> Critics say it is bad service that is driving people away.
One datapoint: I live in Rhode Island. Recently I attended a concert in Brooklyn. The obvious way to travel there was Amtrak to Penn Station and MTA (train or bus) to the final destination. However, I was warned that MTA service is unreliable. I decided to drive. Next time I probably won't go at all.
That's really silly and a sign of how overblown this story has become (in some contexts). You would have been fine. When a system like the NYC Subway gets 20% worse for everyday commuters, that's a really big deal and something those commuters are going to talk about a lot. But a NYC Subway that's 20% worse than it was 10 years ago is still a massive, complex, incredible, useful machine, no matter how much New Yorkers complain about it.
And, so, should they complain? Yeah! There's nothing wrong with expecting more from the MTA. But these stories are generating comments like yours here and that's absurd.
On-time performance has dropped dramatically in the past ten years. In the following article, look for the graph titled, "On-time performance by line, 2007 to 2017".
Yes, and it shouldn't take more than a couple minutes of thinking about the issues to realize that most of the commentary on the topic makes very little sense. Experiential measurements aren't so easily calculated, I'd say.
Just a few examples:
- Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record, or a train that arrives on time 3 out of every 5 times and then is 20 minutes late the other two? How many articles on the subway distinguish between the two types of lateness? It matters a lot.
- You might read that Atlanta's MARTA, for example, has a better on-time performance record than the NYC Subway. Well, that's great, but it's also got rush-hour scheduled headways of 10 minutes, scheduled off-peak headways of 20 minutes or more, and no service entirely at many stations after 9PM (no trains run at all after 2AM). So something that's "late" in New York City still comes before the scheduled train in Atlanta (when the trains there come at all). [0]
- The NYC Subway also has 10 times as many stations as MARTA and 17 times as many miles of track. They say the best camera is the one you have on you. Something like that applies here, too. What's the on-time record for a train that doesn't exist?
MARTA is a random comparison, but it's not uncommon for writers of screeds about the subway to offer up comparisons to other systems devoid of any of the kind of context I provide above.
So, you know: 1) comparisons are difficult; 2) especially if you want to capture what it's actually like to use transit in the cities you're comparing. All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.
What about a train that idles for an extra 0-15 minutes, in order to make sure that it arrives on time, because there is 15 minutes of headroom baked into the schedule?
The parent poster notes that trains in Atlanta do just that.
> All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.
I don't have access to any numbers you don't. I've tried to describe the ways in which I think the numbers can be used to tell a misleading and unnecessarily apocalyptic story. If I've failed to make that case on the merits, then I'll have to live with that, but just for the record, the 20% figure I gave was plainly illustrative, not a quote of actual figures; your references to it demonstrate the power of the anchoring effect, but I'll happily clarify, again, that they were -- I think manifestly, but the communication failure is mine, if not -- randomly chosen to make a point, not culled from a stash of secret MTA data.
The mere fact that people from Rhode Island now believe that they won't be able to successfully use the subway to attend a concert is I think pretty strong evidence that the story has gotten away from us a bit. Nobody here, least of all me, wishes to downplay your commute.
That's fine - non-quantitative (a.k.a. "gut") reasoning is a valid and useful cognitive tool (in certain contexts), in fact.
If I was to give a "gut" estimate for the overall deterioration of the subway service in recent years, though -- I'd peg it at closer to 30 or 40 percent than merely 20.
So, I haven't been to New York in a while, but I'm guessing that you were poorly informed.
Usually when public transit networks start showing strain, it's during rush hours, when they're handling massive spikes in ridership. To give an example from Chicago: If you're trying to get on the train downtown at 6:00pm, you'll get on the next train, and probably get to sit in a seat. If you try to do it at 5:00pm, you stand a good chance of waiting 30 minutes for a train that you can even physically get on to. When you do, your ride will probably also take 50% longer than the 6pm ride would have. And maybe even 100% longer than a ride at 7pm would have.
You naturally get all the complaints from the rush hour riders. And yeah, if your concert were starting at 6 in the evening so that you'd have to brave rush hour traffic, then that would be a problem. But so would driving.
If, like most concerts, it was starting a bit later, you'd very likely have experienced smooth service.
> If you're trying to get on the train downtown at 6:00pm, you'll get on the next train, and probably get to sit in a seat. If you try to do it at 5:00pm, you stand a good chance of waiting 30 minutes for a train that you can even physically get on to.
What line are you describing? I take the L every day from downtown around 5 and I can reliably get on the first train and it will arrive in < 10 minutes (and there's a good chance I'll have a seat). If a train takes more than 10 minutes, it will almost certainly be packed full, but it will also almost certainly be followed by another nearly-empty train in ~1-2 minutes.
The example I had in mind was blue line northbound from Clark & Lake.
Which is admittedly the worst scenario that I could think of, and I should have said that. It gets better quickly from there. I used to get on 2 stops further south, and, yeah, at 5 I usually had no problems and a decent chance of getting a seat, too.
This all depends on the time that you get on the train. Also he was talking about C&L. It is quite possible that you could have 3+ trains go by and still not get in the train between 5-6:30pm. Often times, you'll have your back to the door. During those time's it's better to go south to come back up north. (But you didn't get that advice from me) It's rare to get a completely empty train at C&L during rush hour and there are frequent gaps that are 6+min.
Now UIC Halsted, you're very likely to get a seat, not always though.
* planned work every weekend and most late weeknights which reroutes half the trains and is described in terms guaranteed to confuse visitors. A complete map of the changed routes would help massively; instead, you get a long list of textual descriptions such as "Brooklyn-bound F trains are running express on the E track between Court Sq and W 4th St and local on the D track to Stillwell Av" which scares and confuses tourists who barely understand downtown Manhattan geography, much less how it relates to the rest of the city.
* occasional unreliability at any time of the day, typically either due to signal failures in century-old analog wiring, or because of paramedics or cops shutting down an entire station to take care of a rowdy or injured passenger.
Locals have learned to adapt. They know what the cryptic planned work descriptions mean and in which situations next station alerts are lying. They have learned to understand the static-y conductor announcements on a loud train. They know that on some lines, if you must to be at your destination on time, you ought to leave 30 minutes early just in case this ride is the 1/20 when something happens.
Visitors don't know such things, and I can empathize with their apprehension.
Why not just go to Penn Station planning on taking the train to the final destination, then Uber on the off chance there ends of being a problem with the train?
The MTA has problems, but it still usually gets you where you need to go.
> Turning things around will require a huge infusion of cash
I keep hearing this with zero justification. Why? I’m sceptical of New York’s public agencies asking for lots of cash. I assume there are legitimate projects, but the MTA has been horrible at showing the public this demanded money will be well spent.
Both things can be true. 1) It probably does cost a lot of money to increase headways, run more trains, install positive train control, and otherwise upgrade and maintain tracks; but also 2) the MTA is a bloated, wasteful organization.
I have no trouble holding both ideas in my head at once.
It's part the MTA, part the city government as a whole, and part the state government. This feels like classic "too many cooks" bureaucracy where everyone knows THEY have the right answer and everyone else at the table is conspiring against their golden plan.
I started my career working in the transportation sector, and that leaves me skeptical that it can be so simple. I've watched cost cutters at work in government transportation departments. Their MO seems to always be to cut the costs that are easy to cut so they can claim easy wins right away. Unfortunately, the costs that are easy to cut are typically things like skimping on maintenance. This leads to higher costs in the long run, but, hey, that'll take decades to come to fruition, and by then it'll be someone else's problem.
In short, the state of American infrastructure today is a result of decades upon decades of mismanagement by the cost cutters. I have a hard time believing they can also be the solution.
A good example of this is the DC Metro. It was in a complete maintenance crisis a few years ago and has been playing an extremely expensive game of catchup to avoid killing any more passengers. Service quality and price have suffered while they try to rush all of the deferred maintenance.
The DC Metro also has the same problem of being a jobs program for inner city residents, so efficiency upgrades are fought tooth and nail by the union.
There are two separate problems here: making the MTA meet demand and making it efficient.
You may not be able to achieve both goals at once. Tackling MTA efficiency will involve a lot of confrontations with the union. And you know they won't back down on a single thing, so service will degrade further.
Having said that, maybe now is the time, when things are crumbling to take them on, with the hope of having the popular will at your back.
> I keep hearing this with zero justification. Why?
I'm confident officials have neglected long term maintenance costs when planning and building all the various infrastructure of major cities. The modus operandi is always underfund the project, get people to rely on it (or at least make the case of not just throwing away the first $x when all you need is $y to complete it), beg for more funding.
Maybe the problem is NYC is an overpopulated crap-hole and there's no amount of money to fix it. Plenty of other real estate in the US that businesses and people can move to. NYC is obviously past carrying capacity if we have to resort to boring holes into bedrock to shuttle people around like rodents.
NYC's fantastic. It's one of the safest major metropolitan areas in the world filled with a tremendous variety of culture. It's the most diverse place on the planet with only London even being at a comparable level.
And the level of contempt for people riding subways? Where do you get off? Not only are they better for the environment, they're one of the great equalizers. Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day.
They get people to work during odd shifts, and allow those without so much to reach the same places those with so much can.
> And the level of contempt for people riding subways? Where do you get off? Not only are they better for the environment, they're one of the great equalizers.
I don't have contempt for people riding the subway, I have contempt for the organization that perpetrates that fraud on society.
> Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day.
At what cost? As it turns out, at great cost. Misallocation of capital: making it easier to commute into downtown areas via rail only induces rail demand and increases cost of housing. If end users were forced to pay actual costs of transportation, businesses wouldn't be able to afford keeping down town offices and would move towards worker populations, otherwise they would have to pay higher wages to maintain their labor force. Subsidizing transportation is nothing but subsidizing corporate labor.
If you think NYC is fantastic, that doesn't make my opinion any less valid.
The trains also run the other direction, you know that right? It's the same cost to commute to Far Rockaway as it is to commute to Manhattan, and there's plenty of workers out there too.
Not seeing too many big office buildings there though.
Your analysis is exactly backwards base on history. One of the main drives to create corporate campuses outside of cities was to prevent competing firms from recruiting employees. Same goes for creating company restaurants and dry cleaning etc. keep employees on your campus and a way from competition. When they work downtown and walk out into the community they bump into people randomly and those unexpected connections can create new relationships.
I don't think this is accurate whatsoever. I think the main driver of these decisions is real estate. It's simply much cheaper to build a low-rise complex on lots of acreage than it is to obtain the same square footage downtown.
However, if a corporation can reallocate labor capital into real estate, IMO what happens in the NYC area, that's what they'll do.
digitaltrees has it right - those unexpected connections, it turns out, not only form great new business relationships, but are a great source of revenue for local businesses. Trivially, you can think about a group of coworkers walking on a sidewalk and unexpectedly bumping into a cafe or boutique, making a "serendipitous" purchase they weren't otherwise planning to while on their way to a lunch meet. You don't go to a mall for that lunch meet.
Take a look at any place in America that has higher than its surrounding average real estate price, even in less heard of towns like downtown Hunstville, Alabama or Ogden, Utah - what is true about the most consistently profitable, lucrative pieces of real estate? They're home to mixed use development [1] (One case study of this effect - [2]).
It turns out, all those "new" (assumed good bc of their newness) models of urban development, with single use office OR home OR shopping zoning, with square miles on miles of tract housing, with islands of empty parking lots (for that one day a year that they're full) between huge hulking shopping centers, necessitating car use for even the smallest of toilet paper purchases... well, those ideas ran contrary to the organic structure of towns and villages for all of human history.
And while those ideas were so new and fashionable, yes, places like New York suffered. But eventually the novelty wore out. The ticky-tacky houses started looking all the same (that is, depressing - but that's my opinion).
New York didn't die in the '80s and certainly won't because of some subway hiccups. Dense urban models work. For all of human history they worked, in 1950s America, for a brief moment, some people thought they no longer did - but it looks like they still work, and will always work. And tunnels are a great way to keep that valuable mixed use real-estate - for commuters and city dwellers alike.
The subway in NYC is what makes it one of the most dynamic, attractive, and innovative cities in the US. The density also creates a critical mass of people in certain industries that drive spontaneous creation of new industry, companies, technology.
The real misallocation of resources are sleepy suburbs where people hide in their bedroom watching tv, while the city road and water infrastructure costs orders of magnitude more than the tax revenue or productive capacity of the land is capable of supporting.
“The subway service and the bus service has become unreliable enough for people to stop using it. If people aren’t using it, there’s less money, and they have to keep raising fares without delivering better service.”
I was a daily rider of the DC metro for 8 years. This is exactly what happened there. Reliability plummeted, then ridership, and all the while major fare increases.
I just commented to someone the other day- I loved how clean the metro was but hated the prices for sub-par services. I hate the distance based pricing.
If you haven't been back, I think you'd be surprised at the (weekday) reliability of the metro now. The metro is almost always terribly messed up on weekends (with single-tracking and line closings), but they make a damn good effort to get weekday commuters to work on time. I've been living in the DC area for the past two years and it seems like they have really been making the metro a priority. I have a transfer during my commute during rush hour times, and I hardly ever have to wait more than five minutes for either of my trains.
I second this. I don’t use Metro often, but my wife commutes by Metro almost every day. There was a period of a couple of years where she’d pretty routinely get home an hour or two late because of some huge fuckup with the trains, but recently it’s been very smooth.
I think this is connected to the constant weekend problems you mentioned. The trouble before was that they weren’t maintaining the system properly because they didn’t want to cause disruptions. They finally realized that maintenance isn’t actually optional and started doing what it takes to get it done. The system doesn’t have enough capacity to have sections out of service for maintenance without major disruptions, but at least now they happen at a time of their choosing.
When I was back in DC a few months ago the system seemed to be about 30% closed, some short-term closures and some multi-week closures. I realize the closures are due to the accidents and deaths and are necessary for safety. I haven't heard the words "reliable" and "Metro" in the same sentence for many years.
Seems unlikely to plummet to ruinous levels. Ridership has risen by 800 million people since 1990, but there's fewer miles of track and only a few dozen cars. It seems that the system is strained well beyond its limits and that it might be possible that having fewer people use the subway might allow a chance to fix it? The issue seems to be largely administrative based on every article I've read. There needs to be an agreement by everyone on what how to move forward, and then for that plan to be implemented uninterrupted until its completion. But good luck with that since the mayor of NYC is basically a governor and the governors of NY always seem to butt heads with them.
It's not so much that the rail itself was destroyed, but that the tunnels and stations have been closed for various reasons. Usually it's down to either a new replacement station being built, consistent signal issues, or some other passenger safety concern. Of course there have been closures due to the maintenance gap, but those aren't the bulk.
This claim I found really confusing. The subway has been more crowded the last 5 years than I've ever seen it; that's an anecdote of course, but if you search "NYC subway crowding," you'll see the MTA has been claiming that the subway is more crowded than ever these days. Not sure how they explain that discrepancy.
As for the alternative options like Lyft and Uber they mentioned, those are only viable for privileged upper middle class commuters, so it really can't go that far to explain a claimed drop in ridership. And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.
And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.
Genuine question: why is that? I'm not familiar with the mechanics of the NYC Metro area, but I'm familiar with SF's BART, which certainly claims to have statistics on this -- about 22,000 fare jumps a day, as compared to around 433,000 trips per weekday, meaning about 5% of riders are freeloaders. (They claim this costs about $25M a year.) The San Francisco Chronicle did their own reporting on this, and at the very least it backed up the assertion there were a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.
Ahh those extrapolations. Just like MPAA and their piracy spiel. Multiply 22`000 * 365 days * $3 and you get their $25M. Except a lot of those people simply would never pay the actual fare and the cost of moving additional weight is negligible, so the number is way inflated.
You're comparing people who pirate media that they'd never have actually bought to... people who take BART trips for free that they've never have taken otherwise? You're going to have to work harder to make this comparison work for me, sorry.
I suspect a lot of the decrease happens at night. Late trains are a bit of a Russian roulette. If you're going from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan, it might be faster and more reliable to share a car with friends or strangers.
"The subway has been more crowded the last 5 years than I've ever seen it"
There was an article in the New York Times in May, titled "How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway Into Crisis" that claimed higher ridership is not the main cause for the recent decline:
> For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told us that rising ridership and overcrowding were to blame. Yet ridership actually stayed mostly flat from 2013 to 2018 as delays rose, and the authority recently acknowledged that overcrowding was not at fault.
That statement doesn't contradict yours (shakes fist at well-qualified statement), but I found it surprising when I came across it and I imagine others might as well.
NYC is nowhere in the mess that DC is in. Mostly, because Manhattan, at least, is well-shaped to be navigated efficiently by rail. Because of height restrictions, DC has a relatively sprawled, 2-dimensional core, which means many common routes require transfers (also, the metro being so deep means a nontrivial amount of time is spent on escalators). For me, I often faced the decision of "$6, 10 minute Uber vs. $3.50 1 hour metro". Manhattan is long and skinny -- there's almost always a 0-transfer ride that can get you from point A to B + the wait is almost never longer than 10 mins. Every time I've said "I'm running late, I'll take a cab", it turned out to be a mistake. The situation is certainly different in the boroughs, though.
I hear that a lot about the DC height restrictions, but I wonder if it might not have the opposite effect. Plenty of European cities have tons of density in a low-rise skyline, such as Paris. I wonder if height restrictions actually encourage the 10-story pedestrian-friendly, urban core to keep expanding into the single family home residential areas.
As soon as you cross the Potomac into Virginia there may be high-rises, but everything is built for cars, not transit.
Also, quite a bit of the metro system is cut and cover and quite shallow. A few spots were tunneled deeper to cross waterways.
The ridership is definitely not plummeting. A lot of people have started moving to deeper parts of Brooklyn and Queens because the rents are rising, so they depend on trains even more. The only people who've stopped using trains and buses on a regular basis, are people who can afford Uber or Lyft.
The article briefly mentioned competition from ride sharing services but I wonder to what extent it's made an impact.
Anecdotally, given how cheap Uber and Lyft are in Manhattan (typically $4-5 for a shared ride), I often find myself opting for that instead of dealing with the hassles of the subway system. Both are unreliable when it comes to timeliness, as ride sharing services often take longer than expected (especially Uber Pool and Lyft Line). And as painful as the subway system can sometimes be, I do appreciate the rich history and incredible performances you'll often come across in subway stations. I'm torn, to be honest.
Yeah, I'd be very interested to learn about anything about the sensitivities of ridership to other external variables in general.
Looking at the article's linked presentation [1] and the MTA's most recent financial plan [2] it seems like all the hurt is coming from really huge declines in projected revenues - labor costs seem to be growing pretty reasonably but there's basically zero projected growth in fares. If someone can give me a layman's explanation of what "Capital and Other Reimbursements" is, which accounts for about a $500mm decline between 2019 and 20222, I'd be much obliged.
So I am curious how sensitive riders are to the increased service problems, how much that makes them switch out, to get some sense as to how much the signal improvements will help solve this problem. Also how much to a fare hike, which seems like the more straightforward answer in a vacuum (i.e. other than taxes or other government infusions). The MTA says in [1] that even "draconian service reductions would have a relatively small impact on the deficit."
Reducing service, unless you want to do it really painfully, is unlikely to do much in the long run. A good chunk of the costs are employee related (health/pensions) and debt service. The MTA shouldn't default on its bonds, and in NYS you can't constitutionally modify government pensions after they've been given. And the MTA hires as many drivers and buys trains and buses based on peak demand; cutting off-peak is unlikely to do much since you wouldn't be reducing the absolute number of drivers you need.
In fact, cutting off-peak services would probably worsen the budget outlook long-term, since the marginal cost of an off-peak service is very low.
I think ride sharing services will be facing their own reckoning soon. With so many cars and the prices so low, it’s not sustainable for anyone to make a living. And the medallions were created to address both this problem and the problem of too many cars on the roads, which is also turning into a huge problem.
ride sharing services are the new bogeyman and politicians and others are simply relying on the old mechanism of, say it enough times and people will believe its true.
they love to tout huge mileage numbers because it sounds impressive but when compared to the whole of what is driven its one percent or less. better yet a large amount of ride sharing is off peak.
the reason of course is money, the subsidies to mass transit systems are in the tens of billions which in turn allow for existing systems to not have to be competitive or even maintain their lines because they know they can grab more cash. if anything beyond the hundreds of billions in deferred maintenance many light rail systems have there is nearly similar in pension liabilities.
They are already doing this for several lines. The L wasn't running on weekends at all in November for them to do repairs.
NYC is unique in that there are LOTS of people whose working hours fall into that range and they rely on the subway. Just shutting down the whole system is unfeasible.
NYC is unique as it's always be the center of the universe, even it's just 8M people live here, and other cities, like Tokyo/Hong Kong/Beijing/Shanghai has more population that it
You're sadly mistaken if you think a New York, one of the largest and busiest cities in human existence, is "just another large City", and that the solution to their transportation woes is to just lock it down and work on it.
it's extremely small compared to population of Beijing or shanghai for instance and Beijing shut down subway around 11PM. but yeah people in NY are the only ones working in night, common, you really believe it or you don't have passport?
Shutting the subway down at night for maintenance and running night buses as a replacement is a pretty straightforward method that other, similarly large cities are using successfully.
i dont think it's really that simple. even it was i don't think the decision is that easy anyway.
it's important to think about who your decisions affect, even if they may be a minority (which is bigger than 0.1%). why is it okay to put more burden on the people who already have the most burden as it is?
NYC is the only city which has such requirement and have to provide subway to support them?
How many other cities provide same 24/7 subway transit?
why the other cities don't provide such service?
The other cities don't have people work so late?
How does those people commute?
This is why other cities have shitty transit. Commutes can't be looked at as the only purpose of a transit system. Especially in NY, it's the PRIMARY mode of transportation for a lot of people. Making it shitty outside of commute hours is not an option.
"This is why other cities have shitty transit."?? If NYC continue with current shitty schedule, the subway would be worse and worse, which means less and less commuters will rely on it, and eventually it will be closed as worthless. Will you be happier? As at that time, nobody will benefit. Be more practical, gentleman! We are living in 2018, there is lot of proving that we should optimize a system by reducing the bottleneck. For those 0.1% commuters, they don't nee the whole subway system to support them, they can take bus/shuttle or even uber, which will save millions of dollars for the whole system, and also improve the rush hour transit much much better.
I was actually really surprised when I first found out that subway systems in many large systems shut down at night. I live in a modestly-sized city (Dresden, Germany, ~500k inhabitants), and the local transport authority prides itself on operating nearly the entire tram network (plus some important bus services) 24/7. Just this year, they have actually increased the schedule density during weekend nights. Trams now run every 30 minutes instead of every 60 minutes (which is still the rhythm on weekday nights).
Not surprised. Not only are we lacking in physical infrastructure, but also technological infrastructure. I still don't understand how we do not have stations like in developed Asian countries like Japan or Hong Kong. The trains are "one" unit and the stations are doubled door with people at each station assisting (or ticketing..) you if needed. The train practically drive themselves. The conductor is there for emergency purposes. We didn't even have speed regulator installed until recently (and not all trains have them!) until a bunch of trains kept on crashing because of human error. We spend billions on ONE new station, but we can't invest a couple billion to fix the infrastructure.
Hong Kong and Nanjing subway systems are spectacular. I dont speak or read the language and never once did I get lost because there are super easy to understand signs _everywhere_ and usually an electronic map that indicates the station you just left and the one you're going to, above all the doors to the cars inside. Never once gotten lost, embarrassed i can't say the same for BART.
The problem seems fixable, but as others have said, people will have to take some lumps.
A certain political figure with strong (both bad and good) ties to NYC has harped for a couple of years about a federal infrastructure bill. I think the phrase "third world" was used to describe the problem.
No reason why America's Greatest City (tm) could not wring a couple of bil out of the feds to start upgrading their subways. Move back to the first world, you might say.
In turn, because we're talking about a transaction, the MTA might also need to move out of a "third world" mentality. We can safely assume some of their payroll is spent on political favors. Maybe this "death spiral" talk will motivate the agency to make a least a token gesture towards good use of their riders dollars.
Not to get super political, but the concept of NY/NJ getting any transit infrastructure-related federal funds was nixed late last year in retribution against Sen. Schumer for... something?
There's another option: disband the MTA Union, the primary driver of operations costs. They have blocked technology and safety upgrades for decades to keep 'those darn computers and robots from taking jobs from poor workers just trying to make a living'.
Paying conductors a living wage isn't nearly as expensive to the agency (and the state, and we the taxpayers and riders) as mismanaged and corruptly nepotistic multi-billion dollar contracts for construction.
On the other hand, paying living wages to thousands of unnecessary workers is quite expensive, regardless if they are employees or contractors.
Unions work on both goals simultaneously, increasing wages but also providing job security to their base, inserting strong restrictions on who can perform certain labors etc. The more employees, the higher the power of the union, it's not like a competitor could spring up and kill their host.
It's not a white/black issue, laborers need protection but should not use a privileged position in the economy to seek a rent at the expense of everybody else.
The MTA's union has kept unneeded workers employed. One of the main issues is having two people per train employed when almost every other transit system in the world uses only one person per train.
On top of this, but actively lobbying against having driverless trains and other cost-saving technologies leaves NYC with the most expensive and antiquated system in the world
But isn't this exactly what you're supposed to do in capitalism? Use your privileged position in economy to earn money (by definition at the expense of other people)?
Now, I agree that it's not a very moral position, but we don't expect property owners in SF to keep rents reasonable. They should charge as much as they can, that's the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective!
The thing about this is that the MTA and NYC Subway are NOT for-profit businesses. They're part of the public sector and shouldn't be held to a profit motive. Similarly, the Unions connected to City transportation should recognize that the system they're vampirically draining isn't about profit, and working for it should be in the mindset of a public service, not a 'get rich quick' scheme.
Capitalism (idealized) is when you use get an advantage by selling superior goods or services, while competing with others, without leveraging any state-given privilege.
We need (even) more capitalism in the US, if anything.
Yes, L line in NYC is automatic train control system. If one is to walk to the end of every L train platform, one would see a sign that says "Automated Train Control System is in Effect"
It requires conductors because of the union contract requires them. Not only it requires an engineer "driving" the train (aka pushing a button "I'm here") but also the second one looking to make sure that the train doors can be closed ( or closing them on the person )
So just on the L train MTA can cut 50% of the conductors by fully engaging automated train control and merging door checker engineer duties with the "I'm here" engineer duties.
* Unionized workers make very good money in New York.
* Unions are a primary political driver behind those expensive contracts.
* There's more to unions than conductors. Construction and maintenance, for example.
* The unions routinely put up strong opposition to any meaningful expense or quality control. They also strongly oppose any modernization attempts that might threaten their jobs. They've opposed electronic signaling and control for decades. The worse the subways are, the better it is for them.
* Unions are politically untouchable. No matter what the consequences for the public, people are willing to leap to the defense of the noble workingman. Actually, the noble workingman who needs a "living wage" is riding the subways, not maintaining them. The poor and desperate are found among the five million people who ride the subway every day. Transportation is a public good. It shouldn't be beholden to a small group of highly paid laborers.
* Unionized workers make very good money in New York.
I didn't believe a friend of mine who only finish college was making $218,000 a year basically for early morning train track cleanups (device to pickup trash, stay away from 3rd rail), until I saw his bi-weekly paycheck with my own eyes. He's been doing that for last 5 years and they hire more people to do the same. What an insult to anyone with MBA, PhD., anyone pretty much who doesn't work for Union.
Can you imagine the bargaining power that tech workers would have if they unionized? Our industry relies on tech workers for training and hiring, so hiring scabs during a strike would be basically impossible.
That's the funny part, he is really the bottom of the food chain. Super anti-social he does his job and goes home period. Its just he has been there all these years and seen raise after raise when union got bigger chunks of money to spend. There is nothing more to the story I'm afraid.
The only reason the union is untouchable is because anti-union legislation entrenched old unions by making new unions impossible. Get rid of anti-union laws, watch as people can now join a competing different union or make their own union under the same job. Then unions actually have to work to exist, rather than being co-opted by business managers who are only seeking to earn a profit for themselves with the actual workers making up the union having no choice other than pay or completely abandon unions altogether.
Additionally, if we brought back meta-unions like the IWW, which were able to negotiate multiple industries in parallel and cause policy changes, then unions wouldn't have to resort to holding on to unnecessary jobs to protect the livelihoods of their workers. They could just make sure that an allied union is ready to take them instead.
Employee costs are 60% of the expenses for the MTA [1] and employees are making $30/hr + generous pension and medical benefits[2], I'm not sure how you can possibly justify your position.
That being said, paying union construction workers $1k/day (!) to do nothing is pretty egregious as well [3]
i think that's literally ones of the objectives of under-funding. then privatise. then monopoly rents for those that can own shares. while still under-investing - who cares about trains? just uber a private jet/helicopter.
You have a source for any of that? It's one thing to say labor costs are a primary driver of costs. It's quite another so say Labor Union costs are the primary driver.
Salaries are a huge contributor to the budget, and there are many roles, starting with conductors, that are unnecessary or could be modified/retrained.
The transit union is pretty notorious and well documented in NYC.
There’s also some arcane areas of NY law that drive labor costs dramatically in NYC versus other places. I think a tunnel boring machine in Paris (hardly corporate paradise) operates with something like 80% less manpower than the NYC equivalent.
Unions are definitely the primary driver. Construction unions in New York are using current contracts to pay for their pension liabilities. In other words, taxpayers today are paying for work that was done 30 years ago. This guy is sort of irritating if you have to read him for more than a few hours, but his blog is full of evidence and analysis on this topic.
This article is about capital costs, not labor costs.
>One point construction experts are making, however, is that taxpayers are paying premiums for these public projects since they aren’t being done open shop. The Empire Center report calculated that the government ends up paying 25 percent more for public projects in New York City because of the high prevailing wages.
This is the cost no one wants to talk about.
Good! Living in NYC costs more than living just about anywhere in the USA. Well over 25% more than where I live, a top 50 metro.
"disband" a union without considering the consequences or alternative ways of ameliorating a problem is unfortunately what I've come to expect on highly up-voted, top-level comment here when it comes to matters of public policy. This is a more complicated issue than you presume.
Over the summer The New Yorker had a story on the president of the NYC Transit Authority. Entitled Can Andy Byford Save The Subways[1]? I found it interesting. They had a rather optimistic take, but this article 4 months later makes me think its not going well.
60 Minutes also profiled Andy recently. They even show a machine (over 100 years old) to move train switches, by manually pulling antique levers. Scary to think how these things operate.
The MTA claims that New York City's transit system doesn't have enough funding to keep up with requirements. Critics of the MTA claim that the transit system has more funding than ever, and just isn't keeping up because of some vague inefficiencies or incompetencies.
This is the exact same argument that we have when it comes to education, health care, defense, and so forth. Some argue that it's because government spending is inherently inefficient, and while that may be true, that doesn't explain how governments outside of the United States still seem to be a lot more efficient than governments inside the United States, nor does it explain similar phenomena in things like housing.
This seems like a very broad problem that is currently beneath the public consciousness. SSC's "Considerations on Cost Disease" (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...) is the first general discussion I've found of this, though Scott Alexander cites a paywalled Tyler Cowen piece in Bloomberg.
(Fair warning: while SSC doesn't mention defense spending as an example of this, the US has a ridiculously high defense budget without actually having the quantity or quality of troops and ships and aircraft that such a budget would imply. If China's defense budget were the same as ours, they would whip our ass in a conventional war.)
Whatever the shared root cause or causes are, they need to be addressed. Just giving MTA, Medicare, the Pentagon, universities, etc. more and more money isn't going to be sustainable. And, despite the ramblings of certain conspiratorially-minded folk, I also don't really think this is inflation in disguise, because then you'd also have to explain why there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the costs of e.g. basic groceries.
I don't have any answers here; I just don't think we're asking the right questions if we just restrict the discussion to the specific areas where we see this happen.
When I see stories like this one I take it with a grain of salt because I'll be the MTA and state legislature are basically just fighting their budget battle in the media. If the MTA makes a big stink in the media, they can swing voters to demand more funding and more restrictions on ride sharing.
The US really does have a problem, and it seems to be related to particularly inefficient and uncompetitive contracting and caused by poor governance structures. The fact this battle has to happen in the media at all instead of having a clear chain of decision-making is evidence something is wrong.
I’m not sure how you can establish a “clear chain of decision-making” for public spending that doesn’t involve the public. At the very least, when the Grand Administrator for Public Transporation Spending in the Greater Tri-State Area is standing for re-election, or when the elected officials who appointed the Grand Administrator are up for re-election, this becomes a political issue and hence there is an incentive for one side or the other to get their point of view published in the media, so why not get out there ahead of time?
Anecdotally, it sure seems to me like one of the biggest political issues in, say, the UK is whether the NHS is over or underpaying staff, whether they will have more or less money under Conservative policies or Labour policies, and so forth.
The US has multiple levels of mutually distrustful and uncooperative governments, and at many of those levels, high levels of direct democracy especially when it comes to budgetary issues. So there is some waste there.
It’s a very simple story. Health costs increase 15%/yr, and hiring slowed in the 1990s, leading to more overtime, and poor labor negotiations allowed MTA staff to apply overtime to pensions.
When you look at the NY State workforce, more effective negotiation essentially eliminated overtime, and you just don’t see the pension padding that you see with MTA. Most of the state workforce is in the provincial lands upstate and the unions are pretty weak.
Additionally, with trains, legacy regulations allow for systematic abuse of disability. Not sure about subways, but at one point 97% of LIRR retirees were getting more expensive disability pensions.
The United States had a different path to development than most other developed countries. How different, is a theme developed in an essay by Samuel Huntington from the 1960s: Political Modernization: America vs. Europe. In a nutshell: the US never underwent a period of state centralization, like that associated with the age of absolutism in Europe.
This is good in some ways — effective bureaucracies got their start as support for monarchial ambition, in an era of unprecedented government expenditure and military devastation — but it means the US never developed a strong, effective state, either bureaucratically or socially. The US retains many of what Huntington calls “Tudor Institutions” — institutions like a powerful court system that can effectively determine public policy, a decentralized approach to military forces (including the right to bear arms), and the sometimes handicapping balance of power among the different branches of government and the states. When absolutism collapsed in absolutist countries, all the decentralized institutions had been cleared away; but the bureaucracies survived, and with them a strong civil service tradition (modeled on military service), a notional trust in government, and a wide variety of effective and efficient public agencies.
That might explain cost disease in the public sector, but I don’t know if it’s sufficient to explain cost disease in housing, higher education, or the privatized parts of the health care industry. Unless you want to punt and blame bad government for all those things, which isn't an indefensible position. For example, in health care, the US is very efficient in fields like LASIK (which isn't covered by most public or private insurance) and has occasional counterexamples to cost disease like the Oklahoma City Surgery Center (http://reason.com/blog/2017/01/27/what-happens-when-doctors-... -- warning: libertarian bias).
Still, it’s a very fascinating phenomenon. The US is culturally and constitutionally more robust against tyrannical government, but at the expense of undermining the possibility for effective government. This really gets at the root of some of the discussion about American exceptionalism, too.
The US is culturally and constitutionally more robust against tyrannical government, but at the expense of undermining the possibility for effective government.
This doesn't necessarily mean we can't have effective social services, though -- it's just that they would not be government agencies. Planned Parenthood, which often functions in the face of considerable government opposition, is a great example of an effective and dependable public service. So is the National Rifle Association, which is primarily concerned with maintaining ranges and training programs for police and military as well as civilian use. They aren't businesses but they aren't part of the government either.
Huntington discusses the medieval structure as one of a "harmony of government and society". Perhaps in the US we are trying too hard to get our government to do things it was not meant to do. It doesn't mean there is nothing to do.
Regarding That might explain cost disease in the public sector, but I don’t know if it’s sufficient... and what follows, it's worth considering that the US struggles to get the private and public part right, when a strong institution is needed.
When we get more government in the US, we usually don't get a powerful and effective public institution, responsible for delivering a service directly to the people, staffed with dedicated public servants. Instead, we generally get a tangle of regulation and a large private industrial complex.
A major exception to this -- though they are becoming less so -- are the various branches of the military. They overlap with one another and thus come into conflict; but all soldiers are dedicated public servants.
Immediately adjacent to the military is the US arsenal system, or military industrial complex, a web of not-really-competing companies that the DoD tries to manage via complex and demanding contracts.
While looking for more information, I found this article [1] which gives more detail into the costs of the MTA compared to other cities. Regarding operator efficiency:
> The number of annual revenue car-miles per subway employee in New York was 14,000 in 2010. In Chicago this number is somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 ... On Tokyo’s Metro, the comparable figure is about 18,500.
serious q: what alternatives exist besides buses and taxi/rideshare? Is walking/scootering a material number of people? If not, why about taxing rideshares to fund the subway?
Most NYC residents don't have walkable commutes, especially those living in middle or lower income neighborhoods that are generally further from the city center. The city is too large, and not particularly pedestrian friendly in the outer boroughs.
FWIW Biking has become more viable in recent years, with a good amount of bike lane coverage even in the outer boroughs, but that's still not viable for the less physically able, and I don't know if it's actually cheaper than public transit once you factor in bike equipment/maintenance costs and increased travel times. Also the weather gets fairly extreme in both the summer and winter.
Taxing rideshares sounds like a good idea, though I'm sure Uber would fight like hell against it.
When even the NYT is willing to implicitly criticize unions, you know it's gotten bad:
Even in the face of the financial crisis and budget shortfalls, the M.T.A. has given concession after concession to its main labor union.
Members of the Transport Workers Union got a total of 19 percent in pay raises between 2009 and 2016, compared with 12 percent for the city’s teachers union over the same period.
The labor contracts also gave members lifetime spousal health benefits and free rides on the Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road. (They already were allowed to ride the subway for free.)
Particularly insane:
Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually.
A quick look at glassdoor.com for MTA transit jobs [1], I'm seeing drivers and conductors making ~$22/hour. Presumably this is an entry level rate. Some searching points to a high of ~$30/hour.
Project managers and programmers, of course, are making >$100,000 k. I have doubts that they are represented by the union, though. Of course, quietly lumping their salaries in with the blue-collar folks pushes a particular political narrative.
It seems that if you really want to trim the fat at the MTA, cut wages for the white-collar, un-unionized workers.
Base salaries probably give an especially incomplete picture of total compensation for union workers, where overtime pay can be 4x your base, and benefits are nearly "cop from the 50s" insane.
If you're doing surprise holiday night-shift overtime, you should probably be getting paid 3x your base rate.
Comparing the annual salary of someone who clocks in their 9-5, and goes home on Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to someone who is doing 60 hours a week, twenty of them from 3 am to 9 am, on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday... Is comparing apples to oranges. [1] But it sure drives the outrage! Look, and be outraged at the annual take-home of that bus driver! Ignore the part where he worked like a dog, and gave up all life outside work for it!
Rates for hour worked, in equivalent conditions are the only fair comparison. And, unsurprisingly, they aren't high for MTA employees - especially in a city as outrageously expensive as NYC.
If you want to stop paying public servants overtime, then don't expect public servants to work outside of core business hours.
[1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period. Overtime, even paid overtime, is incredibly shitty, doubly so for holiday and night shift work, triply so for holiday night shift work. People should be compensated more for doing the same job at 2 am on Christmas Saturday, then for doing a 9-5 on Tuesday. [2]
[2] If your job expects regular unpaid overtime from you, you should either have an ownership stake in it, or get a new job, or have a really high on-paper salary.
>> [1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period.
At least half of tech workers I know do unpaid overtime. Almost all are on at-will contracts where they can be laid off anytime and I know almost none who have lifetime-final-year salary pension plans.
1. That overtime is usually rare. Half of all tech workers don't have to be at work for every night shift, through holidays, and weekends. The buses, on the other hand, have to keep running, even after 5 PM on a Friday rolls around.
1.1. Even if you're an auxiliary on-call, you only need to work if something comes up. You don't need to be physically working, all through the night.
1.2. If you're constantly crunching, every week, you need to find another job, or demand non-meaningless equity, or higher wages, then your tech-worker peers, who do their 9-5. Most mature tech companies are full of people who do their 9-5. They employ hundreds of thousands of tech workers.
2. Tech workers are a tiny subset of the working population.
2.1. They also have much higher on-paper compensation then their similarly-trained peers in other fields (Bachelor's degree, and 0-5 years work experience), and even despite the occasional overtime, much higher hourly rates.
While it does not surprise me that compensation is higher for NYC transit workers wrt national average, it is still striking that the difference is so large. I imagine the avg income in NYC is not >55% more than the national average.
That's because the parent poster's numbers are heavily massaged, and include non-union, and executive compensation. Average salaries for people actually operating the trains are ~$22-30/hour.
I'm guessing the pension plan and healthcare inflate the total compensation figure quite a lot.
Basically these guys aren't getting their future screwed so they're an outlier. Same problem the Post Office has. When you aren't allowed to skimp on the perks and pass the buck to the government of the future you don't look very competitive.
The article is 90% on the political mismanagement, but you instead focus on the workers with little influence making $150k in NYC, much of which is from working overtime well past 40 hours in a mostly mindless job.
My favorite line is: "In one particularly egregious example, Mr. Cuomo’s administration forced the M.T.A. to send $5 million to bail out three state-run ski resorts that were struggling after a warm winter."
People say "oh, but diverting tax dollars from MTA, etc." The NYT pegs that at about $1.5 billion over two decades (since Pataki). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... That's $75 million per year, a drop in the bucket in comparison. About enough to build a mile of subway line.
The NYC MTA has a lot of workers who do enormous amount of overtime, which explains the high pay. Add that a good percentage of employees will be relatively specialized trades.
A cursory search shows a train driver making $31/hr, which doesn't seem excessive.
I am also wary of the tactic of showing MTA workers as over-paid compared to a notoriously underpaid profession (e.g. teachers, who in this case held barely above inflation).
That’s fair - and again think it’s a laudable goal.
It used to be that if you worked in the public sector you forwent a market rate salary in exchange for job security and a secure pension. Public sector employees are now making market wages + extremely valuable benefits which in turn are bankrupting municipalities.
In this context how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic, that his taxes need to go up in order to pay for the extremely generous union benefits of a public sector mechanic (who may make more than him)?
Lastly I would argue that municipalities have something of a fiducuiary duty to tax payers to get value for their tax dollar spent - rather than rewarding a voter block at tax payer expense.
How do you know what is a "market wage" for a NYC subway worker? It's not like you can compare them to someone doing the same job in the private sector.
>how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic [...]
How do you tell a tax paying public sector mechanic that they're going to lose their pension and health insurance?
That's not the point - if you are comparing wages you need to take into account benefits. $30/hour might not be great by itself, but $30 + $10/hour in benefits is.
A pension is directly interchangeable with the 15% of wages you would otherwise need to save for retirement. Maybe less, to account for the (very high) risk of governments defaulting on their pension obligations.
I don't have a horse in this race, but remember that what looks "generous" to you in New York City is considered "table stakes for a civilised society" in Europe.
The NYC system isn't composed of "zones" like the systems in such cities as London and Paris. Essentially, once you pay your $2.75 you're free to travel to any subway station in the system. There's also a bus system with limited transfers.
It's a flat rate to get to any transit station in the city, no matter how far away. In NYC, the neighborhoods at the edge of the transportation network have historically been less wealthy, so this is a nice pro-economic mobility thing, and pretty unique among transportation networks. I expect people to say that this should change, but I think it's probably part of new york's secret sauce for economic success.
Public transit shouldn't be expensive. It shouldn't pretty much ever run outside the red. The whole point of it is to incentivize its use and promote efficient means of travel. The only reason to charge at all is to disincentivize unnecessary consumption of it.
If you are doing city planning you want as many people on the Subway as you can get. It enables greater density at ground level and is much cheaper to maintain (if you maintain it) than overcongested road networks and the required parking.
It's an odd and funny argument to make that your product is working well if it's always on fire or broken, which you would think an HN commenter like a sysadmin would understand.
It just seems the margins for error get ever thinner as your system scales. Other systems have figured this out, like Tokyo where they change over a major-use track in one night. Meanwhile, MTA shuts down the L for 15 months.
Obviously taxes. Those who benefit most from public transit are those least able to afford it, but making the cost baked in to the wealth of the people can driven even someone with a personal driver to maybe fathom using the tube instead once in a while if its borderline free.
>Betting someone clever on HN could invent a new signalling system for far less than $40 billion, perhaps $4 billion.
Is this a satirical comment? It doesn't matter how easily a clever HN reader could devise a new, greenfield signaling system, you can't just build and cutover to a new subway signaling system in one of the world's densest cities, atop an existing subway with over 100 years of accrued legacy signaling technologies. The MTA has tried to modernize it's signaling system twice, and each initiative was a multi-decade, multi billion dollar morass. It's just not a problem that can be solved by throwing a shiny new framework at it - not that many real world problems can be.
The US had a very different path to modernization than most other developed countries, because it never underwent absolutism.
The typical effect of absolutism was to introduce an efficient and effective civil service, as part of the general centralization of authority. Absolutist states were monarchial, militaristic states; the combination of taxation and destruction was hard to endure and eventually they had to transition to something else as a result of revolution or defeat. After either event, though, the civil service stuck around and with it a norm of publicly provided services.
The US got off the train at just about the time that absolutism was getting going in Europe -- indeed, because it was getting going in Europe -- and thus retains a decentralized -- not necessarily selfish -- structure and outlook more characteristic of medieval Europe. These "Tudor Institutions" are discussed by Huntington in Political Modernization: America vs. Europe: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Huntington%20Political%20Mo...
The A/C/J/Z lines still contain R32 cars, which were built 54 years ago, and are 20 years past their service life. These cars were built before the moon landing, have terrible brakes, have terrible air conditioning, and are, generally speaking, sweltering rattly deathtraps.
The Second Avenue line is 100 years in the making and has a grand total of...drum roll...3 stations. That opened in 2017.
But hey, they're getting WiFi in the tunnels and installing flatscreen TVs in the stations. Three cheers for more ad space! Personally, I'd rather have less station closures, less delays, and less stopping-and-waiting-20-minutes because of track congestion.
> WiFi in the tunnels and installing flatscreen TVs ... less station closures, less delays, and less stopping-and-waiting-20-minutes because of track congestion
Fair point. How about a drain/pump system to prevent stations from flooding every time it rains? Or cleaning the tracks more frequently to reduce fires? Or fixing the broken intercoms in the cars, so I can at least be warned about surprise service modifications?
Mobile reception and wi-fi on stations, and displays with helpful info and arrivals / departures are very welcome additions, and likely did not cost a lot.
Consumer-grade connectivity within tunnels is likely piggy-backed on the connectivity required for the trains infrastructure. Currently the subway operates a system from 1930s to control the lights and detect train positions. It is based on mechanical / magnetic relays, and is prone to break often.
Replacing that with redundant modern electronics and fiber optics wold increase MTBF dramatically, lowering maintenance costs and wait times. One thing that the current antiquated system is limiting is train speed. Trains used to be faster, but were slowed down because of safety reasons. If the new connectivity allows them to run 30% faster again (or even faster, where the tracks allow), that would be a huge win.
(Written on a subway train crawling through the ancient tunnels.)
> Mobile reception and wi-fi on stations, and displays with helpful info and arrivals / departures are very welcome additions, and likely did not cost a lot.
Installing countdown clocks on only the lettered subway lines cost $209 million. This doesn't include the numbered lines which have had them for about 10 years which also cost hundreds of millions. In all the project took 29 years. [1]
If you want to know how much it cost to install WiFi is was budgeted for $200 million and ended up at around $300 million. [2]
Remember how that healthcare.gov Website cost hundreds of millions and was a failure? It cost $250 million and came with a $75 million maintenance cost. And then a small group came in at the end and fixed it for $4 million with yearly maintenance of $1 million? Well, the MTA has a ton of these projects.
> If you want to know how much it cost to install WiFi is was budgeted for $200 million and ended up at around $300 million.
Except that none of this money came from the MTA. The complete project was funded by private entities. Most of the cost was passed through to the four major wireless carriers. Those carriers continue to pay, on a monthly basis, for their ability to offer services in the Subway and the MTA receives portion of that payment. So, from the MTA's perspective, this project generates revenue. Same goes for a number of similar projects.
The Second Ave line is a disaster like you'd expect in any multi-billion-dollar infrastructure in the US, but it's not fair to call it "100 years in the making". It was proposed and planned 100 years ago, but cancelled. Then they worked on it for three years in the 70s, but the recent work wasn't begun until 2007. Again, still a disaster, but an order of magnitude less than how "100 years in the making" makes it sound. They weren't working on it steadily since 1919 :)
This is a really depressing story to read. I've always believed that a good indicator of a country's health, is its ability to tackle complex large-scale projects. Projects that require coordination on multiple fronts: politics, bureaucracy, technical-know-how, civic sacrifice. In the old days when all this infrastructure was built in the first place, we showed our ability to do so. But now, we've gotten to the point where even maintaining it is proving too challenging. When you look at other countries like Singapore, China, Korea and Japan, it's clear that our political and governmental institutions are lagging far behind when it comes to "getting things done". I wonder what this portends for the coming century.
These problems are really common with 50+ year old infrastructure. Looks at the NYC subway from 50 or even 70 years ago and it looks about the same as it does now:
The problem is basic day to day maintenance is really not
enough, infrastructure get's increasingly complex and expensive over time. Now compare this with you example city's 70 years ago and it's a rather different situation. Singapore for example did not even start construction on a subway system until 1982.
The subway systems in London and Paris are pretty old but work reasonably well. You have to properly maintain and modernize the system then the age of the original structures doesn't matter as much.
There are some of the cars on other lines (like line 10 I'm taking to go to work) are more than 40 years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_67), but they've been through some refurbishment since then.
I don't disagree with this sentiment, but it's worth pointing out that nearly all transportation projects from the "old days" around the world were done by private companies, and often met a swift end in bankruptcy. Creditors lost a lot, but the assets were then picked up by others, and refined through years of trial and error into endeavors of modest profitability. Only our sepia-colored glasses and the survival bias of remaining parts makes it look like people back then had it figured out, and we don't.
Private rail systems in Europe eventually were nationalized during the warring decades of the 1900s and remained that way longer than in the US, while in the US the government spun up Amtrak to relieve rail operators from passenger rail and its rapidly declining revenues, while letting freight railroads go through waves of mergers until only a handful remained. Soon after Amtrak, the airline industry was deregulated, and airlines proceeded to copy the idea: rack up costs, declare bankruptcy, sell, reset.
Truth is, big, ambitious construction projects, and big, ambitious service networks have always sucked, and the ones that remain went through many cycles of overruns and disappointment and service reduction before they stuck. Maybe what ought to worry us isn't that we've lost the magic touch of delivering ambitious, long-running deliverables (railroads, infrastructure, cities, government services...) sustainably, but that we never mastered it in the first place, and the things we have now are the much-recycled husks of former grand ideas that managed to eke by.
> it's worth pointing out that nearly all transportation projects from the "old days" around the world were done by private companies, and often met a swift end in bankruptcy... Only our sepia-colored glasses and the survival bias of remaining parts makes it look like people back then had it figured out, and we don't.
This is true, but only part of the story. The private railroads (and indeed much internet infrastructure) had two phases. In the first, early entrants made big profits by picking the low hanging fruit (i.e. most profitable opportunities) in a new market.
This created investor euphoria just as the opportunities for "easy" profits were drying up. So things turned towards speculative, even fraudulent investments that left the investors out of pocket. But, as you point out, even the second phase left some infrastructure on the ground that could be operated at a profit once bought at firesale prices.
In NYC specifically, the problem was the city government introduced price caps that made the privately owned lines unprofitable, then refused to raise them. So, of course the trains went out of business. It was set to 5 cents in 1904 and remained there for
over 40 years. Not even the lowest hanging fruit could survive such a thing.
Yeah I believe you, I had taken temp-dude's comment to be more about railroads in general and not suburban railways or NYC in particular. And those are different, always were more government related.
I'll take issue with your thesis. I was once standing in Marin county overlooking the Golden Gate bridge, there I read a plaque describing how the bridge was built ahead of schedule and under budget - in the 1930s (no computers!). Behind the Golden gate bridge in the distance you see the Bay bridge, built with tremendous cost overruns and delays measured in billions of dollars and many years, respectively.
I'll make the case that, as a nation, we have lost the ability to deliver civil infrastructure projects on time and on budget, not to mention manage them once they are operational.
Regarding NYC MTA, I'll share an anecdote. I have a very close friend who worked on the second avenue Subway line a few years back. He's a civil engineer by training and was in middle management on this project, employed by the general contractor awarded this contact. His comment was along the lines of: "imagine dozens of dump trucks full of hundred dollar bills backing up to an incinerator and dumping the money. That's what the MTA does. Burn money." The sentiment was that these public institutions are chuck full of incompetence with no repercussions for mismanagement or incentive to excel. As a life long New Yorker, I don't have to work in the tunnels to know that he's right.
Just two years ago in Seattle, the University Link Tunnel was completed ahead of time and under budget, while all media attention went to the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel (Bertha) which was over budget and massively delayed.
The former was a relatively standard tunnel using standard machines, while the latter was the largest single-bore tunnel ever attempted.
I take issue with your thesis. Every day, I ride to work on the Metro Expo line, which was built on time (actually early) and only delayed opening because a private company couldn't get its shit together and build the rail cars on time.
I'll make the case that, as a nation, we're doing fine with the ability to deliver civil infrastructure projects on time and on budget, and to manage them once they are operational, in those regions where they actually care about their infrastructure. See, e.g., LA Metro, Denver's metro, Cleveland's RTA, our utilities grid post-Enron. These are all things done at a scale and density that have been equaled or exceeded only by authoritarian states.
LA Metro is quite an expensive program. Cleveland has been working on the cost-coverage-service balance and arguably making the right choices, but not everyone is happy. I think Chicago might be a better example of a large system run efficiently. Overall, there is not any debate whether the US pays more per mile/capita than other countries, just whether that is something that can be improved.
"New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile... The approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100 million per mile, at the lowest end, and $1 billion at the highest. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile."
I think the point is that while you can find your pet example of an over-budget project, other people can find examples of projects that didn't have those problems.
Rushing to post "but what about the Second Avenue Subway" in any thread on this topic is not useful, since you've provided no evidence that it's representative enough to generalize to all infrastructure projects in all cities of all states of the US.
It's well known that infrastructure projects in the US overall cost way more than comparable projects do in most of the rest of the developed world. Here's just one link, from a cursory Google:
As a nation we have delivered a massive and continuous civil project for the past 70 years: our sprawling suburban road & utility network. Nobody ever notices it because roads are just background at this point.
You may be speaking from the US point of view there. Internationally, many of the biggest projects were government-built and then only later given over to private firms to run
New York subways were sort of stolen. They were privately built, then the companies were forced into bankruptcy by price caps. The companies were not allowed to raise fares, inflation happened, and thus the government took control.
Cities like NYC are overcrowded and dysfunctional, but our financial system allows dysfunctional and failing systems to continue to operate up until the point to which they physically collapse and start either entering prolonged periods of obvious mechanical non-function and/or killing people in embarrassing numbers.
Without all the bailouts, the MTA would have failed decades ago and would have had to have been restructured. Because NYC's political priorities have been to conserve past structures and agreements at the expense of the present and the future, you will see performance go down and down to the point to which 1950s performance will look like 1950s science fiction.
I don't think I would expect anything to change until a major accident kills a large number of people in one day. You should expect the people in charge of the system as it exists today to keep getting millions of dollars as service continues to degrade. But the MTA knows this, so they stop the trains constantly when there is any chance of a collision, so you get the slow motion choke for money that you have had for decades.
There's a great option if you are not happy with New York City and its governance: leave! NYC is a machine for fleecing young people who want to move there with heads full of movies and TV and rich foreign potentates with more money than sense. It's not a great place to live if you want to have a comfortable middle class lifestyle. It might have been that 30+ years ago, but not anymore.
"If something's not working well, abandon it" is pretty pathetic advice. There are very clear ways to fix the problem, the only cause for pessimism is whether the people in charge will do the right things.
Are there, though? You can play armchair city planner all you want, but where is the political, legal, regulatory, etc, environment that allows this "very clear" fix to proceed? Who's to say that even with a big fare increase and a lot of money pushed in, that money won't mysteriously disappear while things don't get any better - as has happened historically?
Sometimes an entity DOES need to fail, and fail hard, before it can really be restructured entirely.
I live in Manhattan. Love it. The MTA fucking up is still miles ahead of every other American city on their best days in terms of transit and density. Most New Yorkers’ stories of nightmarish delays find parity with the daily commutes Americans across the country put up with as a matter of course.
Yep. Really the only city with a transit system on par with New York/Metro IMO is Chicago. And even then the Manhattan subway system has much better coverage than the L.
I prefer living places where I'm not reliant on owning a car, and when I was moving back to the states there were only a handful of metro areas I felt this was possible in without it being inconvenient.
Talking about the politics of it and pointing out the issue, or even joining a straphanger lobbyist group are about as relevant to the real politics involved as playing Sim City 2000 and making your own subway layout. Numerous mayors and governors have tried and failed to fix an issue that is much larger than can be addressed just on the local level. There are also issues with how labor disputes work in the US that can't be addressed purely on the local level. Part of the problem is encompassed in a much larger problem that other unrelated entities have to deal with: dysfunctional impacts of precedents and legislation in US labor law. And indeed, the response that many companies have had to the failure of attempts to reform US labor law has been to just leave the US entirely and/or to just go bankrupt due to failure to work things out with unions partly owing to the widely acknowledged inflexibility of US law in this area.
There are many issues like this in which the resolution is really clear on an intellectual level. When it involves screwing the existing stakeholders, it should not be surprising when those stakeholders use all the leverage they have to resist being deprived of what they have.
For example: Medicare is broke, it doesn't take 195 space alien IQ to see that you have to implement means testing to make the system fiscally whole, but good luck proposing it because you will be annihilated politically if you do. It does not take having a giant 900 pound brain to see that you have to screw the union and blow up the MTA to fix the system. But good luck doing it. And it makes perfect sense for the average AARP member to send in their contributions to protect their entitlements under the law even if they understood intellectually that the government cannot afford to maintain that entitlement in the future.
Cities like NYC are fine WRT density; Manhattan specifically did see a much larger population in the past.
This does not make MTA's efficiency any better, though. NYC's subway and buses enjoy a lot of daily ridership, sell ad space, and sell commercial space underground. Still these, rather large, sources of income are not sufficient, and MTA eats a lot of subsidies, because the expenses are enormous, and incentives to save are likely not there.
Cost-cutting is likely politically hard, because of pork-barrelling, the unpopularity of firing workers (especially unionized workers), and likely plain corruption.
> NYC is a machine for fleecing young people who want to move there with heads full of movies and TV and rich foreign potentates with more money than sense.
Eh, I'm actually not so sure about that. Salaries in NYC are a lot higher than in other parts of the country, so provided you're doing well (say you're in tech, perhaps!) you're not being fleeced at all.
I am a little more optimistic than you are that the subway may one day be fixed. Unfortunately its fate rests in the hands of New York State, not the city, and many in NYS government couldn't care less about fixing it (Cuomo, here's looking at you). But it feels as though we're reaching a breaking point where citizens will demand change without anyone needing to die.
No, but the PATH is pretty reliable and buses work - especially the Spanish bus. Every time I hear people complaining about the train into NYC I ask them why they don't either come to Passaic, Union City, or Hoboken and take an easier and faster (and often, less expensive!) alternative in.
> It's not a great place to live if you want to have a comfortable middle class lifestyle. It might have been that 30+ years ago, but not anymore.
NYC had 2245 murders in 1990 and 290 murders last year. Every category of crime has fallen dramatically over that time period. NYC is less affordable today, but it's without a doubt more "comfortable" and livable for all income levels.
NYC is not just for rich yuppies. The city is home to a lot of middle and lower middle class families as well as the working class who can’t just leave and rely on public transportation for work or school. Look beyond midtown and north Brooklyn and you’ll see that.
It’s entirely fair for people to want to improve things.
Everything that one needs to understand in order to explain why NYC subway is such a shitshow can be learned by any software engineer that attempted to change a gigantic legacy barely functioning code base of an organization with a single product that relies on this codebase which happened to still have "founders" running a show 12-13 years later:
When the company adds "new blood", everything that the new blood proposes gets tossed out for "legacy reasons". Periodically, someone floats a plan for a gigantic multi-year "keep X service but rewrite everything inside it from scratch" software engineering project. Those future "rewrite from scratch" projects are used to justify not making any incremental improvements.
This has little to do with the MTA Union and everything to do with Blasio resisting committing more money to the MTA unless he was guaranteed by Cuomo that the money would go towards the subways and subway throughput, and not other MTA services. Cuomo Controls the MTA; Not the City, or the City Mayor, that's 99% of the problem.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s planned to add amenities like new lighting and USB ports at nearly three dozen New York City subway stations, Completely side-stepping DeBlasio.
In February, Cuomo put the vote forth to The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, (they control the MTA), voted 10-3 vote in favor, to approve 1 billion dollars of contracts to refurbish nine of the thirteen stations.
This is all apart of Cuomo's Enhanced Station Initiative which is entirely focused on cosmetics.
This is the rub for me. If you scroll through this page, there's lot of talk about finances and upgrades without much context or understanding. And there's the usual union bashing, which may or may not be warranted.
But this is the first comment that points out that Cuomo owns the MTA, is responsible for maintaining and improving it, and has a long history of looting the MTA's funds for other projects, or forcing them to spend money on cosmetic changes (does no one remember his big announcement last year that he was going to take 200 million from the MTA to force them to make NYC bridge lights multi-colored? Really?). Service was fine before this man got elected, and plummeted afterward.
It might be that Cuomo's not to blame, any more than any other possible cause. I don't know, I'm not an expert.
But you know what I never hear? Any form of leadership or direction that makes it sound like his people are trying to fix this issue. Which again, means in some sense, Cuomo is still to blame. We don't have reliable transit, and Cuomo's answer is: "Maybe we can get a very controversial new tax passed to pay for it?" From the guy who has a habit of stealing funds from the MTA? Deblasio's condition for more funding was that Cuomo had to promise it will go to the subway and not another one of Cuomo's upstate pet projects... and Cuomo said no.
Until we have a governor who cares, I don't have much hope here. It just doesn't appear to be a priority for him. He declared a state of emergency, and promptly followed up with no headline making changes. Unless I missed something (pls link me! : )
He did, however, name a bridge after his father. Maybe the ceremony would have been better if the bridge sparkled in more colors.
And during an interview on NPR yesterday, Cuomo said something along the line of "Well, I don't know if 'The MTA' really exists'." This is not a man who should be in charge of the MTA. And the fact that he and de Blasio are feuding again, just as they did when they were involved with HUD during the Clinton administration, really proves that the MTA troubles and the NYCHA scandal are 100% connected - and it's because of two people who can't get past their own nonsense.
Seattle has kind of a similar problem. They can't just raise local taxes to pay for local transit. So instead the state has to decide on most Seattle transit projects (and their funding), and of course all of the conservatives east of the mountains bridle at the idea of their money being spent on those big city liberals instead of locally even though the balance of tax revenues and spending means money flows the other way. It's infuriating.
Seattle has no such issues, as the voters directly voter for initiatives that come directly from property taxes. The governor and Olympia have very little say in what Seattle area builds, which is a good thing.
Contrast that with NY state, where the state legislature and governor can interfere with MTA affairs. Cuomo is a huge part of the problem.
Seattle's ST3 transit plan is funded from a mixture of tax sources including sales taxes and car tabs, it required a state wide initiative measure. It's not as bad a situation as NYC but it's still much less than ideal.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadOne datapoint: I live in Rhode Island. Recently I attended a concert in Brooklyn. The obvious way to travel there was Amtrak to Penn Station and MTA (train or bus) to the final destination. However, I was warned that MTA service is unreliable. I decided to drive. Next time I probably won't go at all.
And, so, should they complain? Yeah! There's nothing wrong with expecting more from the MTA. But these stories are generating comments like yours here and that's absurd.
By what metric?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw...
But eyeballing that chart suggests an average deterioration significantly worse than 20 percent.
Just a few examples:
- Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record, or a train that arrives on time 3 out of every 5 times and then is 20 minutes late the other two? How many articles on the subway distinguish between the two types of lateness? It matters a lot.
- You might read that Atlanta's MARTA, for example, has a better on-time performance record than the NYC Subway. Well, that's great, but it's also got rush-hour scheduled headways of 10 minutes, scheduled off-peak headways of 20 minutes or more, and no service entirely at many stations after 9PM (no trains run at all after 2AM). So something that's "late" in New York City still comes before the scheduled train in Atlanta (when the trains there come at all). [0]
- The NYC Subway also has 10 times as many stations as MARTA and 17 times as many miles of track. They say the best camera is the one you have on you. Something like that applies here, too. What's the on-time record for a train that doesn't exist?
MARTA is a random comparison, but it's not uncommon for writers of screeds about the subway to offer up comparisons to other systems devoid of any of the kind of context I provide above.
So, you know: 1) comparisons are difficult; 2) especially if you want to capture what it's actually like to use transit in the cities you're comparing. All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.
[0] https://www.itsmarta.com/railline-schedules.aspx
> Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record
At this point, the operator should just update the schedule to reflect actual travel speed.
The parent poster notes that trains in Atlanta do just that.
The L train?
I was merely responding to someone else who brought up a numbers-based argument only to find out that they... apparently don't have any.
The mere fact that people from Rhode Island now believe that they won't be able to successfully use the subway to attend a concert is I think pretty strong evidence that the story has gotten away from us a bit. Nobody here, least of all me, wishes to downplay your commute.
If I was to give a "gut" estimate for the overall deterioration of the subway service in recent years, though -- I'd peg it at closer to 30 or 40 percent than merely 20.
Now, look, that doesn’t mean it’s good that it’s declined so much, but context and perspective remain useful.
But compared to just about any major city in Europe... seriously, it's almost a joke.
But they shouldn't have been downvoted for expressing that sentiment.
Usually when public transit networks start showing strain, it's during rush hours, when they're handling massive spikes in ridership. To give an example from Chicago: If you're trying to get on the train downtown at 6:00pm, you'll get on the next train, and probably get to sit in a seat. If you try to do it at 5:00pm, you stand a good chance of waiting 30 minutes for a train that you can even physically get on to. When you do, your ride will probably also take 50% longer than the 6pm ride would have. And maybe even 100% longer than a ride at 7pm would have.
You naturally get all the complaints from the rush hour riders. And yeah, if your concert were starting at 6 in the evening so that you'd have to brave rush hour traffic, then that would be a problem. But so would driving.
If, like most concerts, it was starting a bit later, you'd very likely have experienced smooth service.
What line are you describing? I take the L every day from downtown around 5 and I can reliably get on the first train and it will arrive in < 10 minutes (and there's a good chance I'll have a seat). If a train takes more than 10 minutes, it will almost certainly be packed full, but it will also almost certainly be followed by another nearly-empty train in ~1-2 minutes.
Which is admittedly the worst scenario that I could think of, and I should have said that. It gets better quickly from there. I used to get on 2 stops further south, and, yeah, at 5 I usually had no problems and a decent chance of getting a seat, too.
Now UIC Halsted, you're very likely to get a seat, not always though.
We were both talking about 5PM.
> Also he was talking about C&L.
I had no way of knowing this when I wrote my post. :)
Unless it was on the weekend when there are a multitude of service interruptions and station closures.
* planned work every weekend and most late weeknights which reroutes half the trains and is described in terms guaranteed to confuse visitors. A complete map of the changed routes would help massively; instead, you get a long list of textual descriptions such as "Brooklyn-bound F trains are running express on the E track between Court Sq and W 4th St and local on the D track to Stillwell Av" which scares and confuses tourists who barely understand downtown Manhattan geography, much less how it relates to the rest of the city.
* occasional unreliability at any time of the day, typically either due to signal failures in century-old analog wiring, or because of paramedics or cops shutting down an entire station to take care of a rowdy or injured passenger.
Locals have learned to adapt. They know what the cryptic planned work descriptions mean and in which situations next station alerts are lying. They have learned to understand the static-y conductor announcements on a loud train. They know that on some lines, if you must to be at your destination on time, you ought to leave 30 minutes early just in case this ride is the 1/20 when something happens.
Visitors don't know such things, and I can empathize with their apprehension.
The MTA has problems, but it still usually gets you where you need to go.
I keep hearing this with zero justification. Why? I’m sceptical of New York’s public agencies asking for lots of cash. I assume there are legitimate projects, but the MTA has been horrible at showing the public this demanded money will be well spent.
I have no trouble holding both ideas in my head at once.
I believe both are and will be. But to what degree? If it’s billions on bloat, then we need a cost cutter at the top (in addition to new funding).
In short, the state of American infrastructure today is a result of decades upon decades of mismanagement by the cost cutters. I have a hard time believing they can also be the solution.
Maybe find an efficiency maven instead?
The DC Metro also has the same problem of being a jobs program for inner city residents, so efficiency upgrades are fought tooth and nail by the union.
You may not be able to achieve both goals at once. Tackling MTA efficiency will involve a lot of confrontations with the union. And you know they won't back down on a single thing, so service will degrade further.
Having said that, maybe now is the time, when things are crumbling to take them on, with the hope of having the popular will at your back.
I'm confident officials have neglected long term maintenance costs when planning and building all the various infrastructure of major cities. The modus operandi is always underfund the project, get people to rely on it (or at least make the case of not just throwing away the first $x when all you need is $y to complete it), beg for more funding.
Maybe the problem is NYC is an overpopulated crap-hole and there's no amount of money to fix it. Plenty of other real estate in the US that businesses and people can move to. NYC is obviously past carrying capacity if we have to resort to boring holes into bedrock to shuttle people around like rodents.
NYC's fantastic. It's one of the safest major metropolitan areas in the world filled with a tremendous variety of culture. It's the most diverse place on the planet with only London even being at a comparable level.
And the level of contempt for people riding subways? Where do you get off? Not only are they better for the environment, they're one of the great equalizers. Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day.
They get people to work during odd shifts, and allow those without so much to reach the same places those with so much can.
What a weird, haughty, better than thou comment.
I don't have contempt for people riding the subway, I have contempt for the organization that perpetrates that fraud on society.
> Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day.
At what cost? As it turns out, at great cost. Misallocation of capital: making it easier to commute into downtown areas via rail only induces rail demand and increases cost of housing. If end users were forced to pay actual costs of transportation, businesses wouldn't be able to afford keeping down town offices and would move towards worker populations, otherwise they would have to pay higher wages to maintain their labor force. Subsidizing transportation is nothing but subsidizing corporate labor.
If you think NYC is fantastic, that doesn't make my opinion any less valid.
The trains also run the other direction, you know that right? It's the same cost to commute to Far Rockaway as it is to commute to Manhattan, and there's plenty of workers out there too.
Not seeing too many big office buildings there though.
However, if a corporation can reallocate labor capital into real estate, IMO what happens in the NYC area, that's what they'll do.
Take a look at any place in America that has higher than its surrounding average real estate price, even in less heard of towns like downtown Hunstville, Alabama or Ogden, Utah - what is true about the most consistently profitable, lucrative pieces of real estate? They're home to mixed use development [1] (One case study of this effect - [2]).
It turns out, all those "new" (assumed good bc of their newness) models of urban development, with single use office OR home OR shopping zoning, with square miles on miles of tract housing, with islands of empty parking lots (for that one day a year that they're full) between huge hulking shopping centers, necessitating car use for even the smallest of toilet paper purchases... well, those ideas ran contrary to the organic structure of towns and villages for all of human history.
And while those ideas were so new and fashionable, yes, places like New York suffered. But eventually the novelty wore out. The ticky-tacky houses started looking all the same (that is, depressing - but that's my opinion).
New York didn't die in the '80s and certainly won't because of some subway hiccups. Dense urban models work. For all of human history they worked, in 1950s America, for a brief moment, some people thought they no longer did - but it looks like they still work, and will always work. And tunnels are a great way to keep that valuable mixed use real-estate - for commuters and city dwellers alike.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-use_development
2 - https://www.property24.com/articles/mixed-use-developments-b...
The real misallocation of resources are sleepy suburbs where people hide in their bedroom watching tv, while the city road and water infrastructure costs orders of magnitude more than the tax revenue or productive capacity of the land is capable of supporting.
I was a daily rider of the DC metro for 8 years. This is exactly what happened there. Reliability plummeted, then ridership, and all the while major fare increases.
I think this is connected to the constant weekend problems you mentioned. The trouble before was that they weren’t maintaining the system properly because they didn’t want to cause disruptions. They finally realized that maintenance isn’t actually optional and started doing what it takes to get it done. The system doesn’t have enough capacity to have sections out of service for maintenance without major disruptions, but at least now they happen at a time of their choosing.
Did you mean to say "a few dozen more cars"?
As for the alternative options like Lyft and Uber they mentioned, those are only viable for privileged upper middle class commuters, so it really can't go that far to explain a claimed drop in ridership. And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.
EDIT: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone...
Genuine question: why is that? I'm not familiar with the mechanics of the NYC Metro area, but I'm familiar with SF's BART, which certainly claims to have statistics on this -- about 22,000 fare jumps a day, as compared to around 433,000 trips per weekday, meaning about 5% of riders are freeloaders. (They claim this costs about $25M a year.) The San Francisco Chronicle did their own reporting on this, and at the very least it backed up the assertion there were a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.
There was an article in the New York Times in May, titled "How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway Into Crisis" that claimed higher ridership is not the main cause for the recent decline:
> For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told us that rising ridership and overcrowding were to blame. Yet ridership actually stayed mostly flat from 2013 to 2018 as delays rose, and the authority recently acknowledged that overcrowding was not at fault.
That statement doesn't contradict yours (shakes fist at well-qualified statement), but I found it surprising when I came across it and I imagine others might as well.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subw...
As soon as you cross the Potomac into Virginia there may be high-rises, but everything is built for cars, not transit.
Also, quite a bit of the metro system is cut and cover and quite shallow. A few spots were tunneled deeper to cross waterways.
Anecdotally, given how cheap Uber and Lyft are in Manhattan (typically $4-5 for a shared ride), I often find myself opting for that instead of dealing with the hassles of the subway system. Both are unreliable when it comes to timeliness, as ride sharing services often take longer than expected (especially Uber Pool and Lyft Line). And as painful as the subway system can sometimes be, I do appreciate the rich history and incredible performances you'll often come across in subway stations. I'm torn, to be honest.
Looking at the article's linked presentation [1] and the MTA's most recent financial plan [2] it seems like all the hurt is coming from really huge declines in projected revenues - labor costs seem to be growing pretty reasonably but there's basically zero projected growth in fares. If someone can give me a layman's explanation of what "Capital and Other Reimbursements" is, which accounts for about a $500mm decline between 2019 and 20222, I'd be much obliged.
So I am curious how sensitive riders are to the increased service problems, how much that makes them switch out, to get some sense as to how much the signal improvements will help solve this problem. Also how much to a fare hike, which seems like the more straightforward answer in a vacuum (i.e. other than taxes or other government infusions). The MTA says in [1] that even "draconian service reductions would have a relatively small impact on the deficit."
[1] - http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-... [2] - http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-...
In fact, cutting off-peak services would probably worsen the budget outlook long-term, since the marginal cost of an off-peak service is very low.
they love to tout huge mileage numbers because it sounds impressive but when compared to the whole of what is driven its one percent or less. better yet a large amount of ride sharing is off peak.
the reason of course is money, the subsidies to mass transit systems are in the tens of billions which in turn allow for existing systems to not have to be competitive or even maintain their lines because they know they can grab more cash. if anything beyond the hundreds of billions in deferred maintenance many light rail systems have there is nearly similar in pension liabilities.
Like most other civilized societies who have a functioning and well-maintained metro system.
That is really all there is to it!
NYC is unique in that there are LOTS of people whose working hours fall into that range and they rely on the subway. Just shutting down the whole system is unfeasible.
It's another huge City. Besides having a horribly mismanaged public transport, it's not unique.
Except that it's, you know, the center of the universe of course. ;-)
So while it is one of the largest, it's hardly unique.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities]
Then suddenly they have to find a way home or two work that will be much more expensive and eat into their earnings.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but "that's really all there is to it" will affect very negatively hundreds of thousands of people in NYC.
it's important to think about who your decisions affect, even if they may be a minority (which is bigger than 0.1%). why is it okay to put more burden on the people who already have the most burden as it is?
(Some lines aren't yet upgraded to walk-through trains, but they're ordered. Stuff like speed regulators is decades old.)
A certain political figure with strong (both bad and good) ties to NYC has harped for a couple of years about a federal infrastructure bill. I think the phrase "third world" was used to describe the problem.
No reason why America's Greatest City (tm) could not wring a couple of bil out of the feds to start upgrading their subways. Move back to the first world, you might say.
In turn, because we're talking about a transaction, the MTA might also need to move out of a "third world" mentality. We can safely assume some of their payroll is spent on political favors. Maybe this "death spiral" talk will motivate the agency to make a least a token gesture towards good use of their riders dollars.
Maybe.
There's another option: disband the MTA Union, the primary driver of operations costs. They have blocked technology and safety upgrades for decades to keep 'those darn computers and robots from taking jobs from poor workers just trying to make a living'.
Unions work on both goals simultaneously, increasing wages but also providing job security to their base, inserting strong restrictions on who can perform certain labors etc. The more employees, the higher the power of the union, it's not like a competitor could spring up and kill their host.
It's not a white/black issue, laborers need protection but should not use a privileged position in the economy to seek a rent at the expense of everybody else.
Though I'm sure the MTA will pay billions more in contracts over the next few years to halfway automate a few small parts of their jobs.
On top of this, but actively lobbying against having driverless trains and other cost-saving technologies leaves NYC with the most expensive and antiquated system in the world
Now, I agree that it's not a very moral position, but we don't expect property owners in SF to keep rents reasonable. They should charge as much as they can, that's the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective!
Capitalism (idealized) is when you use get an advantage by selling superior goods or services, while competing with others, without leveraging any state-given privilege.
We need (even) more capitalism in the US, if anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
See the GoA4 list
It requires conductors because of the union contract requires them. Not only it requires an engineer "driving" the train (aka pushing a button "I'm here") but also the second one looking to make sure that the train doors can be closed ( or closing them on the person )
So just on the L train MTA can cut 50% of the conductors by fully engaging automated train control and merging door checker engineer duties with the "I'm here" engineer duties.
* Unionized workers make very good money in New York.
* Unions are a primary political driver behind those expensive contracts.
* There's more to unions than conductors. Construction and maintenance, for example.
* The unions routinely put up strong opposition to any meaningful expense or quality control. They also strongly oppose any modernization attempts that might threaten their jobs. They've opposed electronic signaling and control for decades. The worse the subways are, the better it is for them.
* Unions are politically untouchable. No matter what the consequences for the public, people are willing to leap to the defense of the noble workingman. Actually, the noble workingman who needs a "living wage" is riding the subways, not maintaining them. The poor and desperate are found among the five million people who ride the subway every day. Transportation is a public good. It shouldn't be beholden to a small group of highly paid laborers.
I didn't believe a friend of mine who only finish college was making $218,000 a year basically for early morning train track cleanups (device to pickup trash, stay away from 3rd rail), until I saw his bi-weekly paycheck with my own eyes. He's been doing that for last 5 years and they hire more people to do the same. What an insult to anyone with MBA, PhD., anyone pretty much who doesn't work for Union.
That being said, paying union construction workers $1k/day (!) to do nothing is pretty egregious as well [3]
[1] http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-... [2] https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MTA-... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
There’s also some arcane areas of NY law that drive labor costs dramatically in NYC versus other places. I think a tunnel boring machine in Paris (hardly corporate paradise) operates with something like 80% less manpower than the NYC equivalent.
https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2018/08/15/an-open-se...
>One point construction experts are making, however, is that taxpayers are paying premiums for these public projects since they aren’t being done open shop. The Empire Center report calculated that the government ends up paying 25 percent more for public projects in New York City because of the high prevailing wages. This is the cost no one wants to talk about.
Good! Living in NYC costs more than living just about anywhere in the USA. Well over 25% more than where I live, a top 50 metro.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/can-andy-byfor...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone...
This is the exact same argument that we have when it comes to education, health care, defense, and so forth. Some argue that it's because government spending is inherently inefficient, and while that may be true, that doesn't explain how governments outside of the United States still seem to be a lot more efficient than governments inside the United States, nor does it explain similar phenomena in things like housing.
This seems like a very broad problem that is currently beneath the public consciousness. SSC's "Considerations on Cost Disease" (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...) is the first general discussion I've found of this, though Scott Alexander cites a paywalled Tyler Cowen piece in Bloomberg.
(Fair warning: while SSC doesn't mention defense spending as an example of this, the US has a ridiculously high defense budget without actually having the quantity or quality of troops and ships and aircraft that such a budget would imply. If China's defense budget were the same as ours, they would whip our ass in a conventional war.)
Whatever the shared root cause or causes are, they need to be addressed. Just giving MTA, Medicare, the Pentagon, universities, etc. more and more money isn't going to be sustainable. And, despite the ramblings of certain conspiratorially-minded folk, I also don't really think this is inflation in disguise, because then you'd also have to explain why there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the costs of e.g. basic groceries.
I don't have any answers here; I just don't think we're asking the right questions if we just restrict the discussion to the specific areas where we see this happen.
I'm probably being cynical but maybe not.
Anecdotally, it sure seems to me like one of the biggest political issues in, say, the UK is whether the NHS is over or underpaying staff, whether they will have more or less money under Conservative policies or Labour policies, and so forth.
The US has multiple levels of mutually distrustful and uncooperative governments, and at many of those levels, high levels of direct democracy especially when it comes to budgetary issues. So there is some waste there.
When you look at the NY State workforce, more effective negotiation essentially eliminated overtime, and you just don’t see the pension padding that you see with MTA. Most of the state workforce is in the provincial lands upstate and the unions are pretty weak.
Additionally, with trains, legacy regulations allow for systematic abuse of disability. Not sure about subways, but at one point 97% of LIRR retirees were getting more expensive disability pensions.
This is good in some ways — effective bureaucracies got their start as support for monarchial ambition, in an era of unprecedented government expenditure and military devastation — but it means the US never developed a strong, effective state, either bureaucratically or socially. The US retains many of what Huntington calls “Tudor Institutions” — institutions like a powerful court system that can effectively determine public policy, a decentralized approach to military forces (including the right to bear arms), and the sometimes handicapping balance of power among the different branches of government and the states. When absolutism collapsed in absolutist countries, all the decentralized institutions had been cleared away; but the bureaucracies survived, and with them a strong civil service tradition (modeled on military service), a notional trust in government, and a wide variety of effective and efficient public agencies.
Still, it’s a very fascinating phenomenon. The US is culturally and constitutionally more robust against tyrannical government, but at the expense of undermining the possibility for effective government. This really gets at the root of some of the discussion about American exceptionalism, too.
This doesn't necessarily mean we can't have effective social services, though -- it's just that they would not be government agencies. Planned Parenthood, which often functions in the face of considerable government opposition, is a great example of an effective and dependable public service. So is the National Rifle Association, which is primarily concerned with maintaining ranges and training programs for police and military as well as civilian use. They aren't businesses but they aren't part of the government either.
Huntington discusses the medieval structure as one of a "harmony of government and society". Perhaps in the US we are trying too hard to get our government to do things it was not meant to do. It doesn't mean there is nothing to do.
Found a copy of Huntington's essay online: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Huntington%20Political%20Mo...
When we get more government in the US, we usually don't get a powerful and effective public institution, responsible for delivering a service directly to the people, staffed with dedicated public servants. Instead, we generally get a tangle of regulation and a large private industrial complex.
A major exception to this -- though they are becoming less so -- are the various branches of the military. They overlap with one another and thus come into conflict; but all soldiers are dedicated public servants.
Immediately adjacent to the military is the US arsenal system, or military industrial complex, a web of not-really-competing companies that the DoD tries to manage via complex and demanding contracts.
> The number of annual revenue car-miles per subway employee in New York was 14,000 in 2010. In Chicago this number is somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 ... On Tokyo’s Metro, the comparable figure is about 18,500.
[1] https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/13/16455880/new-york-subway-mt...
FWIW Biking has become more viable in recent years, with a good amount of bike lane coverage even in the outer boroughs, but that's still not viable for the less physically able, and I don't know if it's actually cheaper than public transit once you factor in bike equipment/maintenance costs and increased travel times. Also the weather gets fairly extreme in both the summer and winter.
Taxing rideshares sounds like a good idea, though I'm sure Uber would fight like hell against it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Even in the face of the financial crisis and budget shortfalls, the M.T.A. has given concession after concession to its main labor union.
Members of the Transport Workers Union got a total of 19 percent in pay raises between 2009 and 2016, compared with 12 percent for the city’s teachers union over the same period.
The labor contracts also gave members lifetime spousal health benefits and free rides on the Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road. (They already were allowed to ride the subway for free.)
Particularly insane:
Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually.
A quick look at glassdoor.com for MTA transit jobs [1], I'm seeing drivers and conductors making ~$22/hour. Presumably this is an entry level rate. Some searching points to a high of ~$30/hour.
Project managers and programmers, of course, are making >$100,000 k. I have doubts that they are represented by the union, though. Of course, quietly lumping their salaries in with the blue-collar folks pushes a particular political narrative.
It seems that if you really want to trim the fat at the MTA, cut wages for the white-collar, un-unionized workers.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-conductor-s...
Comparing the annual salary of someone who clocks in their 9-5, and goes home on Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to someone who is doing 60 hours a week, twenty of them from 3 am to 9 am, on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday... Is comparing apples to oranges. [1] But it sure drives the outrage! Look, and be outraged at the annual take-home of that bus driver! Ignore the part where he worked like a dog, and gave up all life outside work for it!
Rates for hour worked, in equivalent conditions are the only fair comparison. And, unsurprisingly, they aren't high for MTA employees - especially in a city as outrageously expensive as NYC.
If you want to stop paying public servants overtime, then don't expect public servants to work outside of core business hours.
[1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period. Overtime, even paid overtime, is incredibly shitty, doubly so for holiday and night shift work, triply so for holiday night shift work. People should be compensated more for doing the same job at 2 am on Christmas Saturday, then for doing a 9-5 on Tuesday. [2]
[2] If your job expects regular unpaid overtime from you, you should either have an ownership stake in it, or get a new job, or have a really high on-paper salary.
At least half of tech workers I know do unpaid overtime. Almost all are on at-will contracts where they can be laid off anytime and I know almost none who have lifetime-final-year salary pension plans.
1.1. Even if you're an auxiliary on-call, you only need to work if something comes up. You don't need to be physically working, all through the night.
1.2. If you're constantly crunching, every week, you need to find another job, or demand non-meaningless equity, or higher wages, then your tech-worker peers, who do their 9-5. Most mature tech companies are full of people who do their 9-5. They employ hundreds of thousands of tech workers.
2. Tech workers are a tiny subset of the working population.
2.1. They also have much higher on-paper compensation then their similarly-trained peers in other fields (Bachelor's degree, and 0-5 years work experience), and even despite the occasional overtime, much higher hourly rates.
Basically these guys aren't getting their future screwed so they're an outlier. Same problem the Post Office has. When you aren't allowed to skimp on the perks and pass the buck to the government of the future you don't look very competitive.
People say "oh, but diverting tax dollars from MTA, etc." The NYT pegs that at about $1.5 billion over two decades (since Pataki). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... That's $75 million per year, a drop in the bucket in comparison. About enough to build a mile of subway line.
A cursory search shows a train driver making $31/hr, which doesn't seem excessive.
I am also wary of the tactic of showing MTA workers as over-paid compared to a notoriously underpaid profession (e.g. teachers, who in this case held barely above inflation).
again for teachers you are forgetting the fact that they have similar generous benefits and only work 3/4 of the year...
It used to be that if you worked in the public sector you forwent a market rate salary in exchange for job security and a secure pension. Public sector employees are now making market wages + extremely valuable benefits which in turn are bankrupting municipalities.
In this context how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic, that his taxes need to go up in order to pay for the extremely generous union benefits of a public sector mechanic (who may make more than him)?
Lastly I would argue that municipalities have something of a fiducuiary duty to tax payers to get value for their tax dollar spent - rather than rewarding a voter block at tax payer expense.
>how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic [...]
How do you tell a tax paying public sector mechanic that they're going to lose their pension and health insurance?
If you are doing city planning you want as many people on the Subway as you can get. It enables greater density at ground level and is much cheaper to maintain (if you maintain it) than overcongested road networks and the required parking.
It just seems the margins for error get ever thinner as your system scales. Other systems have figured this out, like Tokyo where they change over a major-use track in one night. Meanwhile, MTA shuts down the L for 15 months.
1) The businesses pay to get their human resources to work
2) The travellers pay or
3) Central taxation pays
So who should pay in New York?
Betting someone clever on HN could invent a new signalling system for far less than $40 billion, perhaps $4 billion.
Once it's proven in New York you could roll it out anywhere in the world.
Is this a satirical comment? It doesn't matter how easily a clever HN reader could devise a new, greenfield signaling system, you can't just build and cutover to a new subway signaling system in one of the world's densest cities, atop an existing subway with over 100 years of accrued legacy signaling technologies. The MTA has tried to modernize it's signaling system twice, and each initiative was a multi-decade, multi billion dollar morass. It's just not a problem that can be solved by throwing a shiny new framework at it - not that many real world problems can be.
The typical effect of absolutism was to introduce an efficient and effective civil service, as part of the general centralization of authority. Absolutist states were monarchial, militaristic states; the combination of taxation and destruction was hard to endure and eventually they had to transition to something else as a result of revolution or defeat. After either event, though, the civil service stuck around and with it a norm of publicly provided services.
The US got off the train at just about the time that absolutism was getting going in Europe -- indeed, because it was getting going in Europe -- and thus retains a decentralized -- not necessarily selfish -- structure and outlook more characteristic of medieval Europe. These "Tudor Institutions" are discussed by Huntington in Political Modernization: America vs. Europe: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Huntington%20Political%20Mo...
The A/C/J/Z lines still contain R32 cars, which were built 54 years ago, and are 20 years past their service life. These cars were built before the moon landing, have terrible brakes, have terrible air conditioning, and are, generally speaking, sweltering rattly deathtraps.
The Second Avenue line is 100 years in the making and has a grand total of...drum roll...3 stations. That opened in 2017.
But hey, they're getting WiFi in the tunnels and installing flatscreen TVs in the stations. Three cheers for more ad space! Personally, I'd rather have less station closures, less delays, and less stopping-and-waiting-20-minutes because of track congestion.
Some of these are much easier fixes than others.
Consumer-grade connectivity within tunnels is likely piggy-backed on the connectivity required for the trains infrastructure. Currently the subway operates a system from 1930s to control the lights and detect train positions. It is based on mechanical / magnetic relays, and is prone to break often.
Replacing that with redundant modern electronics and fiber optics wold increase MTBF dramatically, lowering maintenance costs and wait times. One thing that the current antiquated system is limiting is train speed. Trains used to be faster, but were slowed down because of safety reasons. If the new connectivity allows them to run 30% faster again (or even faster, where the tracks allow), that would be a huge win.
(Written on a subway train crawling through the ancient tunnels.)
Installing countdown clocks on only the lettered subway lines cost $209 million. This doesn't include the numbered lines which have had them for about 10 years which also cost hundreds of millions. In all the project took 29 years. [1]
If you want to know how much it cost to install WiFi is was budgeted for $200 million and ended up at around $300 million. [2]
Remember how that healthcare.gov Website cost hundreds of millions and was a failure? It cost $250 million and came with a $75 million maintenance cost. And then a small group came in at the end and fixed it for $4 million with yearly maintenance of $1 million? Well, the MTA has a ton of these projects.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/engineering-against-all-od...
Except that none of this money came from the MTA. The complete project was funded by private entities. Most of the cost was passed through to the four major wireless carriers. Those carriers continue to pay, on a monthly basis, for their ability to offer services in the Subway and the MTA receives portion of that payment. So, from the MTA's perspective, this project generates revenue. Same goes for a number of similar projects.
How many people die on them every year?
Are they really deathtraps? Or are they just old train cars?
Now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_map#/medi...
1968: https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/irvingtr...
1948: https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/system_1...
The problem is basic day to day maintenance is really not enough, infrastructure get's increasingly complex and expensive over time. Now compare this with you example city's 70 years ago and it's a rather different situation. Singapore for example did not even start construction on a subway system until 1982.
There are some of the cars on other lines (like line 10 I'm taking to go to work) are more than 40 years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_67), but they've been through some refurbishment since then.
Private rail systems in Europe eventually were nationalized during the warring decades of the 1900s and remained that way longer than in the US, while in the US the government spun up Amtrak to relieve rail operators from passenger rail and its rapidly declining revenues, while letting freight railroads go through waves of mergers until only a handful remained. Soon after Amtrak, the airline industry was deregulated, and airlines proceeded to copy the idea: rack up costs, declare bankruptcy, sell, reset.
Truth is, big, ambitious construction projects, and big, ambitious service networks have always sucked, and the ones that remain went through many cycles of overruns and disappointment and service reduction before they stuck. Maybe what ought to worry us isn't that we've lost the magic touch of delivering ambitious, long-running deliverables (railroads, infrastructure, cities, government services...) sustainably, but that we never mastered it in the first place, and the things we have now are the much-recycled husks of former grand ideas that managed to eke by.
This is true, but only part of the story. The private railroads (and indeed much internet infrastructure) had two phases. In the first, early entrants made big profits by picking the low hanging fruit (i.e. most profitable opportunities) in a new market.
This created investor euphoria just as the opportunities for "easy" profits were drying up. So things turned towards speculative, even fraudulent investments that left the investors out of pocket. But, as you point out, even the second phase left some infrastructure on the ground that could be operated at a profit once bought at firesale prices.
I'll make the case that, as a nation, we have lost the ability to deliver civil infrastructure projects on time and on budget, not to mention manage them once they are operational.
Regarding NYC MTA, I'll share an anecdote. I have a very close friend who worked on the second avenue Subway line a few years back. He's a civil engineer by training and was in middle management on this project, employed by the general contractor awarded this contact. His comment was along the lines of: "imagine dozens of dump trucks full of hundred dollar bills backing up to an incinerator and dumping the money. That's what the MTA does. Burn money." The sentiment was that these public institutions are chuck full of incompetence with no repercussions for mismanagement or incentive to excel. As a life long New Yorker, I don't have to work in the tunnels to know that he's right.
The former was a relatively standard tunnel using standard machines, while the latter was the largest single-bore tunnel ever attempted.
I'll make the case that, as a nation, we're doing fine with the ability to deliver civil infrastructure projects on time and on budget, and to manage them once they are operational, in those regions where they actually care about their infrastructure. See, e.g., LA Metro, Denver's metro, Cleveland's RTA, our utilities grid post-Enron. These are all things done at a scale and density that have been equaled or exceeded only by authoritarian states.
"New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile... The approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100 million per mile, at the lowest end, and $1 billion at the highest. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile."
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
Rushing to post "but what about the Second Avenue Subway" in any thread on this topic is not useful, since you've provided no evidence that it's representative enough to generalize to all infrastructure projects in all cities of all states of the US.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-31/the-u-...
As a nation we have delivered a massive and continuous civil project for the past 70 years: our sprawling suburban road & utility network. Nobody ever notices it because roads are just background at this point.
You own it, you maintain it. Good luck.
Without all the bailouts, the MTA would have failed decades ago and would have had to have been restructured. Because NYC's political priorities have been to conserve past structures and agreements at the expense of the present and the future, you will see performance go down and down to the point to which 1950s performance will look like 1950s science fiction.
I don't think I would expect anything to change until a major accident kills a large number of people in one day. You should expect the people in charge of the system as it exists today to keep getting millions of dollars as service continues to degrade. But the MTA knows this, so they stop the trains constantly when there is any chance of a collision, so you get the slow motion choke for money that you have had for decades.
There's a great option if you are not happy with New York City and its governance: leave! NYC is a machine for fleecing young people who want to move there with heads full of movies and TV and rich foreign potentates with more money than sense. It's not a great place to live if you want to have a comfortable middle class lifestyle. It might have been that 30+ years ago, but not anymore.
Are there, though? You can play armchair city planner all you want, but where is the political, legal, regulatory, etc, environment that allows this "very clear" fix to proceed? Who's to say that even with a big fare increase and a lot of money pushed in, that money won't mysteriously disappear while things don't get any better - as has happened historically?
Sometimes an entity DOES need to fail, and fail hard, before it can really be restructured entirely.
I live in Manhattan. Love it. The MTA fucking up is still miles ahead of every other American city on their best days in terms of transit and density. Most New Yorkers’ stories of nightmarish delays find parity with the daily commutes Americans across the country put up with as a matter of course.
I prefer living places where I'm not reliant on owning a car, and when I was moving back to the states there were only a handful of metro areas I felt this was possible in without it being inconvenient.
There are many issues like this in which the resolution is really clear on an intellectual level. When it involves screwing the existing stakeholders, it should not be surprising when those stakeholders use all the leverage they have to resist being deprived of what they have.
For example: Medicare is broke, it doesn't take 195 space alien IQ to see that you have to implement means testing to make the system fiscally whole, but good luck proposing it because you will be annihilated politically if you do. It does not take having a giant 900 pound brain to see that you have to screw the union and blow up the MTA to fix the system. But good luck doing it. And it makes perfect sense for the average AARP member to send in their contributions to protect their entitlements under the law even if they understood intellectually that the government cannot afford to maintain that entitlement in the future.
This does not make MTA's efficiency any better, though. NYC's subway and buses enjoy a lot of daily ridership, sell ad space, and sell commercial space underground. Still these, rather large, sources of income are not sufficient, and MTA eats a lot of subsidies, because the expenses are enormous, and incentives to save are likely not there.
Cost-cutting is likely politically hard, because of pork-barrelling, the unpopularity of firing workers (especially unionized workers), and likely plain corruption.
Eh, I'm actually not so sure about that. Salaries in NYC are a lot higher than in other parts of the country, so provided you're doing well (say you're in tech, perhaps!) you're not being fleeced at all.
I am a little more optimistic than you are that the subway may one day be fixed. Unfortunately its fate rests in the hands of New York State, not the city, and many in NYS government couldn't care less about fixing it (Cuomo, here's looking at you). But it feels as though we're reaching a breaking point where citizens will demand change without anyone needing to die.
NYC had 2245 murders in 1990 and 290 murders last year. Every category of crime has fallen dramatically over that time period. NYC is less affordable today, but it's without a doubt more "comfortable" and livable for all income levels.
NYC is not just for rich yuppies. The city is home to a lot of middle and lower middle class families as well as the working class who can’t just leave and rely on public transportation for work or school. Look beyond midtown and north Brooklyn and you’ll see that.
It’s entirely fair for people to want to improve things.
When the company adds "new blood", everything that the new blood proposes gets tossed out for "legacy reasons". Periodically, someone floats a plan for a gigantic multi-year "keep X service but rewrite everything inside it from scratch" software engineering project. Those future "rewrite from scratch" projects are used to justify not making any incremental improvements.
Not a surprise.
Bring on the 'bots!
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s planned to add amenities like new lighting and USB ports at nearly three dozen New York City subway stations, Completely side-stepping DeBlasio. In February, Cuomo put the vote forth to The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, (they control the MTA), voted 10-3 vote in favor, to approve 1 billion dollars of contracts to refurbish nine of the thirteen stations.
This is all apart of Cuomo's Enhanced Station Initiative which is entirely focused on cosmetics.
It's a shame.
But this is the first comment that points out that Cuomo owns the MTA, is responsible for maintaining and improving it, and has a long history of looting the MTA's funds for other projects, or forcing them to spend money on cosmetic changes (does no one remember his big announcement last year that he was going to take 200 million from the MTA to force them to make NYC bridge lights multi-colored? Really?). Service was fine before this man got elected, and plummeted afterward.
It might be that Cuomo's not to blame, any more than any other possible cause. I don't know, I'm not an expert.
But you know what I never hear? Any form of leadership or direction that makes it sound like his people are trying to fix this issue. Which again, means in some sense, Cuomo is still to blame. We don't have reliable transit, and Cuomo's answer is: "Maybe we can get a very controversial new tax passed to pay for it?" From the guy who has a habit of stealing funds from the MTA? Deblasio's condition for more funding was that Cuomo had to promise it will go to the subway and not another one of Cuomo's upstate pet projects... and Cuomo said no.
Until we have a governor who cares, I don't have much hope here. It just doesn't appear to be a priority for him. He declared a state of emergency, and promptly followed up with no headline making changes. Unless I missed something (pls link me! : )
He did, however, name a bridge after his father. Maybe the ceremony would have been better if the bridge sparkled in more colors.
Contrast that with NY state, where the state legislature and governor can interfere with MTA affairs. Cuomo is a huge part of the problem.
https://www.businessinsider.com/second-avenue-subway-cost-ny...