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NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

theguardian.com

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Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#131

Post by huebomont »

rangersanger wrote: post #69
exabrial wrote: post #55

> Drastically cut service or increase fares 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'.

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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#132

Post by jumelles »

huehehue wrote: post #97

It's bad. 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…

> WiFi in the tunnels and installing flatscreen TVs ... 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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#133

Post by notyourday »

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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#134

Post by chipotle_coyote »

chadlavi wrote: post #70
jdhn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can ridership in NYC really plummet? It's not like everybody there has a car that they can take to work.

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…

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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#135

Post by nine_k »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #111

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 restr…

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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#136

Post by Dowwie »

Expressed in Millions:

    Payroll: $5,392
    Overtime: 811
    Health & Welfare: 2,129
    Pension: 1,354
    Other Labor: 400
    ----------------------
    Total Labor: $10,086

    Non-Labor: 4,205
    Debt Service: 2,692
    BTL Adjustments for Expenses: (251)
    =====================================
    Total: $16,732

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#137

Post by JimboOmega »

huebomont wrote: post #126
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #111

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 restr…

"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.

There are very clear ways to fix the problem

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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#138

Post by dougmwne »

jowiar wrote: post #85
JPKab wrote: post #7

“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.

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…

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.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#139

Post by weatherlight »

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.

It's a shame.

Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

#140

Post by _asummers »

bunderbunder wrote: post #32
weberc2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Blue Line north at 5-5:30PM is a nightmare from Clark/Lake. I sometimes have to wait for 4-5 trains before I can get on.
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