New York doesn't have enough money to get it done. The politicians are too busy paying for all the election promises they've made over the last 50 years. And they absolutely need to cut the bureaucracy (code word for 'unions' and 'government agencies') that are deeply entrenched in the government.
I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out.
We have enough money, if we get our costs under control. Our capital costs (and operating costs...actually everything) are much higher than most other cities/countries. Some good analysis here[1], in addition to this series the NY Times is running.
New York isn’t a greenfield project. There’s a massive legacy system with decades of maintenance debt. Of course it’s going to be more expensive to fix than to maintain an already-maintained system.
That may be technically true, but we should be comparing ourselves to other countries that have had to tackle the same problems. Consider the Paris Métro[1], which is even older than the NYC subway system (1900 vs 1904). They have much better service, lower capital and operating costs, automated trains, etc. We need to take a hard look at ourselves and stop using NYC exceptionalism as an excuse.
It also doesn't run 24/7. That's the triumph (and huge complexity multiplier) of the nyc subway system. Having a always on (for some value of always) transit system is a big draw but also a maintenance nightmare.
Being 24/7 just takes redundancy. If you have 2+ lines from A <> B, you can single track them during low demand times and with care take any part of the system offline without shutting down.
NYC density increases costs in some ways, but it also makes means they can spend far less to maintain roads / street lights / etc. On top of that the high average and median earnings means NYC has an enviable tax base.
> Being 24/7 just takes redundancy. If you have 2+ lines from A <> B, you can single track them during low demand times and with care take any part of the system offline without shutting down.
Not all lines have four tracks (some only have two), and even for the ones that do, running trains while work is going on means incredibly slow and delayed service.
I understand what they meant; I'm explaining that even when running trains on dedicated tracks (e.g. the local line is shut down for maintenance, but the express line still runs), it causes delays that many find unbearable. Running trains in both directions on a single track would degrade service even further. At that point, it may very well just be better to shut the entire line down temporarily, which is what they generally do.
In fact, single-tracking in most of the subway degrades service even more than it technically needs to, due to the inability of the interlocking system to reverse track directions. To single track the MTA has to tie down the stop arms and coordinate by radio, and it is almost never worth it. The MTA does sometimes use single tracking in the East River tunnels, where the interlocking allows the track direction to be reversed.
For comparison, the entire PATH system supports changing the track direction, and single-tracking is relatively common during weekends. Of course, the PATH is much smaller and has a different history behind it, not to mention totally different legal requirements (it is a "railroad" rather than a heavy rail system).
>
In fact, single-tracking in most of the subway degrades service even more than it technically needs to, due to the inability of the interlocking system to reverse track directions. To single track the MTA has to tie down the stop arms and coordinate by radio, and it is almost never worth it. The MTA does sometimes use single tracking in the East River tunnels, where the interlocking allows the track direction to be reversed.
Thanks for adding this - I'd forgotten about that.
I'm curious how much money is needed. Why is it that Japan, Hong Kong and most developed European cities have much better rail transportation ? I don't think money is the only issue. NYC is probably one of the richest cities in the world and yet you say they don't have the money to fix this ?
I know construction in US is expensive but it can't be that bad.
NYC is rich but has very different priorities than other cities. It even operates its own forgien intel service. It is a city dedicated to servicing luxury real estate and the people who own it, neither of which care one iota about subways.
You are wrong. Luxury real estate in NYC is dependent on the transit system, and gentrification tends to follow subway lines. The value of a NYC apartment is related to the proximity to a subway stop. This is why, for example, the new 2nd Ave. subway line ends where it ends -- the next planned stop is in a neighborhood that has not been gentrified, while the existing stops serve several luxury developments.
Yes. Most of NYC real estate only exists to support the real luxury units, the top 1-5% with massive profit margins. A great many units are actually built at a loss to support the construction of the penthouses. Such not-luxury units only exist as a result of zoning. Google "poor door" to see the extreme physical manifestation.
That can be a thing. Calculate how much square footage an economy seat takes compared to a 1st class seat. It's easy math to work out who is paying for the other. Airlines try to maximize profits when doing cabin layout but when they start changing rates, yes a discount to fill one cabin is paid for with profits from the other.
Sort of; actually, MTA funding is a total mess of state subsidies, taxes on counties in the MTA region (remember, the MTA is more than the subway -- LIRR and MNR are also under its umbrella), city subsidies, city taxes, real estate income, and fare revenue (and maybe a few more things beyond that). The MTA also issued bonds to cover budget gaps, so now in addition to capital and operating costs it has debt service to deal with.
The MTA's internal organization is also a total mess. Metro-North and LIRR use nearly identical equipment (identical except for power systems) but are considered separate agencies within the MTA. The subway system is also considered separate, and in fact there is yet another internal division in the subway: IRT, BMT, and IND (internally referred to as 'A', 'B1', and 'B2' divisions). So there is needless duplication in the management structure. Beyond that, there are two more MTA railroads that are easy to forget about: the Staten Island railroad, and the South Brooklyn Railway (which may be operated as part of the subway's "C" division maintenance group, I am a bit fuzzy on the details there). Incredibly, the SIR uses the same equipment as the BMT and IND, so it is a bit difficult to understand why it is managed separately.
Hong Kong has a really interesting answer to that question: they turn a >$1B profit each year. But they can be better described as a real estate company that runs a subway as a side business to make their real estate more valuable.
Yep, I've always been fascinated with that approach and I think it's one of the best solutions. The station itself enriches the land it's on. Even better, it makes the whole public transit system more efficient. If I have to go to another city to shop at a specific store, then it's far more convenient if that store is located there in the station instead of having to take a bus from the station and back.
I'd be very skeptical of the "required" money quoted by anyone who is affiliated with the MTA or state government in general. There's a lot of evidence that indicates the MTA is used as a personal piggy bank. Take, for example, this gem: "MTA wrote $4.9M check to three upstate ski centers in bizarre move requested by Cuomo officials" [1]. Or this one[2] (also part of this NYT series):
"Subway workers now make an average of $170,000 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 about $100,000 in total compensation annually.
The pay for managers is even more extraordinary. The nearly 2,500 people who work in New York subway administration make, on average, $280,000 in salary, overtime and benefits. The average elsewhere is $115,000."
Why are we paying these employees such an insane amount of money relative to our peers? Political failure[3]. Due to the Triborough Amendment clause of the Taylor Law, anytime negotiations with the union fall through, the terms of the previous contract continue. Thus, the Transit Workers Union (TWU) have no incentive to negotiate in good faith. They can't strike, but they still get a pretty sweet deal.
The solution to this starts at the top. We need to vote out our current corrupt (or at the very least, easily cowed) government and put in place people who will make this a priority and not be completely beholden to special interests.
I remain confused about the pay figure the NYTimes gave for subway workers; I have a close relative who works in the subway and I know a number of subway workers, and none of them make anything close to that kind of salary, even counting overtime. So unless that counts something other than the hourly employees, or counts pension contributions as salary (in which case it is just an argument against pensions), I have a hard time believing it.
I also have no idea what better alternative there is when a contract negotiation fails. Is the system supposed to stop altogether until a new contract is agreed upon? Are the workers expected to go without pay? The fact is that the union's demands have not been unreasonable -- they ask to keep benefits, to have pay increases that basically track the cost of living in NYC, and occasional to expand low-cost benefits (e.g. allowing all employees to ride LIRR and MNR for free, rather than just employees who live outside NYC).
Normal government workers in NY cost about 150% of salary due to benefits and pension costs. A big part of this is that NY law requires that the pensions get funded... many states ignore pension contributions and operate at a lower cost.
MTA has other unusual issues... they have a very powerful union that has negotiated wacky deals over the years. In some areas, pretty much everyone retires with dramatically more expensive disability retirements. (See: https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d... )They also have the ability to "spike" pensions with overtime that most NY government workers outside of police and fire cannot do.
Pension spiking happens everywhere. Here in California we had a retired fire chief drawing a $400k pension because he basically worked around the clock the year he retired.
>So unless that counts something other than the hourly employees, or counts pension contributions as salary (in which case it is just an argument against pensions), I have a hard time believing it.
Usually if the figure includes benefits (as it does in this case) the pension contributions are included. Along with things like medical,life, and disability insurance.
Usually when you total everything up it comes to around twice what people get paid. I worked at a place with federal civil servants, and the total cost to the government for a civil servant was costed out at 2.2x salary.
> pay increases that basically track the cost of living in NYC
There's the problem. Half the population is convinced that the people who do all the work to make living in a city possible should not be able to afford to live in said city.
San Francisco is the most extreme example of this insanity, where everyone in the service sector either has multi-hour commutes, or live in a closet with 3 other roommates.
>" Why is it that Japan, Hong Kong and most developed European cities have much better rail transportation?
Japan is an interesting comparison because the lines are private and independently owned and so there's competition[1]. Once upon a time the NYC train line were private and independently owned they were the BMT, IRT and the IND[2]. You still vestiges of this in some stations. At any rate it was thought that that having privately owned train lines might allow them to hold the city hostage and so they were bought by the city. Obviously there's a great irony in that now.
Sadly I agree with most of what you said. Unfortunately I think the cards are stacked against progress here. People like to site the deplorable state of the NYC Subway in the 1970s as evidence that the current situation can be fixed. However investment was made in the system back then before it reached a tipping point and it took over a decade of investing to get out of that.
Now after 20 years of underinvesting this needs to be done against the backdrop of a population boom and ridership explosion.
>"I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out."
Unfortunately this is even harder to fix than the MTA. Its not just the long-standing culture of corruption in Albany, but its the culture of corruption from City Hall, the MTA's contractors and MTA's Union.
Of course just fixing the governance structure of the MTA would be a great start but when you look at how this structure actually works you might be forgiven being cynical:
Not necessarily disagreeing, but it's important to point out that fixing/upgrading the system comes from the capital budget, and the promises you're describing are paid out of the operating budget. The debt service for the former, is earmarked, by law, from the latter, which clocks in at 16% according to recent figures[0]. And we might have larger capital allocations if there weren't the ongoing and very generous salary scales, heavy use of overtime, and pension obligations.
The question I have is, why were things like the Hudson Yards station, work on the perpetually delayed 2nd Avenue subway, Fulton St. station renovation prioritized over the core signal and preexisting aging track infrastructure?
> The question I have is, why were things like the Hudson Yards station, work on the perpetually delayed 2nd Avenue subway, Fulton St. station renovation prioritized over the core signal and preexisting aging track infrastructure?
Which gets votes? Renewing existing infrastructure is something nobody understands.
The crowding on the Lexington Ave. lines is partly due to Metro-North commuters at 125th St. and Grand Central -- the 2nd Ave. subway does absolutely nothing to help with that, because the extension into East Harlem was not funded.
> The question I have is, why were things like the Hudson Yards station, work on the perpetually delayed 2nd Avenue subway, Fulton St. station renovation prioritized over the core signal and preexisting aging track infrastructure?
Politicians love being able to do a big ribbon-cutting ceremony for adding something new. At the very least, it's easier to point to a new subway line and say "I helped make that possible" than it is to do that for improved maintenance of infrastructure.
As long as the existing system is fully funded and properly maintained, there is no pressing need to replace anything. The original signal system worked fine for a century and could continue working fine for another century, as long as maintenance is being done. I would suggest that what the system needs more than the new signal system is expansion; there were actually more transit lines the last time the system had to handle this many passengers. One of the things that 2nd Ave. subway does -- in a small but meaningful way -- is increase the number of trains that can operate in Midtown during peak hours, because it creates a new branch line for trains to terminate on (capacity at terminals is a limiting factor in some cases; this is why 71st-Continental is used as a terminal, despite the fact that the 4-track line continues to 179th St., and why several E trains terminate at 179th or Kew Gardens during peak hours.).
The 2nd Ave. subway would also have helped to reduce crowding on the Lexington Ave. line if it had been built to 125th St., where there is a Metro-North station. That is an unfunded plan at the moment, and there would likely be opposition from the wealthy Upper East Side residents to such an extension (not just the extra crowding, but also the poorer people who live in East Harlem taking the train).
As long as the existing system is fully funded and properly maintained, there is no pressing need to replace anything. The original signal system worked fine for a century and could continue working fine for another century, as long as maintenance is being done
I'm not saying you're definitively wrong, because I don't know from where you get your information, but that is simply not what I've heard from every other source. What I've read is that the signal system and the track structure is antiquated[0], equipment dating almost a century old, which is the cause of most delays and prevents safe running of trains at more frequent intervals, and that certain components of the track are so old that no one manufactures their replacements anymore, so the agency cannibalizes out of commission lines for parts. If you've got something to link that suggests otherwise, I'd be glad to read it and expand my horizons.
I don't deny that increasing track coverage with new lines is very important too.
My information comes from a family member who operates the antiquated equipment. As long as it is being maintained, it works exactly as designed. It is a very well engineered system.
What happened in the past few years is that the MTA allowed maintenance schedules to slip, hence the problems.
(Edit: to be clear, yes, there are limits to what the old system can do and modernization can improve a few things. Those shortcomings are not really what is causing the problems that we are experiencing lately. Modern equipment will also require maintenance and will fail when that maintenance is not performed.)
>it's important to point out that fixing/upgrading the system comes from the capital budget, and the promises you're describing are paid out of the operating budget
Who cares what budget it comes from? It's just money in the end.
> I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out.
We're tired of it, but New York government is not a democracy. The two ruling parties have passed an complex network of laws which, in effect, mean that officials are accountable only to the political party, not to their constituents.
Case in point: one of the largest advocates of eliminating business service was Silver (a Democrat), despite the fact that his constituents were almost entirely dependent on bus service. When he was finally convicted of corruption, people were shocked - not shocked that he was corrupt (everyone knew - it was completely conducted in the open), but shocked that he was actually going to be held accountable to it. Unfortunately, the conviction was overturned on appeal due to a technicality - a law had been passed which narrowed the definition of corruption, meaning that the things he was convicted for were no longer criminal offenses.
We can't vote them out when there's literally no one to vote in, and both the Democrats and the Republicans have a gentleman's agreement not to compete with each other seriously, the same way Comcast and Time Warner Cable do.
New York is literally the most corrupt state government in the country[0]. Nothing short of a series of multiple federal court rulings will change that, because both parties benefit from it, and neither has the incentive to change it.
>We can't vote them out when there's literally no one to vote in, and both the Democrats and the Republicans have a gentleman's agreement not to compete with each other seriously, the same way Comcast and Time Warner Cable do.
And people wonder why Trump got elected.
Pervasive desperation for anyone who might actually shake up the system.
A lot of the reason I remain living in New York is because of fusion voting. It makes me feel as though it would be much easier to switch to a third party without totally breaking with the established parties. Unfortunately, third parties in NYS have yet to grow a spine and endorse their own candidates, primarily because if they don't get enough votes in the elections they cease to exist (i.e., why Working Families endorsed Cuomo instead of Teachout last gubernatorial election).
> A lot of the reason I remain living in New York is because of fusion voting.
Fusion voting is actually one of the exact mechanisms that the two dominant parties use to ensure that third-parties remain completely non-viable. As you point out, fusion voting means that third parties have a stronger incentive to endorse one of the Democratic or Republican candidates instead of running their own, because it ensures their right to ballot access.
> primarily because if they don't get enough votes in the elections they cease to exist (i.e., why Working Families endorsed Cuomo instead of Teachout last gubernatorial election).
It's a little more complicated than that. Cuomo promised the Working Families Party that, if they endorsed him, he'd push for a particular piece of policy that they'd wanted. After they endorsed him, he then started the "Women's Equality Party"[0], which also endorsed Cuomo, in a direct attempt to split the vote from the Working Families Party.
His goal was to drive the Working Families Party vote under 50,000[1], which would have denied them ballot access in future elections, so that he wouldn't have to worry about their influence or endorsement in the future.
Fusion voting is an embarassment to democracy. It's "hilarious" when you show up to the ballot box, and the same candidate is running unopposed on three party lines: as a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independence party candidate[2].
[0] led by himself and his family, run mostly by men.
[1] Don't quote me on the number, but I think that's the threshold
[2] For those who aren't from New York: yes, this is sadly pretty common. Though more often than that, only one party even bothers to front a candidate in the race in the first place, so the general election is a series of uncontested elections, with each candidate running on only one party.
Fine. Sell it to some investment firm, let the new owners run it with zero empathy, pay off whoever they need to pay off to kick out the union, reduce headcount, cut benefits, sell off assets and all the other things you expect and investment firm worth anything to do when it acquires something. Then in a decade when that becomes untenable and the public demands the state take back over the state takes back over and inherits a much different and more workable mess than it has at present.
The hole is very deep. There's no way out that isn't slow and painful.
This article looks promising, but then think about the disaster that is the private ISP industry or the red-light camera industry in the US. The US is bad at privatization, we tend to turn it into exploitative subsidies of crony capitalists.
http://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-wh...
Who would buy it? The system has $40 billion in debt, plus pension obligations, plus union contracts. The only way to make money on this privately would be declaring bankruptcy and hoping for a good settlement.
Completely agree -- not to mention that the reason it stopped being privately owned in the first place was that the original companies went out of business.
I wasn't aware of this, so I looked around a bit and found this [1] from a book about the history of the subway system. Apparently they kept trying to raise it, but were blocked by the mayor, Walker. Of course, the first order of business after it was taken over by the state was to raise the fare.
Edit: found the underlying case, [2], but it looks less than straightforward -- the fixed fair was a condition of the leases on the right-of-way of the train system, and the attempt was made to charge a second fare when a certain boundary was crossed.
The city is going to have to eat the debt/pensions anyways. Privatize so they can get help paying that debt, and system improvements can’t be held hostage anymore.
The connections aren't the problem under discussion. The problem is that it's a crumbling subway system that is having trouble operating at the capacity the city requires. For a city as rich as New York, you would expect something much better.
> having trouble operating at the capacity the city requires.
It's not just having trouble. The capacity the city requires is far beyond what it's currently running at. Meeting current demand would've meant planning for it two decades ago.
Anyone who lives here will tell you that the subway is wildly unreliable. Huge time gaps between trains, train cars that are dangerously overcrowded, random line shutdowns, local trains randomly going express and vice versa, straight up train direction reversals, "signal problems", "mechanical issues", sick passengers who can't get medical help because there's no medical staff in that station, "police investigations", etc are all part of daily life here.
It bears mentioning that prior to 2015 it was not this bad.
In the early 2000's it was common to easily get a seat. I recall the main lines that seemed crowded were the 456 line.
Around 2008 or 2010 they canceled a few lines, reduced bus service, and more. To me what smelled fishy was that the prior year, they had a budget surplus and gave everyone free trips on a Christmas weekend.
Add to that there were less homeless back then, and then complete the picture with the number of homeless people sprawled out in a heap on several seats on a crowded train, and you start to see how people are questioning why they live here.
What's interesting to see is sometimes during rush hour, and if you see a train car that seems less crowded you avoid it either because
a) it's summer and the A/C died in that train car
b) you have a homeless or crazy person harassing people or sprawled out, except exuding an unusually strong odor that day.
I still don't understand why the signal system takes so long to upgrade.
Can't they install most of the new system while the old one is still working on the same tracks? And isn't digital signalling available from contractors that have already done the work in other cities?
Precisely my point: no regularly scheduled downtime to do these things results in major outages when the situation gets too bad to ignore. Same with the impending L-train shutdown.
They do. They do some work on nights and weekends, and some lines have shut down and will shut down for periods of months.
The L train (Manhattan to Brooklyn) is scheduled to shut down for over a year to do residual repairs from Hurricane Sandy's flooding.
But it's a major pain. The system is at capacity many hours of the day, as are surface roads, and some points in the city are only near one line, so there's no easy way to get people where they need to go when their train can't run.
But parts of the systems do shut down time to time, by rerouting trains, or by just canceling them and providing shuttle buses. It's perfectly possible to get 8-12 hours long uninterrupted work windows for significant stretches of the railway.
Incrementally redoing the signal system is difficult, particularly because the system has lots of branches and reverse branches--which means you have to basically have it enableable on the entire system before you can enable it, rather than doing lines at a time.
Difficult, of course. But not impossible, and not specifically because trains cannot be stopped for doing work. Most of the tunnels have 4 lines, so half the line can be worked on while the line still operates; this is being done all the time.
Except that the MTA is doing it on sections of lines at a time. It is actually not hard, because the equipment does not have to be aware of things beyond whatever sections of track it controls (otherwise, any upgrade would require national coordination, since most rail systems, including the NYC subway, are connected to the national rail network).
That's interesting. In Prague, subway (which is IMHO superior to NY subway in some ways) is closed every day from midnight till 5 am (roughly, I think it is extended by an hour during weekends). Instead, we have night trams and buses, so the downtime is not a big deal. Maybe a change of culture would be helpful?
That's what most US cities do, too. Chicago has some all-night rail service, but it's mostly just buses, for instance.
But in NYC, an advisory group suggested that recently, and people hated the idea. The problem is traffic can be heavy even after hours, especially on the weekends, so buses would be a lot slower. Lots of people rely on the subway at all hours of the night.
> Chicago has some all-night rail service, but it's mostly just buses, for instance.
Anyone that can tends to avoid (e.g. prefers to live off the red/blue line) the lines that do not operate 24x7. Not providing universal service means you lose peak time ridership as well, as witnessed by ridership numbers on those lines.
NYC signal systems is extremely complex and old. 24/7 nature makes it hard to do proper maintenance. Old signal system requires nonstop maintenance to keep it running, and it needs to keep running while new system is installed which is extremely expensive. Tons of politics involved too.
It is not all that expensive to operate the old system while the new system is installed. They throw a burlap sack over the new signals until they are ready to activate them, and otherwise the old system just remains in use and costs exactly what it would cost without the new system being installed.
The old system has become somewhat more expensive because replacement parts are not needed anywhere else. Originally it was all standard railroad equipment and the same interlocking machines were used on other regional railroads (including freight lines). Since the MTA is among the last users of those machines, they have to fabricate some of the parts or special order others.
That said, the old system is pretty reliable and does not require "constant maintenance" beyond what a railroad generally requires. Its shortcomings are mostly in its inability to run trains more closely together, its inability to identify which train is in which block, and its inflexibility with regard to track directions. Otherwise the maintenance is mostly replacing light bulbs and vacuum tubes, and rarely having to replace mechanical parts. In theory the lightbulbs and vacuum tubes could be replaced with solid state components, but in practice there would be no point -- you might as well just replace all of it with solid state equipment, which the MTA is (slowly) accomplishing.
> I still don't understand why the signal system takes so long to upgrade. Can't they install most of the new system while the old one is still working on the same tracks?
They could, technically, but the TWU won't let them. The TWU has used signal upgrades as a perpetual carrot for decades - anytime people talk about improvements, they say "well, we need to do X first, so we can upgrade to the most modern signal technology in Y years."
If they upgraded the signals, they'd lose this leverage, so instead it remains eternally Y years away.
The TWU has immense leverage over the projects that get prioritized. In fact, of the six suggestions that the article lists for fixing the subway, the TWU has actively fought against five of them.
> and the MTA has not even hired union members to install the new signal system.
This is an issue that's been going on for decades. Talking about what's happening in 2017 with the new signal network misses the entire point of why this project wasn't completed back in the 90s.
You seem to think the TWU has power that it really does not have. The MTA has been consolidating the subway system's towers since the 1970s, closing a number of the electromechanical towers and replacing them with transistorized (and now computerized) equipment. In the 90s and 00s they had a grand plan to create a single control center for the whole system, but they hired incompetent contractors who failed to deliver, so now they are back to the old approach of building new towers to replace multiple old towers.
At no point has the TWU stopped them. All the TWU can do is stop the MTA from eliminating jobs, they cannot stop the MTA's plans to install new equipment.
> You seem to think the TWU has power that it really does not have. All the TWU can do is stop the MTA from eliminating jobs, they cannot stop the MTA's plans to install new equipment.
I don't think you understand how much power the TWU does have. Not only do they have the power to stop projects altogether, like automating the trains (which they did, as noted in the article), but they do have the ability to either delay or stonewall projects that they oppose by framing them as issues of labor allocation. Even if they can't unilaterally kill the project outright, they can make it expensive and painful enough that nobody will ever pursue it.
There's a symbiotic relationship between the TWU and MTA leadership (and one that's parasitic with respect to the state). Other aspects of this have already been described elsewhere in this thread and the linked article, and it's not possible to understand the way public transit infrastructure projects happen (or, more commonly, don't happen) in New York without accounting for this massive force.
The article says the union did exactly what I said the union can do: prevent the MTA from cutting jobs. That does not prevent the MTA from modernizing the signal system -- the entire context of the dispute over the L line was the MTA's effort to reduce trains to a one-man crew, from the current two-man crew, after a modern signal system was installed and operational. The MTA is busy installing that same modern system on two lines in Queens.
The TWU is not a massive force in transit projects. At worst, they block cost-cutting measures that modern technology can enable through automation. CBTC has benefits beyond automated trains -- it allows trains to run closer together and it allows more flexible usage of the tracks (the current block system does not allow track directions to change as needed, for example). Like I said, the reason this was not deployed in the 90s is that the MTA wasted 15 years trying to build a single tower to control the entire system; things are proceeding now because the MTA went back to its previous approach of consolidation. The TWU had nothing to do with it and continues to have nothing to do with it.
> The TWU had nothing to do with it and continues to have nothing to do with it.
It sounds like you're treating the TWU and MTA as two separate entities. Legally, yes, that's true, but in practice, more often than not, the TWU and MTA act in tandem. If you just look at one and not the other, or the interplay between the two, you miss out on the broader picture.
(In this specific case, I don't see a particularly significance in the distinction between "blocking the project from happening" and "blocking them from realizing a major cost-saving benefit that motivates and funds the project".)
The point is that as long as MTA budgets labor pay at an upward trending rate, TWU has no reason to oppose. The should love new signals that let workers sit in cushy control center desk jobs or get paid to be station attendants (sorely lacking in MTA) instead of train/signal operators. There's plenty of labor to do at MTA, there's no risk of losing demand for jobs.
Overlaying signalling systems is a complex issue for 2 reasons. First, you have limited track and train access because the train is running at capacity. Second, you can actually create unsafe situations by combining two systems that are actually safe by themselves.
Generally, all 'train control' systems take a long time to roll out. Despite often seeming like one product you 'install' from one vendor, it's really more of a 'solution' that requires a bunch of things you deploy together, and parts of it are delivered by subcontractors.
For the relatively simple system that the NYC began using -- Siemens Trainguard MT, used in some other cities, and also on PATH -- you need trackside beacons, lots of wiring (and a good amount of wireless), in-car computing units in the IT closet, in-cab signalling, on-car sensors, in-car wiring, etc [1], a bunch of IT integration and troubleshooting; not to mention "soft deliverables" like conductor training, maintenance training, dispatcher training, safety and bureaucratic approvals, and lots of testing. Even if you assume that all parties are competent and are acting in good faith, this still takes time.
In a recent thread about the Amtrak Cascades derailment [2], a conversation about (positive) train control ensued, and some people who worked on such implementations also talked about why these projects tend to be complex.
I find this situation incredibly interesting as an outsider.
I live in the SF Bay Area where we have a Muni "subway", if you can even call it reminiscent of one and BART. They're both absolutely awful, between not having good/expansive coverage/timely service. A plethora of issues plague both.
Both times I visited NYC this year I took the subway everywhere. Out of probably 40-50 subway rides, only a handful were delayed either in-tunnel or while I was waiting in the station; the trains were pretty much all clean without odd (read: nasty) smells. And, of course, the routes go all over Manhattan rather than just through, say, Lexington or Park Ave (like how SF's Muni basically converges and mainlines under Market St.).
I found NYC's subway a pleasant improvement. Yet I keep seeing articles about how it needs to be fixed.
In general, transit as observed by an occasional visitor often traveling off-peak tends to a lot different from a daily commuter depending on it to get to work during rush hour. There are probably exceptions but most people with a daily commute find plenty to complain about in just about every city.
That's when it tends to get really bad - even minor delays cause massive backups, because the trains are essentially running as close together as the (outdated) signaling technology allows.
Once a delay happens, there's no way to catch up other than just waiting for peak hours to pass and catching up during off-peak time.
That being said, it's still a huge step up from pretty much every other city's metro system (save for maybe DC). It's just that it's gone from being a 8/10 to a 7/10, compared to every other city's 3/10.
Depends on where you live -- going through a tunnel or over a bridge adds significantly to the odds of encountering delays. Even if you live near one of the first few stops in Queens or Brooklyn you're dealing with disproportionally higher average travel time.
Yup. Any delay in Manhattan during rush hour, and the trains just pile up waiting to get into Manhattan in the outer boroughs. And in the outer boroughs, you often don't have the luxury of being able to choose from multiple lines. So all in all this means that your morning commute could last anywhere from X ('scheduled' commute time) to X + 45 minutes, occasionally even worse. And you'll probably be packed like sardines inside the cars as well, hopefully with a working AC if it's not freezing outside.
> I found NYC's subway a pleasant improvement. Yet I keep seeing articles about how it needs to be fixed.
Decades of underinvestment means that it's not as good today as it was ten years ago, or as good ten years ago as it was a few decades before that.
That said, even with all its problems, the NY metro area still has far better and more extensive public transportation than any other metro area in the country. Over a third of all subway stations in the country are located within New York City's city limits, and that's not even counting the three separate commuter train options, Amtrak, bus service, or Staten Island railway.
Yet I have heard horror stories of how it was so run down in the 70's and 80's that people were afraid to even take it at all.
Isn't this a case of people glorifying the past? Are there objective metrics that demonstrate service quality has degraded (reduced train frequency, reduced amount of seats, etc...)?
Because 100+ years ago someone saw the right path forward and they forced this into existence with political power. How can this be done today? Elon Musk comes to mind. Humanity seemingly has to be forced forward by a visionary backed by power.
> Because 100+ years ago someone saw the right path forward and they forced this into existence with political power. How can this be done today? Elon Musk comes to mind. Humanity seemingly has to be forced forward by a visionary backed by power.
New York's current problem is that it already has too many elected officials with power that is completely unchecked and uncheckable by voters[0]. I'm not convinced that the solution to that problem is to have another person whose power is completely unchecked and uncheckable by voters.
Living in NYC, I haven't driven a car in 3 years and haven't even renewed my driver license for 2. I still manage to go hiking during summer weekends and skiing during the winter. Accessibility really isn't the issue.
I think it's optics more than anything. NYC residents pay a ton in taxes and get little back. Our state taxes get moved upstate and our federal taxes go to poor states. I really think it's just trying to put pressure on our representatives to be a bit more "selfish" as to what happens with our taxes.
Not to be flip, but those who live in the nyc (ny) burbs subsidize your mass transit, as do businesses in the burbs.
Though dated, a 2011 Rockefeller Institute study claimed nyc paid out 5% more than it got back to the rest of the state while the burbs paid out 10% more. Per capita, they claimed nyc paid out $34 more while the burbs paid out $311 more).
Income based financing schemes almost always fail in nonhomogeneous environments to be 'fair.'
I grew up in Scarsdale, your comments definitely aren't foreign to me.
> those who live in the nyc (ny) burbs subsidize your mass transit
The problem I see with this is that I struggle to consider it "your" mass transit. Both the MTA and Metro North are owned by the state. One of them has 300k daily riders, the other has 5.5m daily riders. 150k of those MN riders end up in the city everyday, so both groups are using state owned products, one group is potentially using BOTH (I always did when I commuted from Westchester to the financial district). The 4 commuter lines combined (NJTransit, PATH, LIRR, Metro North) have 1/3 the total daily ridership of the subway, but get almost double the amount of subsidies from state coffers. Growing up, I can count the number of parents who didn't commute to the city on both hands. Being wealthy enough to live in the suburbs doesn't mean your money is generated there. The median income in Scarsdale is $250k. I doubt that Scarsdale Flowers is the one lifting that average, so the people being taxed for it are the ones who actually use it anyway. I realize this is only one of the suburbs, but it's the one I'm personally familiar with.
> Income based financing schemes almost always fail in nonhomogeneous environments to be 'fair.'
I'm definitely not arguing for it. In fact, I usually argue against it. I'm just pointing out why I think the argument is being made, given that the subway isn't in as bad shape as the news makes it sound.
> Not to be flip, but those who live in the nyc (ny) burbs subsidize your mass transit, as do businesses in the burbs.
The MTA spends a disproportionate amount of money on the MetroNorth and LIRR, compared to its ridership. In terms of mass transit specifically, it's the city that's subsidizing the suburbs, not the other way around.
Depends on time of day and the weather. Rain, rush, weekends, weekend nights - oh boy. You have to plan in advance, and be familiar with alternatives or you can really get stuck.
The past few weeks it’s also maintenance closing lots of stations without any signs or it being really hard to follow the sign if it exists even as a local.
The NYC subway system is orders of magnitude better than anything else in this country, absolutely. This also means that pretty much everyone relies on it to get around every day---so we have to hold it to a much higher standard. If the subway were as bad as it is in SF, the whole city would more or less stop functioning entirely.
> If the subway were as bad as it is in SF, the whole city would more or less stop functioning entirely.
And SF is far better than say LA or Denver as far as public transit. I think you nailed it perfectly though, being “the best” carries a lot of responsibility and the MTA isn’t honoring that.
I had the same reaction to this article. It's incredible how horrible SF's system is, and yet, the articles are always about New York's subway. If someone did an in depth comparison of the two it would be incredibly eye opening. The system in SF is garbage.
Conversely: tons of people here in Vancouver complain about our equivalent systems (the Skytrain, usually), whereas people I know who've visited from New York are blown away by how clean, fast, and efficient it is. Trains that come every 90 seconds, no garbage on the tracks, bright, open, airy stations (most are above ground on that line).
NYC is a model of public transit from the perspective of ubiquity, feasibility, and ridership, though, and that's pretty key.
We also visited the SF Bay Area, and it was confusing as hell. The BART? The Muni? The buses? The cable cars? Who uses what? How do we get around? I need different passes? Oh, the tap card works? What's even going on?
I found the BART was very reminiscent in a lot of ways to Montreal's Metro system, but the MUNI (we took the J line? I kept calling it the JUnit, to my wife's annoyance) and it was 'fine', but only because we were a few blocks away. It felt very… rustic. Unmaintained. The raising/lowering stairs thing was a neat solution though.
In short, NYC being better than SF isn't a high bar, but I think we should all be happy that we live in cities that have such transit systems at all. Many large cities in the US don't even have public transit systems that can get people anywhere with any efficiency.
Yes. The coverage is quite poor and doesn't service certain high traffic areas at all, like UBC. The solution has been to increase bus coverage which can only take you so far.
The trains are very popular, and during rush hour there might not be enough room on the train for everyone to get on.
The trains come every 3 minutes during peak hours, and less often during non-peak hours, as much as 15 minutes.
It's remarkably hard to get reliable numbers on train frequency in subway stations worldwide. However, it is generally believed that the only system in the world that gets headways smaller than 100 seconds/train is the Moscow Metro at 90--95 seconds per train = 38--40 trains per hour (tph), followed by the Jubilee line of the London Underground at 100 seconds/train = 36 tph.
While it's easy to find no shortage of sources that say that SkyTrain in Vancouver can "theoretically" run at 75 seconds/train = 48 tph, the more optimistic figures of its actual peak frequency look like 108 seconds/train = ~33 tph. Some sources I found (including the official schedule) suggest 150 seconds/train = 24 tph.
True, the SF public transit story is abhorrent, so I can see how NYC would seem much better to a SF local. But if you come from nearly ANY other developed country on the planet, the situation in NYC would seem abhorrent. I have been on roughly 40 transit systems across the world, and the NYC subway is hands-down the least reliable. This is including Soviet-era systems in eastern Europe.
In terms of ridership, London, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, etc. are all comparable to NYC, some are just as old (e.g. London, Paris, Tokyo), and none are as broken.
As a non-US tourist I find the NYC subway dirty (there was trash on the lines that nobody picked up in weeks), and terribly undocumented (few or misplaced info panels and directions). It’s also very crowded at peak hours but that’s understandable I assume.
As a EU import, I understand. Actually, most of the city is quite dirty, relatively. It's probably even a US issue. Non-rich neighborhoods simply don't get to spend much on anything serving the public, including upkeep. This goes for much of NYC as well, despite it being a 'rich' city.
The information on schedules and changes due to maintenance are overwhelming for a tourist. At nights and in weekends especially, there are often trains being rerouted in very creative ways. Though all of this information is posted, it's often hard to understand for a non-local. It often mentions station names, which mean nothing to you if you don't live here (and even if you do it's not always obvious). Luckily the locals are always happy to help you with directions, contrary to popular belief, so just ask away!
NYC's subway system was started before cars were widespread, and it's still the lifeblood of the city, so it has to work. When it's even a little bit off, people complain.
SF's public transit system (except cable cars which are mostly just preserved for tourists now) was built after the automobile, and as such it feels like an afterthought.
I moved to NYC a year ago and have the same basic feeling as you. Could the subway be improved? Obviously! But New Yorkers don't realize how good they have it compared to the rest of the U.S. [0] If a train takes 10 minutes, they're annoyed. Meanwhile, scheduled headways of 20 minutes are the norm where I'm from -- on the one light rail line that goes through the center of town.
My daily experience on the NYC Subway is that it's an incredible marvel. [1]
[0] There was even an article on r/nyc earlier this year about how New York shouldn't get Amazon's HQ2 based on the access to transit requirement. The article argued that the transit is too bad here. That's -- that's so absurd as to be almost beyond belief.
[1] An enormous caveat here: I can walk or bike to work. I do use the subway at peak hours fairly frequently, but I'm not reliant on it or held hostage by it, as many others are.
I think many New Yorkers realize how bad it is in the rest of the US. HOWEVER! In NYC, the subway is essential, and many people don't realistically have any other option. Especially if you're in the outer boroughs. Even worse, there you also don't have the luxury of walking over to another line if yours is heavily delayed. Walking is too far, and biking is only recently slowly becoming a reasonable alternative.
There are people in every city who don’t have any other option. What those people do in places like St. Louis is transfer between multiple buses on much worse commutes than the ones you’re imagining on a packed 7-train.
I think what’s actually different, if we’re honest, is that middle class people have arranged their lives to rely on the train in NYC, and they’re a more vocal (or at least more likely to be heard) constituency.
Sure, but that's another way of saying the same thing. Because by "no realistic option" GP means, in effect, "no option that middle class people would stand for".
If you build a transportation infrastructure that's good enough for middle class people to rely on then middle class people will come to rely on it, and if you don't then they won't.
No argument with that. It’s good that the residents of New York are holding their representatives to account. It’s also simultaneously true that wild hyperbole about NYC not having adequate transit to support HQ2 is just that.
I’m making the pretty boring argument that we shouldn’t get carried away.
Some lines are highly delayed and more congested. I ride a few different lines a few times a month when I do business in the city and Queens. It’s definately not as good as it was at its peak, but isn’t that awful either.
Growing up in the 80s, it was dramatically more congested, slower and generally awful. So the tales of impending doom sound like drama to me.
NY politics are a carnival atmosphere right now, even by NY standards. I think these issues are getting more play as a result. It will only get worse as hostile federal policy sucks money out of Nee York.
It’s always easier to build than maintain. This happens in all institutional settings. Stuff will get worse, bonds will get paid off, and more capital dollars will be available to rebuild.
The one advantage of the 80s is you could open the windows (though there was no ac) and you could ride in the vestible between cars. Still having some risk adversion, I would generally get on/off from inside a car but had no problem reading my WSJ one handed while holding the handle. (Always ride your back to the direction of motion so braking pushes you against the door!)
I do miss some of the better exterior graffiti of the late 70s/early 80s
BART is honestly not as bad as people make it out to be. It's fast - really fast. People overlook that. And it's super frequent during rush hours. MUNI trains do have cleaner and nicer cars but they're so slow above the ground. MUNI buses on the other hand are always stinking.
However, what I uniformly hate about all modes of public transportation in the Bay Area is the casual, lethargic passengers who take their sweet sweet time to get in and out and clog the doorways. New York on the other hand was extremely courteous (in my limited experience) by on boarding and off boarding as quickly as they can.
BART was the first modern transit system. Computer control. Active suspension. Solid-state motor controls. Card-based fare collection. Air conditioning. All new technology. All special-purpose. It took over a decade to get all that debugged.
Now it's antiquated, and keeping those one-offs going is hard.
It's easier to maintain old electromechanical systems like NYC's than 1960s electronics like BART. The NYC stuff is mostly standard General Railway Signal equipment, with some Union Switch and Signal stuff. Many railways worldwide used those components. Siemens sells compatible relays.[1]
Think of where you'd be today if your transit system ran on OS/2. The NYC transit system is still running hundreds of computers on OS/2. It was the best system at the time.
1. Due to lack of good management and a number of structural issues, building in NYC costs about 5 to 10x more per km than other built-up cities. (E.g., $2.2 B per km in NYC vs. $230 M in Paris.) Source: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
2. There is insufficient funding available, due largely to the fact that the subway is controlled by the state (not the city), which has prevented congestion pricing to be implemented. It finally seems like the crisis may cause congestion pricing to pass, which will provide a major new dedicated funding source. The plan <http://iheartmoveny.org/> is quite good and will also dramatically reduce traffic congestion.
However, until costs are controlled, we will only be able to improve our current service, not do the major expansion that large transit deserts in and around the city need.
Now compare to Beijing, which is simultaneously building "20 different subway lines, measuring a total distance of 354.8 kilometers." That will probably cost $35 B but would cost $781 B in NYC. https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2017/07/29/beijing-metro-u...
> Out of probably 40-50 subway rides, only a handful were delayed either in-tunnel or while I was waiting in the station
You must not have had to come from Brooklyn to Manhattan during commute hours. Daily (or multiples times a day even) occurrence in that case. I’ll still gladly take MTA over Muni/BART any day, but NYC could definitely learn a thing or two from Hong Kong or even London’s subway systems.
I take the L every day from Graham to 6th at 9am. I very rarely have to wait to get on a train and the delays aren't more than just being slower compared to off-hours. I can understand a frustration trying to get on a train if you live on Bedford, I'm sure that's a nightmare. However, I simply don't understand the complaints (comparing it within the city). Maybe it's just because every other commute I've had has gone through Union Square or 42nd. Compared to those, everything is easy.
> I take the L every day from Graham to 6th at 9am.
How’s the L like during the summer on your way home? 110°+ platform temps weren’t uncommon back when I took it.
That said, I think the line you are on makes a big difference. My line (A/C) seems to have the worst trains as far as age / cleanliness of the ones I’ve been on. Way too infrequent during commute hours and when they do come they come in pairs or triplets. This causes the first train (and sometimes second) to be packed Tokyo style, which then causes delays for trains after it as it takes longer for folks to get on / off. If they just made them run consistent and more frequent (seriously 10-15min between groups of trains during commute hours isn’t uncommon), they’d not be overcrowded and not delay as much, but alas, scheduling seems to allude MTA.
As to other lines, 4/5/6 has decent trains and are pretty frequent, but horribly crowded during commute. 7 train (inside Manhattan anyway) is typically full (not too overcrowded), but frequency is sometimes a problem and I wish it was better aligned with the schedules of the lines which feed into it. 1/2/3 and N/Q/R aren’t bad in general usually. I’ve not taken the B/D/F/M/J/Z/G lines enough to have a fair opinion, but I usually seem to have one issue or another with them when I do end up on them (usually maintenance related lately).
service runs very well in NYC (anecdotally), but compared to cities like LA or Phoenix their trains are the haggard burro's of times long gone. Sad to say but I feel the only thing that will improve the quality of this service over time is cascading system failures similar to what BART is experiencing. Politicians are gleefully divorced from the concept of public transportation in their largest city, so until the NYC Subway begins to impact titans of industry and their ability to call upon the masses to come to work on time, its likely to remain a grisly reminder of just how real living in america can be.
A culture shift might not hurt either, although full disclosure im not entirely steeped in the culture of the big apple. Here in Los Angeles, extending our purple line train to the tune of four billion dollars seemed like a generally wise investment to everyone; the tax passed easily.
Why are they talking about moving stairs? Why is this first on the list? What is this madness? The stairs don't need to be moved. They simply need to add more brand new lines and stations and invest in infrastructure to improve reliability. That's it.
The NYC Subway is not "broken" because the stairs are in the wrong place. The NYC Subway isn't even "broken."
Moving stairs is likely the only thing in the article that has a possibility of happening...
NYC politics is broken. Nobody is willing to spend money on important projects, the incentives for politicians simply focus too much on the short term. Changing the geometry of the stations at certain bottleneck points could have a significant effect on delays caused by overcrowding. I've noticed this sort of thing during rush hour, where a train has to sit in a station for an extra few minutes as people push in.
I'm actually happy they listed something as "trivial" as station configuration first. The list is full of things that are either politically fraught, or are already in progress and just take of a lot of time.
Reconfiguring individual stations may be a big win, because they come with only a modest one-time cost (y'know, sixty-to-a-hundred million, also known in the US as "cheap"), but result in immediate and appreciable gains in particular spots. The nature of these projects makes them easy to brand, boast, and sometimes fund, and you can do them (largely) independent from other, large-scale things you have in the pipe that will take years to come to fruition.
The more I think about our future with self driving cars/busses; I wonder at what point will subways no longer be needed? If you look at the capital cost of a new bus compared to the cost for the operator(s) who work it, we could greatly increase our fleet of bus services simply by removing the driver. If that and the cost per mile falls under $1/mile for uber and the like, I don't think we have a massive need for subways anymore.
I tend of think along those lines as well for most sprawled cities. But I don't think that will be true of dense cities like nyc that need mass rapid transit. Even with increased capacity that AV's will allow, roads don't have the capacity to move the millions of passengers during rush hour.
Subways will remain in dense city centers because they offer capacity that cannot be matched with buses. Driver or no driver is irrelevant. Your argument probably will hold true for regional trains and high speed trains, though. The travel time will be quite similar if you factor in the time to and from the railway stations.
subways are useful even with self driving cars just because they are another level. A self driving helicopter could replace a subway, but ground level cars eventually get into congestion. Of course we can build bridges, but a subway is just a train underground so that doesn't apply.
Andy Byford just left as CEO of the TTC to take this challenge on. He’s a more ambitious man than I, to actively seek to try to fix the NYC MTA. I wish him luck and wish we did more to support him while he was here.
The theme is often money, but here's where I think NYC (and the U.S.) get it wrong, and how other countries like the UK and France get it right. I'm no civil engineer or government contract negotiator so I'd love to be corrected here, but here goes.
The U.S. prides itself on local government, private industry and so forth, public-private cooperation ideally leading to more money efficiency since private companies 'care' and governments are 'wasteful'. Great. However, some problems I've noticed here:
-- Local government is actually more inefficient. The ARC project cancelation which would have already dug a tunnel under the Hudson river between NYC and NJ in the biggest commuter hub in the country was canceled because three government organizations, NY State, NJ State and the Port Authority, couldn't agree on funding and were playing politics. The NJ governor (Christie) later allocated the moneys to lower the gas tax before his re-election campaign as well as for highway repair
-- MTA, the parent organization that runs the NYC subway system, is said to be woefully underfunded and so forth.
Yet, the Port Authority, a totally unrelated organization FUNDED BY TAX MONEYS AND PUBLIC TRANSPORT TOLL COLLECTIONS, spent $4B to refurbish a single station and erect a dinosaur skeleton and called it the "World Trade Center transit hub." While the subway system this transit hub is attached to is utterly failing apart due to repairs. A strong centralized government would have made this less likely.
Fulton St Station was refurbished for the cost of 1.4B, again at the same time that signals are failing and trains are breaking in other parts of the subway system this station is attached to.
How do either of these projects get away with giving billions of dollars to select contractors, to select private corporations, (st)architects and so forth? How do we ensure that someone in power didn't get in bed with one of these private developers?
-- The NYC Mayor and the NY State governor fight seemingly daily over blame for the disastrous subway system. The Mayor himself is something of a scatterbrain, getting involved in issues when he gets screamed at, while the governor cares more about his constituents upstate. Both are fairly corrupt.
There IS money, the money just goes to insane places due to the scattered players: private organizations, cross state organizations like the Port Authority, city governments, state governments, federal governments...
Isn't this one of the reasons why NYC transit construction and repair costs are so much more than places like London, where A) the system is WAY older b) the tunnels are MUCH deeper and narrower and yet C) they override these problems by establishing new lines like the Overground, the DLR and the Crossrail.
London (a city I lived in a few years) seems to be moving at a much more rapid evolutionary path than NYC, which seems like it's crumbling around us.
What would it take to fix the subway? Money of course. Where's it come from? Who cares, just spend it. Transit is necessary. Tax the businesses that benefit from good transit. Raise the gas taxes, because driving is a luxury if you could have taken mass transit. Boston's transit is a mess too. Some of the problems can be fixed just by throwing money at the problem. The Boston subway breaks down all the time because the cars are way past service life. You can just buy new cars, and service will improve a lot. But they waited so long that breakdowns are constant. The new cars won't be here for years, but we don't need any upgrades other than buy the cars and put them on the tracks. It's seriously frustrating that these things are in such a bad state when massive improvements can come by just spending money to fix old broken stuff. Call me naive, but I just want better public services, and I understand it costs money.
You don’t need to replace everything. You can fix things. It’s probably billions still, but I still say the money should be spent. Even if it’s hundreds of billions over the new couple decades, spend the money, fix the subways. Start with essentials. Then continue maintenance while doing simultaneous improvements.
Let’s be clear, if you don’t spend money you definitely can’t fix the problem. Will only money fix it ? No, but if you need to change management, change expectations, change schedules, do that. All that will cost money as will buying new cars and new signal systems and hiring crews to install the signal systems. What’s needed to fix the system is a lot of changes and they will all cost money. But the reason the changes haven’t happened is due to money. Boston’s system has certainly suffered from lack of money. Sure they have billions, but it isn’t enough.
If you don’t have enough maintenance people to do the work, that is still a money problem. If you pay more for that job, more people will want to do that job, and then you can hire people to staff the positions correctly. It might take a few years for the next generation to come into the workforce, but I believe it can be done.
As non-NYC resident the first thing I though was, "Huh, I wonder what's wrong with New York's subways?" But alas they went straight into solutions so I am still left to wonder what problems they are trying to fix and in what priority. Pretty webpage though.
Take for example solution #1: "Redesign stations to get more people on and off trains faster."
The text and graphics then goes on to explain some interesting issues with various stations but what solutions are the experts recommending to get more people on and off? How many more people per unit of time do they need to accommodate? This is solution #1, does that mean it's the most urgent? etc. etc.
"Many stations like this one are not prepared to accommodate a larger volume of passengers, even if a new traffic control system allowed trains to come more frequently."
"Much of the subway’s signal system uses antiquated parts like the electromechanical relays shown above from the West Fourth Street-Washington Square station in Manhattan.
Train traffic for about two-thirds of the subway system is monitored in rooms like the one shown below at West Fourth Street. Little has changed in a century.
The old signal system uses a network of switches and cables along the track to keep trains a safe distance apart. The technology is outdated and expensive to maintain."
You are right. The article only claimed to provide a list of expert suggestions on how to fix the New York subway and it did that. I'm the one who wants it to be more.
It strikes a chord because the suggestions offered feel like so many tech roadmap planning meetings I've been in where the technology itself is the end and not a means to an end. Without the greater context I am not sure how anyone can evaluate the suggestions to try and predict whether or not they will accomplish the stated goal.
Assume the hallways were widened, all the relays, monitoring rooms and signals were updated addressing each quote you provided. Is New York's subway fixed now? Maybe it's better for some definitions of better but I digress...
I was a bit shocked by New York’s subway; you always seems to have to wait a loooong time for a train. On the London Underground the carriages are much smaller but waiting even 5 mins for a train is vanishingly rare. Tokyo has a crazy subway that guarantees to almost the second when the trains go. You can literally say exactly when you’ll be somewhere across town down to the minute and it’s nearly never wrong.
Completely agree. Paris, London, and Tokyo all have better and cleaner subways than NYC. But NYC is about as good as it gets in the US.
Believe it or not, as nasty as NYC subways are now, in the 1970s they were far dirtier.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadI don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out.
BTW: If you disagree please talk out your points.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Métro
NYC density increases costs in some ways, but it also makes means they can spend far less to maintain roads / street lights / etc. On top of that the high average and median earnings means NYC has an enviable tax base.
Not all lines have four tracks (some only have two), and even for the ones that do, running trains while work is going on means incredibly slow and delayed service.
I understand what they meant; I'm explaining that even when running trains on dedicated tracks (e.g. the local line is shut down for maintenance, but the express line still runs), it causes delays that many find unbearable. Running trains in both directions on a single track would degrade service even further. At that point, it may very well just be better to shut the entire line down temporarily, which is what they generally do.
For comparison, the entire PATH system supports changing the track direction, and single-tracking is relatively common during weekends. Of course, the PATH is much smaller and has a different history behind it, not to mention totally different legal requirements (it is a "railroad" rather than a heavy rail system).
Thanks for adding this - I'd forgotten about that.
I know construction in US is expensive but it can't be that bad.
Also, isn't there an interesting relationship b/w the state and the city wrt funding where the state is responsible for the subway and not the city?
The MTA's internal organization is also a total mess. Metro-North and LIRR use nearly identical equipment (identical except for power systems) but are considered separate agencies within the MTA. The subway system is also considered separate, and in fact there is yet another internal division in the subway: IRT, BMT, and IND (internally referred to as 'A', 'B1', and 'B2' divisions). So there is needless duplication in the management structure. Beyond that, there are two more MTA railroads that are easy to forget about: the Staten Island railroad, and the South Brooklyn Railway (which may be operated as part of the subway's "C" division maintenance group, I am a bit fuzzy on the details there). Incredibly, the SIR uses the same equipment as the BMT and IND, so it is a bit difficult to understand why it is managed separately.
"Subway workers now make an average of $170,000 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 about $100,000 in total compensation annually.
The pay for managers is even more extraordinary. The nearly 2,500 people who work in New York subway administration make, on average, $280,000 in salary, overtime and benefits. The average elsewhere is $115,000."
Why are we paying these employees such an insane amount of money relative to our peers? Political failure[3]. Due to the Triborough Amendment clause of the Taylor Law, anytime negotiations with the union fall through, the terms of the previous contract continue. Thus, the Transit Workers Union (TWU) have no incentive to negotiate in good faith. They can't strike, but they still get a pretty sweet deal.
The solution to this starts at the top. We need to vote out our current corrupt (or at the very least, easily cowed) government and put in place people who will make this a priority and not be completely beholden to special interests.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/mta-wrote-4-9m-chec...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Law#Criticism_and_refor...
I also have no idea what better alternative there is when a contract negotiation fails. Is the system supposed to stop altogether until a new contract is agreed upon? Are the workers expected to go without pay? The fact is that the union's demands have not been unreasonable -- they ask to keep benefits, to have pay increases that basically track the cost of living in NYC, and occasional to expand low-cost benefits (e.g. allowing all employees to ride LIRR and MNR for free, rather than just employees who live outside NYC).
MTA has other unusual issues... they have a very powerful union that has negotiated wacky deals over the years. In some areas, pretty much everyone retires with dramatically more expensive disability retirements. (See: https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d... )They also have the ability to "spike" pensions with overtime that most NY government workers outside of police and fire cannot do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Retirement_Act
The subway workers are represented by TWU local 100; LIRR workers are represented by 7 different unions, all separate from the subway workers.
Usually if the figure includes benefits (as it does in this case) the pension contributions are included. Along with things like medical,life, and disability insurance.
Usually when you total everything up it comes to around twice what people get paid. I worked at a place with federal civil servants, and the total cost to the government for a civil servant was costed out at 2.2x salary.
There's the problem. Half the population is convinced that the people who do all the work to make living in a city possible should not be able to afford to live in said city.
San Francisco is the most extreme example of this insanity, where everyone in the service sector either has multi-hour commutes, or live in a closet with 3 other roommates.
Japan is an interesting comparison because the lines are private and independently owned and so there's competition[1]. Once upon a time the NYC train line were private and independently owned they were the BMT, IRT and the IND[2]. You still vestiges of this in some stations. At any rate it was thought that that having privately owned train lines might allow them to hold the city hostage and so they were bought by the city. Obviously there's a great irony in that now.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/30/nyregion/about-new-york-al...
Now after 20 years of underinvesting this needs to be done against the backdrop of a population boom and ridership explosion.
>"I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out."
Unfortunately this is even harder to fix than the MTA. Its not just the long-standing culture of corruption in Albany, but its the culture of corruption from City Hall, the MTA's contractors and MTA's Union.
Of course just fixing the governance structure of the MTA would be a great start but when you look at how this structure actually works you might be forgiven being cynical:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/who-runs-mta-15281.html
The question I have is, why were things like the Hudson Yards station, work on the perpetually delayed 2nd Avenue subway, Fulton St. station renovation prioritized over the core signal and preexisting aging track infrastructure?
[0]http://web.mta.info/mta/budget/pdf/MTA%202017%20Adopted%20Bu... (page II-1)
Which gets votes? Renewing existing infrastructure is something nobody understands.
BTW 2nd avenue subway should be seen as "less crowded green line trains", which matched popular demand rather well, and it did work, to my mind.
But people expect it to keep working as it does today, as far as I can tell. It's about expectations, not realism.
Politicians love being able to do a big ribbon-cutting ceremony for adding something new. At the very least, it's easier to point to a new subway line and say "I helped make that possible" than it is to do that for improved maintenance of infrastructure.
The 2nd Ave. subway would also have helped to reduce crowding on the Lexington Ave. line if it had been built to 125th St., where there is a Metro-North station. That is an unfunded plan at the moment, and there would likely be opposition from the wealthy Upper East Side residents to such an extension (not just the extra crowding, but also the poorer people who live in East Harlem taking the train).
I'm not saying you're definitively wrong, because I don't know from where you get your information, but that is simply not what I've heard from every other source. What I've read is that the signal system and the track structure is antiquated[0], equipment dating almost a century old, which is the cause of most delays and prevents safe running of trains at more frequent intervals, and that certain components of the track are so old that no one manufactures their replacements anymore, so the agency cannibalizes out of commission lines for parts. If you've got something to link that suggests otherwise, I'd be glad to read it and expand my horizons.
I don't deny that increasing track coverage with new lines is very important too.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
What happened in the past few years is that the MTA allowed maintenance schedules to slip, hence the problems.
(Edit: to be clear, yes, there are limits to what the old system can do and modernization can improve a few things. Those shortcomings are not really what is causing the problems that we are experiencing lately. Modern equipment will also require maintenance and will fail when that maintenance is not performed.)
Who cares what budget it comes from? It's just money in the end.
We're tired of it, but New York government is not a democracy. The two ruling parties have passed an complex network of laws which, in effect, mean that officials are accountable only to the political party, not to their constituents.
Case in point: one of the largest advocates of eliminating business service was Silver (a Democrat), despite the fact that his constituents were almost entirely dependent on bus service. When he was finally convicted of corruption, people were shocked - not shocked that he was corrupt (everyone knew - it was completely conducted in the open), but shocked that he was actually going to be held accountable to it. Unfortunately, the conviction was overturned on appeal due to a technicality - a law had been passed which narrowed the definition of corruption, meaning that the things he was convicted for were no longer criminal offenses.
We can't vote them out when there's literally no one to vote in, and both the Democrats and the Republicans have a gentleman's agreement not to compete with each other seriously, the same way Comcast and Time Warner Cable do.
New York is literally the most corrupt state government in the country[0]. Nothing short of a series of multiple federal court rulings will change that, because both parties benefit from it, and neither has the incentive to change it.
[0] http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2016/sep/19/el...
And people wonder why Trump got elected.
Pervasive desperation for anyone who might actually shake up the system.
Except he lost by something like 8:1 in NYC. Why? Because the folks in NYC knew he was as crooked or worse as the swamp he claimed he would drain.
Fusion voting is actually one of the exact mechanisms that the two dominant parties use to ensure that third-parties remain completely non-viable. As you point out, fusion voting means that third parties have a stronger incentive to endorse one of the Democratic or Republican candidates instead of running their own, because it ensures their right to ballot access.
> primarily because if they don't get enough votes in the elections they cease to exist (i.e., why Working Families endorsed Cuomo instead of Teachout last gubernatorial election).
It's a little more complicated than that. Cuomo promised the Working Families Party that, if they endorsed him, he'd push for a particular piece of policy that they'd wanted. After they endorsed him, he then started the "Women's Equality Party"[0], which also endorsed Cuomo, in a direct attempt to split the vote from the Working Families Party.
His goal was to drive the Working Families Party vote under 50,000[1], which would have denied them ballot access in future elections, so that he wouldn't have to worry about their influence or endorsement in the future.
Fusion voting is an embarassment to democracy. It's "hilarious" when you show up to the ballot box, and the same candidate is running unopposed on three party lines: as a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independence party candidate[2].
[0] led by himself and his family, run mostly by men.
[1] Don't quote me on the number, but I think that's the threshold
[2] For those who aren't from New York: yes, this is sadly pretty common. Though more often than that, only one party even bothers to front a candidate in the race in the first place, so the general election is a series of uncontested elections, with each candidate running on only one party.
The hole is very deep. There's no way out that isn't slow and painful.
This article looks promising, but then think about the disaster that is the private ISP industry or the red-light camera industry in the US. The US is bad at privatization, we tend to turn it into exploitative subsidies of crony capitalists. http://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-wh...
Edit: found the underlying case, [2], but it looks less than straightforward -- the fixed fair was a condition of the leases on the right-of-way of the train system, and the attempt was made to charge a second fare when a certain boundary was crossed.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=LYSVd43vZwQC&lpg=PR13&ots=...
[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/279/159/case.htm...
It's not just having trouble. The capacity the city requires is far beyond what it's currently running at. Meeting current demand would've meant planning for it two decades ago.
Anyone who lives here will tell you that the subway is wildly unreliable. Huge time gaps between trains, train cars that are dangerously overcrowded, random line shutdowns, local trains randomly going express and vice versa, straight up train direction reversals, "signal problems", "mechanical issues", sick passengers who can't get medical help because there's no medical staff in that station, "police investigations", etc are all part of daily life here.
It bears mentioning that prior to 2015 it was not this bad.
In the early 2000's it was common to easily get a seat. I recall the main lines that seemed crowded were the 456 line.
Around 2008 or 2010 they canceled a few lines, reduced bus service, and more. To me what smelled fishy was that the prior year, they had a budget surplus and gave everyone free trips on a Christmas weekend.
Add to that there were less homeless back then, and then complete the picture with the number of homeless people sprawled out in a heap on several seats on a crowded train, and you start to see how people are questioning why they live here.
What's interesting to see is sometimes during rush hour, and if you see a train car that seems less crowded you avoid it either because
a) it's summer and the A/C died in that train car b) you have a homeless or crazy person harassing people or sprawled out, except exuding an unusually strong odor that day.
Can't they install most of the new system while the old one is still working on the same tracks? And isn't digital signalling available from contractors that have already done the work in other cities?
The L train (Manhattan to Brooklyn) is scheduled to shut down for over a year to do residual repairs from Hurricane Sandy's flooding.
But it's a major pain. The system is at capacity many hours of the day, as are surface roads, and some points in the city are only near one line, so there's no easy way to get people where they need to go when their train can't run.
The work has to be incremental, of course.
But in NYC, an advisory group suggested that recently, and people hated the idea. The problem is traffic can be heavy even after hours, especially on the weekends, so buses would be a lot slower. Lots of people rely on the subway at all hours of the night.
Anyone that can tends to avoid (e.g. prefers to live off the red/blue line) the lines that do not operate 24x7. Not providing universal service means you lose peak time ridership as well, as witnessed by ridership numbers on those lines.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
The old system has become somewhat more expensive because replacement parts are not needed anywhere else. Originally it was all standard railroad equipment and the same interlocking machines were used on other regional railroads (including freight lines). Since the MTA is among the last users of those machines, they have to fabricate some of the parts or special order others.
That said, the old system is pretty reliable and does not require "constant maintenance" beyond what a railroad generally requires. Its shortcomings are mostly in its inability to run trains more closely together, its inability to identify which train is in which block, and its inflexibility with regard to track directions. Otherwise the maintenance is mostly replacing light bulbs and vacuum tubes, and rarely having to replace mechanical parts. In theory the lightbulbs and vacuum tubes could be replaced with solid state components, but in practice there would be no point -- you might as well just replace all of it with solid state equipment, which the MTA is (slowly) accomplishing.
They could, technically, but the TWU won't let them. The TWU has used signal upgrades as a perpetual carrot for decades - anytime people talk about improvements, they say "well, we need to do X first, so we can upgrade to the most modern signal technology in Y years."
If they upgraded the signals, they'd lose this leverage, so instead it remains eternally Y years away.
The more likely answer is that the MTA has hired shady contractors who did incompetent work for years.
The TWU has immense leverage over the projects that get prioritized. In fact, of the six suggestions that the article lists for fixing the subway, the TWU has actively fought against five of them.
> and the MTA has not even hired union members to install the new signal system.
This is an issue that's been going on for decades. Talking about what's happening in 2017 with the new signal network misses the entire point of why this project wasn't completed back in the 90s.
At no point has the TWU stopped them. All the TWU can do is stop the MTA from eliminating jobs, they cannot stop the MTA's plans to install new equipment.
I don't think you understand how much power the TWU does have. Not only do they have the power to stop projects altogether, like automating the trains (which they did, as noted in the article), but they do have the ability to either delay or stonewall projects that they oppose by framing them as issues of labor allocation. Even if they can't unilaterally kill the project outright, they can make it expensive and painful enough that nobody will ever pursue it.
There's a symbiotic relationship between the TWU and MTA leadership (and one that's parasitic with respect to the state). Other aspects of this have already been described elsewhere in this thread and the linked article, and it's not possible to understand the way public transit infrastructure projects happen (or, more commonly, don't happen) in New York without accounting for this massive force.
The TWU is not a massive force in transit projects. At worst, they block cost-cutting measures that modern technology can enable through automation. CBTC has benefits beyond automated trains -- it allows trains to run closer together and it allows more flexible usage of the tracks (the current block system does not allow track directions to change as needed, for example). Like I said, the reason this was not deployed in the 90s is that the MTA wasted 15 years trying to build a single tower to control the entire system; things are proceeding now because the MTA went back to its previous approach of consolidation. The TWU had nothing to do with it and continues to have nothing to do with it.
It sounds like you're treating the TWU and MTA as two separate entities. Legally, yes, that's true, but in practice, more often than not, the TWU and MTA act in tandem. If you just look at one and not the other, or the interplay between the two, you miss out on the broader picture.
(In this specific case, I don't see a particularly significance in the distinction between "blocking the project from happening" and "blocking them from realizing a major cost-saving benefit that motivates and funds the project".)
For the relatively simple system that the NYC began using -- Siemens Trainguard MT, used in some other cities, and also on PATH -- you need trackside beacons, lots of wiring (and a good amount of wireless), in-car computing units in the IT closet, in-cab signalling, on-car sensors, in-car wiring, etc [1], a bunch of IT integration and troubleshooting; not to mention "soft deliverables" like conductor training, maintenance training, dispatcher training, safety and bureaucratic approvals, and lots of testing. Even if you assume that all parties are competent and are acting in good faith, this still takes time.
In a recent thread about the Amtrak Cascades derailment [2], a conversation about (positive) train control ensued, and some people who worked on such implementations also talked about why these projects tend to be complex.
[1] http://www.mobility.siemens.com/mobility/global/SiteCollecti... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968720
I live in the SF Bay Area where we have a Muni "subway", if you can even call it reminiscent of one and BART. They're both absolutely awful, between not having good/expansive coverage/timely service. A plethora of issues plague both.
Both times I visited NYC this year I took the subway everywhere. Out of probably 40-50 subway rides, only a handful were delayed either in-tunnel or while I was waiting in the station; the trains were pretty much all clean without odd (read: nasty) smells. And, of course, the routes go all over Manhattan rather than just through, say, Lexington or Park Ave (like how SF's Muni basically converges and mainlines under Market St.).
I found NYC's subway a pleasant improvement. Yet I keep seeing articles about how it needs to be fixed.
Just interesting to spectate as an outsider.
That's when it tends to get really bad - even minor delays cause massive backups, because the trains are essentially running as close together as the (outdated) signaling technology allows.
Once a delay happens, there's no way to catch up other than just waiting for peak hours to pass and catching up during off-peak time.
That being said, it's still a huge step up from pretty much every other city's metro system (save for maybe DC). It's just that it's gone from being a 8/10 to a 7/10, compared to every other city's 3/10.
Decades of underinvestment means that it's not as good today as it was ten years ago, or as good ten years ago as it was a few decades before that.
That said, even with all its problems, the NY metro area still has far better and more extensive public transportation than any other metro area in the country. Over a third of all subway stations in the country are located within New York City's city limits, and that's not even counting the three separate commuter train options, Amtrak, bus service, or Staten Island railway.
Isn't this a case of people glorifying the past? Are there objective metrics that demonstrate service quality has degraded (reduced train frequency, reduced amount of seats, etc...)?
Yes, there are, and the NYTimes has reported that data in previous articles from this same series.
I can emphatically state that five years ago, there was much less over crowding, more frequent trains, and less delays.
New York's current problem is that it already has too many elected officials with power that is completely unchecked and uncheckable by voters[0]. I'm not convinced that the solution to that problem is to have another person whose power is completely unchecked and uncheckable by voters.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988458
I think it's optics more than anything. NYC residents pay a ton in taxes and get little back. Our state taxes get moved upstate and our federal taxes go to poor states. I really think it's just trying to put pressure on our representatives to be a bit more "selfish" as to what happens with our taxes.
Though dated, a 2011 Rockefeller Institute study claimed nyc paid out 5% more than it got back to the rest of the state while the burbs paid out 10% more. Per capita, they claimed nyc paid out $34 more while the burbs paid out $311 more).
Income based financing schemes almost always fail in nonhomogeneous environments to be 'fair.'
I grew up in Scarsdale, your comments definitely aren't foreign to me.
> those who live in the nyc (ny) burbs subsidize your mass transit
The problem I see with this is that I struggle to consider it "your" mass transit. Both the MTA and Metro North are owned by the state. One of them has 300k daily riders, the other has 5.5m daily riders. 150k of those MN riders end up in the city everyday, so both groups are using state owned products, one group is potentially using BOTH (I always did when I commuted from Westchester to the financial district). The 4 commuter lines combined (NJTransit, PATH, LIRR, Metro North) have 1/3 the total daily ridership of the subway, but get almost double the amount of subsidies from state coffers. Growing up, I can count the number of parents who didn't commute to the city on both hands. Being wealthy enough to live in the suburbs doesn't mean your money is generated there. The median income in Scarsdale is $250k. I doubt that Scarsdale Flowers is the one lifting that average, so the people being taxed for it are the ones who actually use it anyway. I realize this is only one of the suburbs, but it's the one I'm personally familiar with.
> Income based financing schemes almost always fail in nonhomogeneous environments to be 'fair.'
I'm definitely not arguing for it. In fact, I usually argue against it. I'm just pointing out why I think the argument is being made, given that the subway isn't in as bad shape as the news makes it sound.
how do they get around in the city? public transportation
there's no us and them here
The MTA spends a disproportionate amount of money on the MetroNorth and LIRR, compared to its ridership. In terms of mass transit specifically, it's the city that's subsidizing the suburbs, not the other way around.
Wasn't uncommon for me to be stuck for 45 minutes in the same spot.
And SF is far better than say LA or Denver as far as public transit. I think you nailed it perfectly though, being “the best” carries a lot of responsibility and the MTA isn’t honoring that.
Thank god we'll be getting a new mayor.
NYC is a model of public transit from the perspective of ubiquity, feasibility, and ridership, though, and that's pretty key.
We also visited the SF Bay Area, and it was confusing as hell. The BART? The Muni? The buses? The cable cars? Who uses what? How do we get around? I need different passes? Oh, the tap card works? What's even going on?
I found the BART was very reminiscent in a lot of ways to Montreal's Metro system, but the MUNI (we took the J line? I kept calling it the JUnit, to my wife's annoyance) and it was 'fine', but only because we were a few blocks away. It felt very… rustic. Unmaintained. The raising/lowering stairs thing was a neat solution though.
In short, NYC being better than SF isn't a high bar, but I think we should all be happy that we live in cities that have such transit systems at all. Many large cities in the US don't even have public transit systems that can get people anywhere with any efficiency.
The trains are very popular, and during rush hour there might not be enough room on the train for everyone to get on.
The trains come every 3 minutes during peak hours, and less often during non-peak hours, as much as 15 minutes.
It's remarkably hard to get reliable numbers on train frequency in subway stations worldwide. However, it is generally believed that the only system in the world that gets headways smaller than 100 seconds/train is the Moscow Metro at 90--95 seconds per train = 38--40 trains per hour (tph), followed by the Jubilee line of the London Underground at 100 seconds/train = 36 tph.
While it's easy to find no shortage of sources that say that SkyTrain in Vancouver can "theoretically" run at 75 seconds/train = 48 tph, the more optimistic figures of its actual peak frequency look like 108 seconds/train = ~33 tph. Some sources I found (including the official schedule) suggest 150 seconds/train = 24 tph.
In terms of ridership, London, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, etc. are all comparable to NYC, some are just as old (e.g. London, Paris, Tokyo), and none are as broken.
The information on schedules and changes due to maintenance are overwhelming for a tourist. At nights and in weekends especially, there are often trains being rerouted in very creative ways. Though all of this information is posted, it's often hard to understand for a non-local. It often mentions station names, which mean nothing to you if you don't live here (and even if you do it's not always obvious). Luckily the locals are always happy to help you with directions, contrary to popular belief, so just ask away!
SF's public transit system (except cable cars which are mostly just preserved for tourists now) was built after the automobile, and as such it feels like an afterthought.
My daily experience on the NYC Subway is that it's an incredible marvel. [1]
[0] There was even an article on r/nyc earlier this year about how New York shouldn't get Amazon's HQ2 based on the access to transit requirement. The article argued that the transit is too bad here. That's -- that's so absurd as to be almost beyond belief.
[1] An enormous caveat here: I can walk or bike to work. I do use the subway at peak hours fairly frequently, but I'm not reliant on it or held hostage by it, as many others are.
I think what’s actually different, if we’re honest, is that middle class people have arranged their lives to rely on the train in NYC, and they’re a more vocal (or at least more likely to be heard) constituency.
If you build a transportation infrastructure that's good enough for middle class people to rely on then middle class people will come to rely on it, and if you don't then they won't.
I’m making the pretty boring argument that we shouldn’t get carried away.
Growing up in the 80s, it was dramatically more congested, slower and generally awful. So the tales of impending doom sound like drama to me.
NY politics are a carnival atmosphere right now, even by NY standards. I think these issues are getting more play as a result. It will only get worse as hostile federal policy sucks money out of Nee York.
It’s always easier to build than maintain. This happens in all institutional settings. Stuff will get worse, bonds will get paid off, and more capital dollars will be available to rebuild.
I do miss some of the better exterior graffiti of the late 70s/early 80s
However, what I uniformly hate about all modes of public transportation in the Bay Area is the casual, lethargic passengers who take their sweet sweet time to get in and out and clog the doorways. New York on the other hand was extremely courteous (in my limited experience) by on boarding and off boarding as quickly as they can.
Now it's antiquated, and keeping those one-offs going is hard. It's easier to maintain old electromechanical systems like NYC's than 1960s electronics like BART. The NYC stuff is mostly standard General Railway Signal equipment, with some Union Switch and Signal stuff. Many railways worldwide used those components. Siemens sells compatible relays.[1]
Think of where you'd be today if your transit system ran on OS/2. The NYC transit system is still running hundreds of computers on OS/2. It was the best system at the time.
[1] https://w3.usa.siemens.com/mobility/us/en/Documents/F1-F60%2...
1. Due to lack of good management and a number of structural issues, building in NYC costs about 5 to 10x more per km than other built-up cities. (E.g., $2.2 B per km in NYC vs. $230 M in Paris.) Source: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
2. There is insufficient funding available, due largely to the fact that the subway is controlled by the state (not the city), which has prevented congestion pricing to be implemented. It finally seems like the crisis may cause congestion pricing to pass, which will provide a major new dedicated funding source. The plan <http://iheartmoveny.org/> is quite good and will also dramatically reduce traffic congestion.
However, until costs are controlled, we will only be able to improve our current service, not do the major expansion that large transit deserts in and around the city need.
Now compare to Beijing, which is simultaneously building "20 different subway lines, measuring a total distance of 354.8 kilometers." That will probably cost $35 B but would cost $781 B in NYC. https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2017/07/29/beijing-metro-u...
You must not have had to come from Brooklyn to Manhattan during commute hours. Daily (or multiples times a day even) occurrence in that case. I’ll still gladly take MTA over Muni/BART any day, but NYC could definitely learn a thing or two from Hong Kong or even London’s subway systems.
How’s the L like during the summer on your way home? 110°+ platform temps weren’t uncommon back when I took it.
That said, I think the line you are on makes a big difference. My line (A/C) seems to have the worst trains as far as age / cleanliness of the ones I’ve been on. Way too infrequent during commute hours and when they do come they come in pairs or triplets. This causes the first train (and sometimes second) to be packed Tokyo style, which then causes delays for trains after it as it takes longer for folks to get on / off. If they just made them run consistent and more frequent (seriously 10-15min between groups of trains during commute hours isn’t uncommon), they’d not be overcrowded and not delay as much, but alas, scheduling seems to allude MTA.
As to other lines, 4/5/6 has decent trains and are pretty frequent, but horribly crowded during commute. 7 train (inside Manhattan anyway) is typically full (not too overcrowded), but frequency is sometimes a problem and I wish it was better aligned with the schedules of the lines which feed into it. 1/2/3 and N/Q/R aren’t bad in general usually. I’ve not taken the B/D/F/M/J/Z/G lines enough to have a fair opinion, but I usually seem to have one issue or another with them when I do end up on them (usually maintenance related lately).
service runs very well in NYC (anecdotally), but compared to cities like LA or Phoenix their trains are the haggard burro's of times long gone. Sad to say but I feel the only thing that will improve the quality of this service over time is cascading system failures similar to what BART is experiencing. Politicians are gleefully divorced from the concept of public transportation in their largest city, so until the NYC Subway begins to impact titans of industry and their ability to call upon the masses to come to work on time, its likely to remain a grisly reminder of just how real living in america can be.
A culture shift might not hurt either, although full disclosure im not entirely steeped in the culture of the big apple. Here in Los Angeles, extending our purple line train to the tune of four billion dollars seemed like a generally wise investment to everyone; the tax passed easily.
The NYC Subway is not "broken" because the stairs are in the wrong place. The NYC Subway isn't even "broken."
NYC politics is broken. Nobody is willing to spend money on important projects, the incentives for politicians simply focus too much on the short term. Changing the geometry of the stations at certain bottleneck points could have a significant effect on delays caused by overcrowding. I've noticed this sort of thing during rush hour, where a train has to sit in a station for an extra few minutes as people push in.
Reconfiguring individual stations may be a big win, because they come with only a modest one-time cost (y'know, sixty-to-a-hundred million, also known in the US as "cheap"), but result in immediate and appreciable gains in particular spots. The nature of these projects makes them easy to brand, boast, and sometimes fund, and you can do them (largely) independent from other, large-scale things you have in the pipe that will take years to come to fruition.
The U.S. prides itself on local government, private industry and so forth, public-private cooperation ideally leading to more money efficiency since private companies 'care' and governments are 'wasteful'. Great. However, some problems I've noticed here:
-- Local government is actually more inefficient. The ARC project cancelation which would have already dug a tunnel under the Hudson river between NYC and NJ in the biggest commuter hub in the country was canceled because three government organizations, NY State, NJ State and the Port Authority, couldn't agree on funding and were playing politics. The NJ governor (Christie) later allocated the moneys to lower the gas tax before his re-election campaign as well as for highway repair
-- MTA, the parent organization that runs the NYC subway system, is said to be woefully underfunded and so forth. Yet, the Port Authority, a totally unrelated organization FUNDED BY TAX MONEYS AND PUBLIC TRANSPORT TOLL COLLECTIONS, spent $4B to refurbish a single station and erect a dinosaur skeleton and called it the "World Trade Center transit hub." While the subway system this transit hub is attached to is utterly failing apart due to repairs. A strong centralized government would have made this less likely. Fulton St Station was refurbished for the cost of 1.4B, again at the same time that signals are failing and trains are breaking in other parts of the subway system this station is attached to.
How do either of these projects get away with giving billions of dollars to select contractors, to select private corporations, (st)architects and so forth? How do we ensure that someone in power didn't get in bed with one of these private developers?
-- The NYC Mayor and the NY State governor fight seemingly daily over blame for the disastrous subway system. The Mayor himself is something of a scatterbrain, getting involved in issues when he gets screamed at, while the governor cares more about his constituents upstate. Both are fairly corrupt.
There IS money, the money just goes to insane places due to the scattered players: private organizations, cross state organizations like the Port Authority, city governments, state governments, federal governments...
Isn't this one of the reasons why NYC transit construction and repair costs are so much more than places like London, where A) the system is WAY older b) the tunnels are MUCH deeper and narrower and yet C) they override these problems by establishing new lines like the Overground, the DLR and the Crossrail.
London (a city I lived in a few years) seems to be moving at a much more rapid evolutionary path than NYC, which seems like it's crumbling around us.
The NY Times started this earlier this year:
“Parts of the system are more than a century old; replacing everything would cost upward of a trillion dollars.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/nyregion/subway-service-m...
Let’s be clear, if you don’t spend money you definitely can’t fix the problem. Will only money fix it ? No, but if you need to change management, change expectations, change schedules, do that. All that will cost money as will buying new cars and new signal systems and hiring crews to install the signal systems. What’s needed to fix the system is a lot of changes and they will all cost money. But the reason the changes haven’t happened is due to money. Boston’s system has certainly suffered from lack of money. Sure they have billions, but it isn’t enough.
If you don’t have enough maintenance people to do the work, that is still a money problem. If you pay more for that job, more people will want to do that job, and then you can hire people to staff the positions correctly. It might take a few years for the next generation to come into the workforce, but I believe it can be done.
Here you go: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Great comment though.
Take for example solution #1: "Redesign stations to get more people on and off trains faster."
The text and graphics then goes on to explain some interesting issues with various stations but what solutions are the experts recommending to get more people on and off? How many more people per unit of time do they need to accommodate? This is solution #1, does that mean it's the most urgent? etc. etc.
from the article:
"Many stations like this one are not prepared to accommodate a larger volume of passengers, even if a new traffic control system allowed trains to come more frequently."
"Much of the subway’s signal system uses antiquated parts like the electromechanical relays shown above from the West Fourth Street-Washington Square station in Manhattan.
Train traffic for about two-thirds of the subway system is monitored in rooms like the one shown below at West Fourth Street. Little has changed in a century.
The old signal system uses a network of switches and cables along the track to keep trains a safe distance apart. The technology is outdated and expensive to maintain."
It strikes a chord because the suggestions offered feel like so many tech roadmap planning meetings I've been in where the technology itself is the end and not a means to an end. Without the greater context I am not sure how anyone can evaluate the suggestions to try and predict whether or not they will accomplish the stated goal.
Assume the hallways were widened, all the relays, monitoring rooms and signals were updated addressing each quote you provided. Is New York's subway fixed now? Maybe it's better for some definitions of better but I digress...