What Would It Take to Fix New York’s Subway?

Edit: found the underlying case, [2], but it looks less than straightforward -- the fixed fair was a condition of the leases on the right-of-way of the train system, and the attempt was made to charge a second fare when a certain boundary was crossed.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=LYSVd43vZwQC&lpg=PR13&ots=...

[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/279/159/case.htm...

The U.S. prides itself on local government, private industry and so forth, public-private cooperation ideally leading to more money efficiency since private companies 'care' and governments are 'wasteful'. Great. However, some problems I've noticed here:

-- Local government is actually more inefficient. The ARC project cancelation which would have already dug a tunnel under the Hudson river between NYC and NJ in the biggest commuter hub in the country was canceled because three government organizations, NY State, NJ State and the Port Authority, couldn't agree on funding and were playing politics. The NJ governor (Christie) later allocated the moneys to lower the gas tax before his re-election campaign as well as for highway repair

-- MTA, the parent organization that runs the NYC subway system, is said to be woefully underfunded and so forth. Yet, the Port Authority, a totally unrelated organization FUNDED BY TAX MONEYS AND PUBLIC TRANSPORT TOLL COLLECTIONS, spent $4B to refurbish a single station and erect a dinosaur skeleton and called it the "World Trade Center transit hub." While the subway system this transit hub is attached to is utterly failing apart due to repairs. A strong centralized government would have made this less likely. Fulton St Station was refurbished for the cost of 1.4B, again at the same time that signals are failing and trains are breaking in other parts of the subway system this station is attached to.

How do either of these projects get away with giving billions of dollars to select contractors, to select private corporations, (st)architects and so forth? How do we ensure that someone in power didn't get in bed with one of these private developers?

-- The NYC Mayor and the NY State governor fight seemingly daily over blame for the disastrous subway system. The Mayor himself is something of a scatterbrain, getting involved in issues when he gets screamed at, while the governor cares more about his constituents upstate. Both are fairly corrupt.

There IS money, the money just goes to insane places due to the scattered players: private organizations, cross state organizations like the Port Authority, city governments, state governments, federal governments...

Isn't this one of the reasons why NYC transit construction and repair costs are so much more than places like London, where A) the system is WAY older b) the tunnels are MUCH deeper and narrower and yet C) they override these problems by establishing new lines like the Overground, the DLR and the Crossrail.

London (a city I lived in a few years) seems to be moving at a much more rapid evolutionary path than NYC, which seems like it's crumbling around us.

Reconfiguring individual stations may be a big win, because they come with only a modest one-time cost (y'know, sixty-to-a-hundred million, also known in the US as "cheap"), but result in immediate and appreciable gains in particular spots. The nature of these projects makes them easy to brand, boast, and sometimes fund, and you can do them (largely) independent from other, large-scale things you have in the pipe that will take years to come to fruition.

The old system has become somewhat more expensive because replacement parts are not needed anywhere else. Originally it was all standard railroad equipment and the same interlocking machines were used on other regional railroads (including freight lines). Since the MTA is among the last users of those machines, they have to fabricate some of the parts or special order others.

That said, the old system is pretty reliable and does not require "constant maintenance" beyond what a railroad generally requires. Its shortcomings are mostly in its inability to run trains more closely together, its inability to identify which train is in which block, and its inflexibility with regard to track directions. Otherwise the maintenance is mostly replacing light bulbs and vacuum tubes, and rarely having to replace mechanical parts. In theory the lightbulbs and vacuum tubes could be replaced with solid state components, but in practice there would be no point -- you might as well just replace all of it with solid state equipment, which the MTA is (slowly) accomplishing.