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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

#171

Post by stefan_ »

cascom wrote: post #164
chadlavi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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] [1] http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Final-Proposed-Budget-... [2] https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/201…

What are you saying, employee costs are the majority of expense for just about any business. It's the whole point of the economy.

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

#172

Post by j-c-hewitt »

JimboOmega wrote: post #137
huebomont wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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.

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

#173

Post by ep103 »

untog wrote: post #156
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…

> 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…

He means move to a commutable distance away : )

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

#174

Post by ryanwaggoner »

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…

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 :)

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

#175

Post by InitialLastName »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #161
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #151

The problem with urban transport systems is that no one sees them for what they really are... an expensive thing that drives the economy. There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself, but the reality is that a few billion invested in better public transport results in a lot more billions being made elsewhere. We need to get away from this idea that public transport systems ne…

The ideas you're saying are quite common in the West, as you say, but that's not the attitude in NYC. Everyone realizes it's worth funding and fixing. The disputes are about the who, what, how, and paid by whom.

The issue is really that the MTA is funded and controlled by the State of New York, while it predominantly serves the City of New York. Since the population (especially the voting population) of the city is Hence why the NYC mayor is so intent on funding worthless streetcars and ferries; they let him get out from under the thumb of the state.

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

#176

Post by skadamat »

For people here who are interested in transit, I highly recommend Jarrett Walker's book "Human Transit". He really focuses the conversation around a few ideas that almost everyone can agree on (and uses them to focus & have productive conversations in transit agencies) https://humantransit.org/

Last night I watched his talk "Transit Truths" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5AHJA2-lAc - which also summarizes the ideas in his book well.

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

#177

Post by rhcom2 »

stefan_ wrote: post #108
jseliger wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contra…

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."

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

#178

Post by eric_h »

InitialLastName wrote: post #175
jkaplowitz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideas you're saying are quite common in the West, as you say, but that's not the attitude in NYC. Everyone realizes it's worth funding and fixing. The disputes are about the who, what, how, and paid by whom.

The issue is really that the MTA is funded and controlled by the State of New York, while it predominantly serves the City of New York. Since the population (especially the voting population) of the city is Hence why the NYC mayor is so intent on funding worthless streetcars and ferries; they let him get out from under the thumb of the state.

> Hence why the NYC mayor is so intent on funding worthless streetcars and ferries

I'm assuming you're using the "worthless" adjective only for the streetcars - I use the NYC Ferry regularly (a stop opened near my apt last year) and it's way better than the subway. I have to walk a bit further on the other side, but it's still way more comfortable.

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

#179

Post by dluan »

zanny wrote: post #160
jimnotgym wrote: post #73

$2.75 sounds really cheap to my British ears. How far can you go on that?

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 maintai…

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.

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

#180

Post by siculars »

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #130
whack wrote: post #99

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…

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 bia…

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.

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