Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

I'm really interested/worried about what the transit situation will be like post-COVID. New York is one of the few cities in the US where public transit use cuts across class lines to a major extent, but it's also the place where we come into close contact with hundreds of strangers on a daily basis. I just don't see us going back to that in a heartbeat.

I'm really hopeful that the city takes this opportunity to build proper infrastructure for people to bike around safely. There just isn't room for everyone to start driving a car.

View on HN

New York is New York if and only if there is dramatically fewer cars. It is simply definitional.

Any retreat from public transportation would be astoundingly stupid. And in fact this whole piece is astoundingly stupid. Asian cities are the prior art of density combined with basic public awareness of epidemiology. None of the weird stuff the author talks about happens there to my knowledge.

If it happens, I see it happening not as deliberate policy but as a consequence of consumer preference. The MTA was already on their way to fucked before this happened. Poor policing policies have reduced the social penalties for turnstile jumping. Ridership (and fare intake) has been on the decline. The high cost structure, coupled with lower fare collection means more money has to come from the city/state via taxes, for which there is already stiff competition.

IMO, I don't really see the MTA coming back from this. The unions won't let them decrease costs (construction or operational). They don't have the capital to make the improvements that would increase automation, and even if they did they'd have a hell of a time getting that through the operating unions. Making the stations nicer just means you're going to wind up with more police chasing more homeless people, creating more opportunities for police-on-citizen violence caught on video.

> I don't really see the MTA coming back from this.

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? Are you expecting a different governance model?

It doesn't seem feasible to me to simply think 'the subway will stop existing'. The density level of the city has formed around the existence of mass transportation.

It's strange to me to hear people blame turnstile jumping for the decline of the MTA. Its budget for operations has been repeatedly cut or diverted to large capital projects, which do nothing to improve service if operations are poor. Declining ridership and fare intake were a reflection of the poor operational state of the system - in 2017 and 2018, as the number of delays and major incidents skyrocketed, ridership went down. And when operations improved over the latter half of 2018 through 2019, ridership went up again.

Even if a low farebox recovery rate were the problem, the solution isn't increased policing. Many people in NYC simply can't afford to ride the subway, and you're not gonna magically squeeze money out of them.

I don’t blame turnstile jumping, just see it as a symptom of the broader issues facing the MTA.

Nope.

The MTA was already doing better last few years (thanks train daddy). Relying on fares is stupid anyways. There were lots of pointless station improvements as others said.

As to the costs, union, and automation, I would explicitly trade a huge increase in new line capital costs for driverless or whatever trains, and get all those drivers retrained to contribute to the capital costs. In general, I think workers should be incentivized to assist with their jobs' obselesence, and this will make everything smoother and easier.

Regardless, that is a long way off. We need new signals far more than we need driverless trains, and there is no labor-automation conflict there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com