Is this really a funding problem or is it an employee quality problem ...
NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
471–477 of 477 posts
Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Is there a link to this interview?
Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
The business entity that owns the subway being profitable is not the same as the subway being profitable. MTR for instance is a real estate developer as well as a subway operator: "As compensation for the cost of building railway networks, the government grants the MTR Corporation land development rights along its rail lines, stations and depots – an increasingly lucrative business in recent years amid a red-hot prop…
It's well understood by the locals that the Hong Kong (and possibly other Asian cities) system reaps most of it's revenue from land rights around/immediately above the stations. In In Asia transit hubs are often also retail hubs and the commercial rents become profit for the public transit system. This makes perfect sense as the retail value of the nearby land can most obviously be credited to the transit system. I'd…
Yeah, majority of Hong Kong subway stations has malls on premise. Not sure it's owned by MTR too, but it's there.
Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, why? The OP has asserted that NY transit delivers vast economic benefits that offset its loss making nature. Fine, I can buy that to some extent, but how big exactly are these benefits? How do we know they're actually so big and not in reality quite small? Well, we could do some one-off studies and hope that Excel is used properly, but why? We already have mechanisms that figure out the value of things and allo…
(This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...) I don't disagree that it's hard to quantify the exact economic value, but you can't use a free market to solve coordination problems like public transit. Coordination failure in stages: 1) A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second m…
> (This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...)
This is the entire point. You cannot dismiss it. What conditions allow the costs to rise so high in NYC?
> A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time.
Why should anyone want to go any place, and what makes them so entitled to receive such a transportation service? People, like businesses, will follow economic incentives. I'm sure landlords and real estate developers love the metro system, it brings great value to the otherwise less desirable realestate. For ever dollar someone doesn't pay to ride the metro, that's a dollar more in rent an apartment can charge.
You have to look at the big picture and figure out who these mass transit systems actually benefit.
Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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.
Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
#476Earlier 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…
"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.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subw...
Re: NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
(This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...) I don't disagree that it's hard to quantify the exact economic value, but you can't use a free market to solve coordination problems like public transit. Coordination failure in stages: 1) A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second m…
> (This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...) This is the entire point. You cannot dismiss it. What conditions allow the costs to rise so high in NYC? > A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time. Why should anyone want to go any place, and…
Everyone wants to go everywhere - because people live Everywhere and have jobs Everywhere and their friends live Everywhere and there are stores Everywhere.
No one is entitled to anything - you added that word apropos of nothing in my post.