New York’s Subway Frequency Guidelines Are the Wrong Approach

> Giving them more money is not the solution; putting them in jail and paying Singapore to administer our transit is.

Do you think that's practicable? I thought you were a big supporter of of the rule of law rather than arbitrary politically motivated jailings.

Evidently a lot has gone wrong with NY transport, but "just stop giving the MTA money" is not going to result in better transport, and "the MTA is incompetent" reasoning seems to mostly lead to adding yet another layer of procurement/management rules that makes them less flexible and more wasteful. What would be an incremental, politically acceptable change that we could make to improve matters?

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/the-unique-...

In NYC, some rich landowners get all the benefit of public spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondout_Reservoir (75 miles upstate)

From Vancouver to Ancient Rome, every city in the world thinks it is somehow better managed than its hinterlands. City dwellers forget their urban lifestyle relies on a constant stream of resources from elsewhere. New York sends money upstate. Upstate sends water. You cannot drink money. If the economic and political ties were cut I know where I'd rather be.

Ultimately, the idea of democracy is to provide equal protection for all, and so NYC's relative prosperity should be funding some upstate initiatives. That said, administrative control of the subway should be entirely in NYC, and if we don't collect enough tax to run it to the standards we desire, we should be able to affect that change locally.

Much as I'd love for key NYC infrastructure (namely the MTA) to be free from the grips of Albany, this would never work. New York City is so intrinsically dependent on infrastructure from the surrounding areas that it would be a nightmare to try and negotiate that across state lines. Negotiating water rights alone would be an absolute mess.

> we still aren't allowed to run the socialist utopia most city residents actually want

Uh, no, "most" residents of New York City don't want a socialist utopia.

Just because four of the five boroughs voted for Obama in 2008 doesn't mean NYC is some bastion of radical left-wing thought. Let's not forget that the city voted Bloomberg in three times.

(If you really want a deeper analysis, you might want to note that New York City politics is also influenced by people of color to a degree that no other major city in the US is. While they tend to vote reliably for Democratic candidates, black and Latino voters are empirically far less liberal[0] than their white counterparts in the Democratic party).

[0] Ignore the op-ed itself; the graph halfway down the page illustrates the data very well: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/upshot/what-the-hispanic-v...

"The time is comm' and though I'm no youngster, I may see it, when New York City will break away from the State and become a state itself. It's got to come. The feelin' between this city and the hayseeds that make a livin' by plunderin' it is every bit as bitter as the feelin' between the North and South before the war. And, let me tell you, if there ain't a peaceful separation before long, we may have the horrors of civil war right here in New York State. Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin' better today than to go out gunnin' for hayseeds!

New York City has got a bigger population than most of the states in the Union. It's got more wealth than any dozen of them. Yet the people here, as I explained before, are nothin' but slaves of the Albany gang. We have stood the slavery a long, long time, but the uprisin' is near at hand. It will be a fight for liberty, just like the American Revolution. We'll get liberty peacefully if we can; by cruel war if we must.

Just think how lovely things would be here if we had a Tammany Governor and Legislature meetin', say in the neighborhood of Fifty-ninth Street, and a Tammany Mayor and Board of Aldermen doin' business in City Hall! How sweet and peaceful everything would go on!

The people wouldn't have to bother about nothin'. Tammany would take care of everything for them in its nice quiet way. You wouldn't hear of any conflicts between the state and city authorities. They would settle everything pleasant and comfortable at Tammany Hall, and every bill introduced in the Legislature by Tammany would be sure to go through. The Republicans wouldn't count.

Imagine how the city would be built up in a short time! At present we can't make a public improvement of any consequence without goin' to Albany for permission, and most of the time we get turned down when we go there. But, with a Tammany Governor and Legislature up at Fifty-ninth Street, how public works would hum here! The Mayor and Aldermen could decide on an improvement, telephone the Capitol, have a bill put through in a jiffy and—there you are. We could have a state constitution, too, which would extend the debt limit so that we could issue a whole lot more bonds. As things are now, all the money spent for docks, for instance, is charged against the city in calculatin' the debt limit, although the Dock Department provides immense revenues. It's the same with some other departments. This humbug would be dropped if Tammany ruled at the Capitol and the City Hall, and the city would have money to burn." -- George Washington Plunkett [1]

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2810/2810-h/2810-h.htm

It also costs time (and money) to split up trains every day (10 cars into 5 cars, or 8 into 4), and so the MTA probably wouldn't do that.

Finally, if all the railcars are being used 24/7, there is no time to do routine maintenance on them.