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How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

nytimes.com

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Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#101

Post by solatic »

L_Rahman wrote: post #69
Chathamization wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people in London and Toronto care enough to pressure their leaders about this? In my experience it's hard to find people in the U.S. who even bother to pay attention to who has oversight when it comes to transportation (and not just transportation, this is true for a lot of local issues).

I promise you that New Yorkers care about this deeply. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-human-cost-of-subway... Any survey of New Yorkers and government services will tell you how much this matters. The biggest problem is that the New York government at city and state levels is one of the most corrupt, oligarchic and undemocratic organizations in modern society. I cannot begin to describe how broken it is. Her…

That's because people keep voting for Democratic candidates, no matter their performance as incumbents.

Why can't people vote for the candidate of a different party? It doesn't have to be Republican. Why isn't there a "Fix the Subway" single-issue party running candidates that people can vote for?

The internal machinations of political party membership are only relevant if voters no longer have a de-facto choice on election day.

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#102

Post by inferiorhuman »

slg wrote: post #86
spyspy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MTA liberally shuts down service for hours/days at a time. I wouldn’t chalk it all up to not having enough time to do maintanence. It was 24/7 back when it was functioning more consistently as well.

Which is the exact type of things that leads to customer complaints. Customers have to be inconvenienced in order to do maintenance on the NYC Subway. In turn the bar to require maintenance will be higher than it is in London. The natural result of years of delayed maintenance is for the system to get worse and worse as time goes on.

I disagree that maintenance is more difficult in London than in New York. I spent about two weeks in London about a decade ago. The first thing that struck me is that when you arrived at the tube station in Heathrow you'd get all sorts of information about which lines were in service that day. In trying to navigate London there was a constant shuffle about which stations or lines were out of service. Plus it took about two hours to get from Heathrow to Victoria due to signal issues (the wrong kind of snow is also an issue, apparently).

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#103

Post by Eric_WVGG »

avn2109 wrote: post #33
MBCook wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting other companies build their own subways? A subway seems like a natural monopoly to me.

The NYC subway system was mostly privately constructed by 3-ish private-ish organizations, and later joined under a state monopoly. You can still see vestigial underground signage that says stuff like "To IRT Lines" or "BMT Lines -->," referring to now-defunct private subway operators. This is also why the rolling stock and tracking are visibly different from line to line.

Another vestige is that the lettered lines were owned by one of those companies, the numbered by another

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#104

Post by inferiorhuman »

rayiner wrote: post #21

I don’t understand why American governments are so bad at providing public services. Money often isn’t it. The NY subway has an operating budget of $8 billion for about 1.7 billion riders per year ($4.7 per rider per year). The London Tube has an operating budget of (2.2 billion pounds—$3.5 billion pre-Brexit) for 1.4 billion riders ($2.5 per rider). The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the…

> The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the same route miles, and are similarly old. Yet NYC’s system costs almost twice as much to run.

My two cents: things are more expensive in the United States due to us insisting on being so different in two major ways:

1.) Different safety and road standards. All of Europe, as well as many other countries have completely or partially adopted European road and rail safety standards. For example: in the United States if a passenger rail line shares track with freight trains the passenger cars are required to withstand collisions with heavy freight trains with a minimum of deformation. This makes everything heavy and unique. Emissions standards likewise mean that if you're still running diesel equipment that's all going to be very unique.

2.) We don't believe in social services in the United States. The NY MTA has to fund health care (via insurance) as well as pensions. TfL sure ain't subsidizing health insurance for its employees, although they may be funding a pension.

As it turns out the bigger your pool of risk, customers, whatever... the cheaper things get.

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#105

Post by ZillBurned »

bradleyjg wrote: post #85
L_Rahman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you that New Yorkers care about this deeply. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-human-cost-of-subway... Any survey of New Yorkers and government services will tell you how much this matters. The biggest problem is that the New York government at city and state levels is one of the most corrupt, oligarchic and undemocratic organizations in modern society. I cannot begin to describe how broken it is. Her…

The biggest problem is that the New York government at city and state levels is one of the most corrupt, oligarchic and undemocratic organizations in modern society. I cannot begin to describe how broken it is. We could have voted to reform the constitution and then stayed engaged enough to pick independent delegates instead of the same old insiders catering to special interests. But we collectively let the insiders…

The Constitution is not flawed it's the powerful who ignore it that's the problem. The two most populated states have the very worst policies and on an epic scale. You wouldn't get them to change their corrupt ways no matter what changes are made. There's no going back. Strength is in their numbers even if you drew a picture of how it's going to end up they will argue their weak to ridiculous points to the very bitter end. California is particularly difficult to accept. They have ruined one of the most beautiful areas of our country. For what? To keep their lifestyle in their gated mansions. The peons be damned. We suffer the most gross injustices in decades.

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#106

Post by thriftwy »

nerdponx wrote: post #91
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #56

What's most obscene is that no effort is made to compensate for lost trains on partially shutdown express/local lines. The mayor could fix that immediately by just demanding more service on the sections that run rather than forcing everyone into sardine cans. It's pretty clear that MTA is using repairs as an excuse to cut spending on service and are unlikely to ever run it at full capacity. The system carried more pa…

To be fair, the 4/5 between Union Square and 125th St is a sardine can from 7-10 AM and 5-7 PM daily even when they run every 3 minutes or whatever the rush hour gap is.

Moscow Metro does 40 of trains per hour (doesn't save from sardine can effect tho) so one per 3 minutes is not a hard limit.

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#107

Post by ZillBurned »

rayiner wrote: post #21

I don’t understand why American governments are so bad at providing public services. Money often isn’t it. The NY subway has an operating budget of $8 billion for about 1.7 billion riders per year ($4.7 per rider per year). The London Tube has an operating budget of (2.2 billion pounds—$3.5 billion pre-Brexit) for 1.4 billion riders ($2.5 per rider). The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the…

That's only one fraction of what our govt tries to control. People think they literally need to run every aspect of our lives. We're finding out what it's like to have the govt run our healthcare and make decisions for us. The govt actually is supposed to be in office to protect us. If all goes well we will have many agencies closed that had no business being govt run. Private is always the best way to hold people accountable. That and competition.

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#108

Post by caseysoftware »

forapurpose wrote: post #53
rayiner wrote: post #21

I don’t understand why American governments are so bad at providing public services. Money often isn’t it. The NY subway has an operating budget of $8 billion for about 1.7 billion riders per year ($4.7 per rider per year). The London Tube has an operating budget of (2.2 billion pounds—$3.5 billion pre-Brexit) for 1.4 billion riders ($2.5 per rider). The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the…

U.S. politicians aren't punished or rewarded for their choices in funding infrastructure. In large part, it's because one party supports, as one of their defining policies, almost any reduction in government spending, revenue, and services. I'm not sure the other party faces significant opposition to cutting infrastructure. You can see it right now in the current tax bill. There is plenty of discussion about what wil…

That's an interesting theory but the New York City Council is over 90% Democrat[0], the New York State Assembly is over 70% Democrat[1], and there's only been one Republican governor in over 40 years.[2]

If you're going to blame Republicans, you should probably make sure there are enough to make a difference..

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Council

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Assembly

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Governors_of_New_York

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#109

Post by cgmg »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #78
AznHisoka wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that same idea, I would love to see private buses replace the subway. There is a large van that takes 15-20 people from Queens to Chinatown that runs everyday 12 hours a day and it costs under $5. Would love to see similar systems for Queens -> Times Square or Brooklyn -> wall street.

Yes, let’s have more deadly, congestion-inducing, loud and smog-producing private buses filling up our streets, rather than making a cheap, electrified mass transit system better. The Queens to Chinatown bus fills a gap in services from Flushing to Chinatown. If that bus is really transporting multiple subway trains worth of people each day, that in my mind means we ought to build better mass transit between those tw…

> Not that we should cannibalize our working (!) people-moving infrastructure for something worse.

> Cannibalize

What's wrong with cannibalizing a system that's fundamentally broken?

Re: How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways

#110

Post by joering2 »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #5

> ”... hundreds of mechanic positions have been cut because there is not enough money to pay them — even though the average total compensation for subway managers has grown to nearly $300,000 a year. ” I know this isn’t the primary reason the subway is falling into disrepair, but it’s clearly a symptom of a system that lacks real accountability. There has to be some reasonable push back to compensation (backed ultima…

Its gets worse than that; if you read further the reasoning is that "Its hard to buy apartment for less than $800,000 in Brooklyn".

Great excuse next time they interview you for the job; check how much is average housing, divide roughly by three, and here is how you have reasonably arrived at your salary.

If they look at you odd, just refer to NYT article.

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