get rich quick' scheme.

The workers might be working in order to make money though. Making a profit isn't just for businesses.

"Use your privilege to earn money" is feudalism.

Capitalism (idealized) is when you use get an advantage by selling superior goods or services, while competing with others, without leveraging any state-given privilege.

We need (even) more capitalism in the US, if anything.

Except when conductors aren't needed or necessary. Having a fully autonomous rail system is a much simpler problem than autonomous cars.

Are there any currently in existence?

There are automated monorails in quite a few places round the world.

Yes, in several places

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

See the GoA4 list

Yes, in fact the L train is automated (or was in the process)

Yes, L line in NYC is automatic train control system. If one is to walk to the end of every L train platform, one would see a sign that says "Automated Train Control System is in Effect"

It requires conductors because of the union contract requires them. Not only it requires an engineer "driving" the train (aka pushing a button "I'm here") but also the second one looking to make sure that the train doors can be closed ( or closing them on the person )

So just on the L train MTA can cut 50% of the conductors by fully engaging automated train control and merging door checker engineer duties with the "I'm here" engineer duties.

In NYC the L and soon the 7 could be operated with one person, but the union insists two remain onboard for "safety."

The JFK AirTrain line

DFW airport and Las Vegas airport both have trains that seem to operate autonomously. There might be a remote operator as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

This is wrong in many ways.

* 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.

The unions are a classic case of "if you're being paid to solve a problem, the last thing you want to do is solve it."

* Unionized workers make very good money in New York.

I didn't believe a friend of mine who only finish college was making $218,000 a year basically for early morning train track cleanups (device to pickup trash, stay away from 3rd rail), until I saw his bi-weekly paycheck with my own eyes. He's been doing that for last 5 years and they hire more people to do the same. What an insult to anyone with MBA, PhD., anyone pretty much who doesn't work for Union.

Maybe we should form a union?

Can you imagine the bargaining power that tech workers would have if they unionized? Our industry relies on tech workers for training and hiring, so hiring scabs during a strike would be basically impossible.

To whom does you friend have to pay kickbacks, and how much are those?

That's the funny part, he is really the bottom of the food chain. Super anti-social he does his job and goes home period. Its just he has been there all these years and seen raise after raise when union got bigger chunks of money to spend. There is nothing more to the story I'm afraid.

The only reason the union is untouchable is because anti-union legislation entrenched old unions by making new unions impossible. Get rid of anti-union laws, watch as people can now join a competing different union or make their own union under the same job. Then unions actually have to work to exist, rather than being co-opted by business managers who are only seeking to earn a profit for themselves with the actual workers making up the union having no choice other than pay or completely abandon unions altogether.

Additionally, if we brought back meta-unions like the IWW, which were able to negotiate multiple industries in parallel and cause policy changes, then unions wouldn't have to resort to holding on to unnecessary jobs to protect the livelihoods of their workers. They could just make sure that an allied union is ready to take them instead.

That could go to another change: the procurement process, so that smaller companies can compete.

Employee costs are 60% of the expenses for the MTA [1] and employees are making $30/hr + generous pension and medical benefits[2], I'm not sure how you can possibly justify your position.

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-...

What are you saying, employee costs are the majority of expense for just about any business. It's the whole point of the economy.

Read the parent

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.

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.

Salaries are a huge contributor to the budget, and there are many roles, starting with conductors, that are unnecessary or could be modified/retrained.

The transit union is pretty notorious and well documented in NYC.

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.

Unions are definitely the primary driver. Construction unions in New York are using current contracts to pay for their pension liabilities. In other words, taxpayers today are paying for work that was done 30 years ago. This guy is sort of irritating if you have to read him for more than a few hours, but his blog is full of evidence and analysis on this topic.

https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2018/08/15/an-open-se...

This article is about capital costs, not labor costs.

>One point construction experts are making, however, is that taxpayers are paying premiums for these public projects since they aren’t being done open shop. The Empire Center report calculated that the government ends up paying 25 percent more for public projects in New York City because of the high prevailing wages. This is the cost no one wants to talk about.

Good! Living in NYC costs more than living just about anywhere in the USA. Well over 25% more than where I live, a top 50 metro.

"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.

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.

"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.

There are very clear ways to fix the problem

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.

> Are there, though?

I live in Manhattan. Love it. The MTA fucking up is still miles ahead of every other American city on their best days in terms of transit and density. Most New Yorkers’ stories of nightmarish delays find parity with the daily commutes Americans across the country put up with as a matter of course.

Yep. Really the only city with a transit system on par with New York/Metro IMO is Chicago. And even then the Manhattan subway system has much better coverage than the L.

I prefer living places where I'm not reliant on owning a car, and when I was moving back to the states there were only a handful of metro areas I felt this was possible in without it being inconvenient.

NYC and Chicago were the only two big cities I liked living in from a public transport perspective... Maybe that's why I ended up here in London!

Talking about the politics of it and pointing out the issue, or even joining a straphanger lobbyist group are about as relevant to the real politics involved as playing Sim City 2000 and making your own subway layout. Numerous mayors and governors have tried and failed to fix an issue that is much larger than can be addressed just on the local level. There are also issues with how labor disputes work in the US that can't be addressed purely on the local level. Part of the problem is encompassed in a much larger problem that other unrelated entities have to deal with: dysfunctional impacts of precedents and legislation in US labor law. And indeed, the response that many companies have had to the failure of attempts to reform US labor law has been to just leave the US entirely and/or to just go bankrupt due to failure to work things out with unions partly owing to the widely acknowledged inflexibility of US law in this area.

There are many issues like this in which the resolution is really clear on an intellectual level. When it involves screwing the existing stakeholders, it should not be surprising when those stakeholders use all the leverage they have to resist being deprived of what they have.

For example: Medicare is broke, it doesn't take 195 space alien IQ to see that you have to implement means testing to make the system fiscally whole, but good luck proposing it because you will be annihilated politically if you do. It does not take having a giant 900 pound brain to see that you have to screw the union and blow up the MTA to fix the system. But good luck doing it. And it makes perfect sense for the average AARP member to send in their contributions to protect their entitlements under the law even if they understood intellectually that the government cannot afford to maintain that entitlement in the future.

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.

> 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.

He means move to a commutable distance away : )

Better not go to New Jersey, those NJ Transit tunnels aren't up to much either!

No, but the PATH is pretty reliable and buses work - especially the Spanish bus. Every time I hear people complaining about the train into NYC I ask them why they don't either come to Passaic, Union City, or Hoboken and take an easier and faster (and often, less expensive!) alternative in.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

What's wrong with distance based pricing?

Distance based pricing is fine. But can't they make it a little simpler? Increments of $1 would be nice. Instead of $3.85, just make it $4.00.

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.

I second this. I don’t use Metro often, but my wife commutes by Metro almost every day. There was a period of a couple of years where she’d pretty routinely get home an hour or two late because of some huge fuckup with the trains, but recently it’s been very smooth.

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.

When I was back in DC a few months ago the system seemed to be about 30% closed, some short-term closures and some multi-week closures. I realize the closures are due to the accidents and deaths and are necessary for safety. I haven't heard the words "reliable" and "Metro" in the same sentence for many years.

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

Seems unlikely to plummet to ruinous levels. Ridership has risen by 800 million people since 1990, but there's fewer miles of track and only a few dozen cars. It seems that the system is strained well beyond its limits and that it might be possible that having fewer people use the subway might allow a chance to fix it? The issue seems to be largely administrative based on every article I've read. There needs to be an agreement by everyone on what how to move forward, and then for that plan to be implemented uninterrupted until its completion. But good luck with that since the mayor of NYC is basically a governor and the governors of NY always seem to butt heads with them.

> and only a few dozen cars

Did you mean to say "a few dozen more cars"?

yes. good catch. They've only ADDED a few dozen cars in that time.

What rail got destroyed since 1990?

It's not so much that the rail itself was destroyed, but that the tunnels and stations have been closed for various reasons. Usually it's down to either a new replacement station being built, consistent signal issues, or some other passenger safety concern. Of course there have been closures due to the maintenance gap, but those aren't the bulk.

This claim I found really confusing. The subway has been more crowded the last 5 years than I've ever seen it; that's an anecdote of course, but if you search "NYC subway crowding," you'll see the MTA has been claiming that the subway is more crowded than ever these days. Not sure how they explain that discrepancy.

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.

The 60 minutes video posted in another comment claimed that ridership was near a 70 year high, I believe

EDIT: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone...

And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.

Genuine question: why is that? I'm not familiar with the mechanics of the NYC Metro area, but I'm familiar with SF's BART, which certainly claims to have statistics on this -- about 22,000 fare jumps a day, as compared to around 433,000 trips per weekday, meaning about 5% of riders are freeloaders. (They claim this costs about $25M a year.) The San Francisco Chronicle did their own reporting on this, and at the very least it backed up the assertion there were a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.

Ahh those extrapolations. Just like MPAA and their piracy spiel. Multiply 22`000 * 365 days * $3 and you get their $25M. Except a lot of those people simply would never pay the actual fare and the cost of moving additional weight is negligible, so the number is way inflated.

They wouldn't pay the full fare anyways? Would they... take cheaper transportation?

You're comparing people who pirate media that they'd never have actually bought to... people who take BART trips for free that they've never have taken otherwise? You're going to have to work harder to make this comparison work for me, sorry.

I suspect a lot of the decrease happens at night. Late trains are a bit of a Russian roulette. If you're going from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan, it might be faster and more reliable to share a car with friends or strangers.

"The subway has been more crowded the last 5 years than I've ever seen it"

There was an article in the New York Times in May, titled "How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway Into Crisis" that claimed higher ridership is not the main cause for the recent decline:

> For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told us that rising ridership and overcrowding were to blame. Yet ridership actually stayed mostly flat from 2013 to 2018 as delays rose, and the authority recently acknowledged that overcrowding was not at fault.

That statement doesn't contradict yours (shakes fist at well-qualified statement), but I found it surprising when I came across it and I imagine others might as well.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subw...

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.

I hear that a lot about the DC height restrictions, but I wonder if it might not have the opposite effect. Plenty of European cities have tons of density in a low-rise skyline, such as Paris. I wonder if height restrictions actually encourage the 10-story pedestrian-friendly, urban core to keep expanding into the single family home residential areas.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Both things can be true

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).

It's part the MTA, part the city government as a whole, and part the state government. This feels like classic "too many cooks" bureaucracy where everyone knows THEY have the right answer and everyone else at the table is conspiring against their golden plan.

I started my career working in the transportation sector, and that leaves me skeptical that it can be so simple. I've watched cost cutters at work in government transportation departments. Their MO seems to always be to cut the costs that are easy to cut so they can claim easy wins right away. Unfortunately, the costs that are easy to cut are typically things like skimping on maintenance. This leads to higher costs in the long run, but, hey, that'll take decades to come to fruition, and by then it'll be someone else's problem.

In short, the state of American infrastructure today is a result of decades upon decades of mismanagement by the cost cutters. I have a hard time believing they can also be the solution.

Maybe find an efficiency maven instead?

A good example of this is the DC Metro. It was in a complete maintenance crisis a few years ago and has been playing an extremely expensive game of catchup to avoid killing any more passengers. Service quality and price have suffered while they try to rush all of the deferred maintenance.

The DC Metro also has the same problem of being a jobs program for inner city residents, so efficiency upgrades are fought tooth and nail by the union.

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.

Jesus dude, what??

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.

> 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.

I don't have contempt for people riding the subway, I have contempt for the organization that perpetrates that fraud on society.

> Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day.

At what cost? As it turns out, at great cost. Misallocation of capital: making it easier to commute into downtown areas via rail only induces rail demand and increases cost of housing. If end users were forced to pay actual costs of transportation, businesses wouldn't be able to afford keeping down town offices and would move towards worker populations, otherwise they would have to pay higher wages to maintain their labor force. Subsidizing transportation is nothing but subsidizing corporate labor.

If you think NYC is fantastic, that doesn't make my opinion any less valid.

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.

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.

I don't think this is accurate whatsoever. I think the main driver of these decisions is real estate. It's simply much cheaper to build a low-rise complex on lots of acreage than it is to obtain the same square footage downtown.

However, if a corporation can reallocate labor capital into real estate, IMO what happens in the NYC area, that's what they'll do.

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...

The subway in NYC is what makes it one of the most dynamic, attractive, and innovative cities in the US. The density also creates a critical mass of people in certain industries that drive spontaneous creation of new industry, companies, technology.

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.

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.

Hong Kong and Nanjing subway systems are spectacular. I dont speak or read the language and never once did I get lost because there are super easy to understand signs _everywhere_ and usually an electronic map that indicates the station you just left and the one you're going to, above all the doors to the cars inside. Never once gotten lost, embarrassed i can't say the same for BART.

Im an Australian so native English speaker, in NYC for a few days and can not figure out the god damn subway to save my life.

Our system is 100 years old and their's aren't.

The points made apply equally to London's lines, which are even older.

(Some lines aren't yet upgraded to walk-through trains, but they're ordered. Stuff like speed regulators is decades old.)

Paris and London are older and better.

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-...

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.

Smells like bullshit to me.

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...

Base salaries probably give an especially incomplete picture of total compensation for union workers, where overtime pay can be 4x your base, and benefits are nearly "cop from the 50s" insane.

If you're doing surprise holiday night-shift overtime, you should probably be getting paid 3x your base rate.

Comparing the annual salary of someone who clocks in their 9-5, and goes home on Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to someone who is doing 60 hours a week, twenty of them from 3 am to 9 am, on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday... Is comparing apples to oranges. [1] But it sure drives the outrage! Look, and be outraged at the annual take-home of that bus driver! Ignore the part where he worked like a dog, and gave up all life outside work for it!

Rates for hour worked, in equivalent conditions are the only fair comparison. And, unsurprisingly, they aren't high for MTA employees - especially in a city as outrageously expensive as NYC.

If you want to stop paying public servants overtime, then don't expect public servants to work outside of core business hours.

[1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period. Overtime, even paid overtime, is incredibly shitty, doubly so for holiday and night shift work, triply so for holiday night shift work. People should be compensated more for doing the same job at 2 am on Christmas Saturday, then for doing a 9-5 on Tuesday. [2]

[2] If your job expects regular unpaid overtime from you, you should either have an ownership stake in it, or get a new job, or have a really high on-paper salary.

>> [1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period.

At least half of tech workers I know do unpaid overtime. Almost all are on at-will contracts where they can be laid off anytime and I know almost none who have lifetime-final-year salary pension plans.

1. That overtime is usually rare. Half of all tech workers don't have to be at work for every night shift, through holidays, and weekends. The buses, on the other hand, have to keep running, even after 5 PM on a Friday rolls around.

1.1. Even if you're an auxiliary on-call, you only need to work if something comes up. You don't need to be physically working, all through the night.

1.2. If you're constantly crunching, every week, you need to find another job, or demand non-meaningless equity, or higher wages, then your tech-worker peers, who do their 9-5. Most mature tech companies are full of people who do their 9-5. They employ hundreds of thousands of tech workers.

2. Tech workers are a tiny subset of the working population.

2.1. They also have much higher on-paper compensation then their similarly-trained peers in other fields (Bachelor's degree, and 0-5 years work experience), and even despite the occasional overtime, much higher hourly rates.

Thats hardly a gold standard anyone should be aiming for.

While it does not surprise me that compensation is higher for NYC transit workers wrt national average, it is still striking that the difference is so large. I imagine the avg income in NYC is not >55% more than the national average.

That's because the parent poster's numbers are heavily massaged, and include non-union, and executive compensation. Average salaries for people actually operating the trains are ~$22-30/hour.

I'm guessing the pension plan and healthcare inflate the total compensation figure quite a lot.

Basically these guys aren't getting their future screwed so they're an outlier. Same problem the Post Office has. When you aren't allowed to skimp on the perks and pass the buck to the government of the future you don't look very competitive.

The article is 90% on the political mismanagement, but you instead focus on the workers with little influence making $150k in NYC, much of which is from working overtime well past 40 hours in a mostly mindless job.

My favorite line is: "In one particularly egregious example, Mr. Cuomo’s administration forced the M.T.A. to send $5 million to bail out three state-run ski resorts that were struggling after a warm winter."

The MTA spends over $10 billion per year on labor, much of it redundant (e.g. two drivers per car): http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-spending.

People say "oh, but diverting tax dollars from MTA, etc." The NYT pegs that at about $1.5 billion over two decades (since Pataki). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... That's $75 million per year, a drop in the bucket in comparison. About enough to build a mile of subway line.

The NYC MTA has a lot of workers who do enormous amount of overtime, which explains the high pay. Add that a good percentage of employees will be relatively specialized trades.

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).

you mean $31/hr + medical + pension and medical in retirement...

again for teachers you are forgetting the fact that they have similar generous benefits and only work 3/4 of the year...

Everyone should have medical + pension + medical in retirement. How did America get to a place where healthcare and pensions are regarded as perks?

That’s a nice sentiment - in that case we should all work in the public sector and and get those things...oh yeah....

I'm just surprised that people would propose to solve a problem by taking those things away from people.

That’s fair - and again think it’s a laudable goal.

It used to be that if you worked in the public sector you forwent a market rate salary in exchange for job security and a secure pension. Public sector employees are now making market wages + extremely valuable benefits which in turn are bankrupting municipalities.

In this context how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic, that his taxes need to go up in order to pay for the extremely generous union benefits of a public sector mechanic (who may make more than him)?

Lastly I would argue that municipalities have something of a fiducuiary duty to tax payers to get value for their tax dollar spent - rather than rewarding a voter block at tax payer expense.

How do you know what is a "market wage" for a NYC subway worker? It's not like you can compare them to someone doing the same job in the private sector.

>how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic [...]

How do you tell a tax paying public sector mechanic that they're going to lose their pension and health insurance?

That's not the point - if you are comparing wages you need to take into account benefits. $30/hour might not be great by itself, but $30 + $10/hour in benefits is.

A pension is directly interchangeable with the 15% of wages you would otherwise need to save for retirement. Maybe less, to account for the (very high) risk of governments defaulting on their pension obligations.

I don't have a horse in this race, but remember that what looks "generous" to you in New York City is considered "table stakes for a civilised society" in Europe.

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.

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-...

Reducing service, unless you want to do it really painfully, is unlikely to do much in the long run. A good chunk of the costs are employee related (health/pensions) and debt service. The MTA shouldn't default on its bonds, and in NYS you can't constitutionally modify government pensions after they've been given. And the MTA hires as many drivers and buys trains and buses based on peak demand; cutting off-peak is unlikely to do much since you wouldn't be reducing the absolute number of drivers you need.

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.

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.

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.

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...

60 Minutes also profiled Andy recently. They even show a machine (over 100 years old) to move train switches, by manually pulling antique levers. Scary to think how these things operate.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone...

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.

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.

The US really does have a problem, and it seems to be related to particularly inefficient and uncompetitive contracting and caused by poor governance structures. The fact this battle has to happen in the media at all instead of having a clear chain of decision-making is evidence something is wrong.

I’m not sure how you can establish a “clear chain of decision-making” for public spending that doesn’t involve the public. At the very least, when the Grand Administrator for Public Transporation Spending in the Greater Tri-State Area is standing for re-election, or when the elected officials who appointed the Grand Administrator are up for re-election, this becomes a political issue and hence there is an incentive for one side or the other to get their point of view published in the media, so why not get out there ahead of time?

Anecdotally, it sure seems to me like one of the biggest political issues in, say, the UK is whether the NHS is over or underpaying staff, whether they will have more or less money under Conservative policies or Labour policies, and so forth.

The US has multiple levels of mutually distrustful and uncooperative governments, and at many of those levels, high levels of direct democracy especially when it comes to budgetary issues. So there is some waste there.

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.

That might explain cost disease in the public sector, but I don’t know if it’s sufficient to explain cost disease in housing, higher education, or the privatized parts of the health care industry. Unless you want to punt and blame bad government for all those things, which isn't an indefensible position. For example, in health care, the US is very efficient in fields like LASIK (which isn't covered by most public or private insurance) and has occasional counterexamples to cost disease like the Oklahoma City Surgery Center (http://reason.com/blog/2017/01/27/what-happens-when-doctors-... -- warning: libertarian bias).

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.

The US is culturally and constitutionally more robust against tyrannical government, but at the expense of undermining the possibility for effective government.

This doesn't necessarily mean we can't have effective social services, though -- it's just that they would not be government agencies. Planned Parenthood, which often functions in the face of considerable government opposition, is a great example of an effective and dependable public service. So is the National Rifle Association, which is primarily concerned with maintaining ranges and training programs for police and military as well as civilian use. They aren't businesses but they aren't part of the government either.

Huntington discusses the medieval structure as one of a "harmony of government and society". Perhaps in the US we are trying too hard to get our government to do things it was not meant to do. It doesn't mean there is nothing to do.

Found a copy of Huntington's essay online: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Huntington%20Political%20Mo...

Regarding That might explain cost disease in the public sector, but I don’t know if it’s sufficient... and what follows, it's worth considering that the US struggles to get the private and public part right, when a strong institution is needed.

When we get more government in the US, we usually don't get a powerful and effective public institution, responsible for delivering a service directly to the people, staffed with dedicated public servants. Instead, we generally get a tangle of regulation and a large private industrial complex.

A major exception to this -- though they are becoming less so -- are the various branches of the military. They overlap with one another and thus come into conflict; but all soldiers are dedicated public servants.

Immediately adjacent to the military is the US arsenal system, or military industrial complex, a web of not-really-competing companies that the DoD tries to manage via complex and demanding contracts.

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?

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

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.

DC metro has zones, as an example of a US train system with it.

Toronto and London have zones. I'd bet the farm that Byford does the same when the MetroCard replacement is fully deployed.

No zones effectively on the Métro. There are zones in Paris but that’s if you want to go suburban and then you don’t take the Métro. You take RER.

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

You can transfer from the A to other services too, so you're not just limited to that.

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.

Same in Stockholm. There was zone based fees for some time.

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.

It's an odd and funny argument to make that your product is working well if it's always on fire or broken, which you would think an HN commenter like a sysadmin would understand.

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.

But someone has to pay? Broadly speaking either

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?

Obviously taxes. Those who benefit most from public transit are those least able to afford it, but making the cost baked in to the wealth of the people can driven even someone with a personal driver to maybe fathom using the tube instead once in a while if its borderline free.

It's not so obvious who you are going to tax. Are you going to do it from income taxes, local property taxes,local business taxes, corporation taxes?

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

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.

Why would it dictate that? Choosier consumers with more options require you to step up your game to compete. The point of the death spiral is that ridership is down due to reliability issues, which will get worse due to less fare revenue, driving ridership down further.

Why? Why not? If you need to move 1000 people to a given destination over an hour, and you run every 15 mins, and 1000 drops to 800, then approx every 20 mins will do.

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.

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'd rather see an increase in progressive taxes for individuals and companies in NYC rather than a fare hike.

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.

This is one of the best articles on why the NYC subway is such a mess

https://www.businessinsider.com/second-avenue-subway-cost-ny...

The list of cities that offer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport is growing. Maybe this is the model for the future!

The New York subway system is riddled with inefficiencies, corruption, and terrible maintenance. You’ve gotta call it for what it is. Their bull shit has caught up to them. I feel nothing less than contempt for the people behind it.

Vox has a great piece on how the NYC MTA got to its current state of affairs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COLMODzYX7U

Everything that one needs to understand in order to explain why NYC subway is such a shitshow can be learned by any software engineer that attempted to change a gigantic legacy barely functioning code base of an organization with a single product that relies on this codebase which happened to still have "founders" running a show 12-13 years later:

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.

You can pretty much get anywhere on the ny subway system and it's pretty cheap. Bay area public transport is more expensive and it doesn't even go everywhere.

Curious whether Uber or Lyft riders will change their behaviors as the toll on public transit becomes more salient..

It's funny how pathetic America deals with any sort of public service. It's all about me me me.

Well isn't the whole point of public service to serve them in the first place? They are literally entitled to it.

The US had a very different path to modernization than most other developed countries, because it never underwent absolutism.

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...

solution it's pretty simple, hike the fare like in comparable cities, shut down subway in night like in comparable cities, remove unlimited ticket and replace it with time/zone limited like in comparable cities. you can't eat cake and have it

Is this really a funding problem or is it an employee quality problem ...

serious q: what alternatives exist besides buses and taxi/rideshare? Is walking/scootering a material number of people? If not, why about taxing rideshares to fund the subway?

Most NYC residents don't have walkable commutes, especially those living in middle or lower income neighborhoods that are generally further from the city center. The city is too large, and not particularly pedestrian friendly in the outer boroughs.

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.

Uber & others seem to be fine with a general congestion charge although, and actually seem to encourage it.

Why don’t they just pave the tunnels and put autonomous buses in?

This is clickbait based on old news. The MTA hired an unconventional transportation turn-around guru. It's going to take time to make things better.

Amazon Cuomo will fix it.

I think if Amazon pitches in with some funds and help them out with logistics software planning for increased efficiency, they will go a long way in buying some goodwill from the NY public. It's great publicity while helping out the city citizens.

Put all that ML and AI expertise to some public use.

CLOSE THE SUBWAY MIDNIGHT-5AM and fix it

Like most other civilized societies who have a functioning and well-maintained metro system.

That is really all there is to it!

They are already doing this for several lines. The L wasn't running on weekends at all in November for them to do repairs.

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.

Please stop this unique snowflake claim about NYC :+)

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. ;-)

NYC is unique as it's always be the center of the universe, even it's just 8M people live here, and other cities, like Tokyo/Hong Kong/Beijing/Shanghai has more population that it

You're sadly mistaken if you think a New York, one of the largest and busiest cities in human existence, is "just another large City", and that the solution to their transportation woes is to just lock it down and work on it.

it's extremely small compared to population of Beijing or shanghai for instance and Beijing shut down subway around 11PM. but yeah people in NY are the only ones working in night, common, you really believe it or you don't have passport?

New York is the 28th largest city, with another 10 within one million.

So while it is one of the largest, it's hardly unique.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities]

Shutting the subway down at night for maintenance and running night buses as a replacement is a pretty straightforward method that other, similarly large cities are using successfully.

The NYC subway system has more stations than any other subway system in the world. 29% more than next most station-rich system.

Would that approve anything or excuse for anything? According wiki, NYC has 424 stations, and Shanghai Metro has 393 stations. (424-393)/393 = 7.3%

That really hurts most a lot of poor people who work odd hours.

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.

To serve much better for 99.9% commuters or serve poorly for 100% commuters, isn't that a easier decision?

i dont think it's really that simple. even it was i don't think the decision is that easy anyway.

it's important to think about who your decisions affect, even if they may be a minority (which is bigger than 0.1%). why is it okay to put more burden on the people who already have the most burden as it is?

NYC is the only city which has such requirement and have to provide subway to support them? How many other cities provide same 24/7 subway transit? why the other cities don't provide such service? The other cities don't have people work so late? How does those people commute?

This is why other cities have shitty transit. Commutes can't be looked at as the only purpose of a transit system. Especially in NY, it's the PRIMARY mode of transportation for a lot of people. Making it shitty outside of commute hours is not an option.

"This is why other cities have shitty transit."?? If NYC continue with current shitty schedule, the subway would be worse and worse, which means less and less commuters will rely on it, and eventually it will be closed as worthless. Will you be happier? As at that time, nobody will benefit. Be more practical, gentleman! We are living in 2018, there is lot of proving that we should optimize a system by reducing the bottleneck. For those 0.1% commuters, they don't nee the whole subway system to support them, they can take bus/shuttle or even uber, which will save millions of dollars for the whole system, and also improve the rush hour transit much much better.

subsidized ridesharing?

In some areas you can use commuter benefits with Uber and I think Lyft was implementing that also.

Night buses like London, they are much more efficient when there is less traffic.

They can take the bus. Don't you have night buses?

Most bus routes in NYC only run once an hour between midnight and 5am on weekdays. Many don't run at all on the weekends between midnight and 5am.

I was actually really surprised when I first found out that subway systems in many large systems shut down at night. I live in a modestly-sized city (Dresden, Germany, ~500k inhabitants), and the local transport authority prides itself on operating nearly the entire tram network (plus some important bus services) 24/7. Just this year, they have actually increased the schedule density during weekend nights. Trams now run every 30 minutes instead of every 60 minutes (which is still the rhythm on weekday nights).

you are comparing apples and oranges, buses/trams run 24/7 with lower interval in night pretty much everywhere, subway not so much

Why though? Maintenance hours?

I think what everyone reading this story is missing and that the opportunity.

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.

You're assuming such a signalling system would be wanted. Do you see the problem?

>Betting someone clever on HN could invent a new signalling system for far less than $40 billion, perhaps $4 billion.

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.

> Critics say it is bad service that is driving people away.

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.

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.

A NYC Subway that's 20% worse than it was 10 years ago

By what metric?

On-time performance has dropped dramatically in the past ten years. In the following article, look for the graph titled, "On-time performance by line, 2007 to 2017".

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw...

Thanks very much for the link.

But eyeballing that chart suggests an average deterioration significantly worse than 20 percent.

Delays, primarily. Overcrowding, secondarily.

Numbers, please. (That's what "metric" means, btw).

Numbers may not tell the whole story, obviously: https://outline.com/KLsxf3

Yes, and it shouldn't take more than a couple minutes of thinking about the issues to realize that most of the commentary on the topic makes very little sense. Experiential measurements aren't so easily calculated, I'd say.

Just a few examples:

- Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record, or a train that arrives on time 3 out of every 5 times and then is 20 minutes late the other two? How many articles on the subway distinguish between the two types of lateness? It matters a lot.

- You might read that Atlanta's MARTA, for example, has a better on-time performance record than the NYC Subway. Well, that's great, but it's also got rush-hour scheduled headways of 10 minutes, scheduled off-peak headways of 20 minutes or more, and no service entirely at many stations after 9PM (no trains run at all after 2AM). So something that's "late" in New York City still comes before the scheduled train in Atlanta (when the trains there come at all). [0]

- The NYC Subway also has 10 times as many stations as MARTA and 17 times as many miles of track. They say the best camera is the one you have on you. Something like that applies here, too. What's the on-time record for a train that doesn't exist?

MARTA is a random comparison, but it's not uncommon for writers of screeds about the subway to offer up comparisons to other systems devoid of any of the kind of context I provide above.

So, you know: 1) comparisons are difficult; 2) especially if you want to capture what it's actually like to use transit in the cities you're comparing. All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.

[0] https://www.itsmarta.com/railline-schedules.aspx

I know you're describing pathological examples to make your point, but:

> Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record

At this point, the operator should just update the schedule to reflect actual travel speed.

What about a train that idles for an extra 0-15 minutes, in order to make sure that it arrives on time, because there is 15 minutes of headroom baked into the schedule?

The parent poster notes that trains in Atlanta do just that.

> All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.

The L train?

Agreed - I don't need numbers to tell me how unpleasant the daily experience of riding the subway in NYC has become.

I was merely responding to someone else who brought up a numbers-based argument only to find out that they... apparently don't have any.

I don't have access to any numbers you don't. I've tried to describe the ways in which I think the numbers can be used to tell a misleading and unnecessarily apocalyptic story. If I've failed to make that case on the merits, then I'll have to live with that, but just for the record, the 20% figure I gave was plainly illustrative, not a quote of actual figures; your references to it demonstrate the power of the anchoring effect, but I'll happily clarify, again, that they were -- I think manifestly, but the communication failure is mine, if not -- randomly chosen to make a point, not culled from a stash of secret MTA data.

The mere fact that people from Rhode Island now believe that they won't be able to successfully use the subway to attend a concert is I think pretty strong evidence that the story has gotten away from us a bit. Nobody here, least of all me, wishes to downplay your commute.

That's fine - non-quantitative (a.k.a. "gut") reasoning is a valid and useful cognitive tool (in certain contexts), in fact.

If I was to give a "gut" estimate for the overall deterioration of the subway service in recent years, though -- I'd peg it at closer to 30 or 40 percent than merely 20.

A NYC Subway that’s 40% worse than it was 10 years ago is still by far the best transit system in North America.

Now, look, that doesn’t mean it’s good that it’s declined so much, but context and perspective remain useful.

A NYC Subway that’s 40% worse than it was 10 years ago is still by far the best transit system in North America.

But compared to just about any major city in Europe... seriously, it's almost a joke.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The example I had in mind was blue line northbound from Clark & Lake.

Which is admittedly the worst scenario that I could think of, and I should have said that. It gets better quickly from there. I used to get on 2 stops further south, and, yeah, at 5 I usually had no problems and a decent chance of getting a seat, too.

Blue Line north at 5-5:30PM is a nightmare from Clark/Lake. I sometimes have to wait for 4-5 trains before I can get on.

This all depends on the time that you get on the train. Also he was talking about C&L. It is quite possible that you could have 3+ trains go by and still not get in the train between 5-6:30pm. Often times, you'll have your back to the door. During those time's it's better to go south to come back up north. (But you didn't get that advice from me) It's rare to get a completely empty train at C&L during rush hour and there are frequent gaps that are 6+min.

Now UIC Halsted, you're very likely to get a seat, not always though.

> This all depends on the time that you get on the train.

We were both talking about 5PM.

> Also he was talking about C&L.

I had no way of knowing this when I wrote my post. :)

> If, like most concerts, it was starting a bit later, you'd very likely have experienced smooth service.

Unless it was on the weekend when there are a multitude of service interruptions and station closures.

The actual issue with New York subways is:

* 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.

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 seems fixable, but as others have said, people will have to take some lumps.

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.

Not to get super political, but the concept of NY/NJ getting any transit infrastructure-related federal funds was nixed late last year in retribution against Sen. Schumer for... something?

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