Cuomo Declares a State of Emergency for the Subway
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Do you have any evidence of this?
Being a naïve Californian, I would assume that there are plenty of variables other than management (labor costs, union membership, labor laws, cultural status of subway workers, legal statues, building requirements, vendors and their rates) that could plausibly represent most of the difference.
I find it amusing how Democrats always obsess about fiscally conservative peoples obsession with 'deregulation', so when big news worthy accidents happen they point to conservatives and say 'see this is what you get with deregulation'. As if the only thing we're critical of is the money spent making sure accidents don't happen. Workplace safety and oversight of critical infrastructure is probably the lowest on the list of things I'm concerned with.
There are countless other bureaucratic government organizations that are crippled by incompetence and excess administrative oversight that are failing to accomplish their simple assigned tasks, to the point where it's now standard practice to expect costs to be 2-3x projections and only a fool would expect heads of public workers to roll as a result. Just blame the current leader of x polticial party, right?
I'm not convinced being in support of public infrastructure means I have to support throwing billions more into an organization that consistently fails to perform with the billions they already have.
And this has as much to do with the small group of consultants and big third party companies these people sign extravagant contracts with - under the guise of 'free markets'. So when these projects ultimately fail to be delivered, or end up 3x the cost, the big government liberals can blame capitalism. Because their idea of 'free market competition' is hiring the same 3 companies who managed to have enough lawyers and political connections to navigate their complex administrative systems put in place by these same bureaucrats, who often also end up being employees of these same companies later in their careers.
Lowest bidder government RFPs are just another layer of obscurity sold as a solution to this problem which just further masks responsibility with something that looks like a market on the surface but fails to hold up to even the most basic scrutiny. /rant
...but what is the answer? You can't have a free market subway system that throws any old traffic down the tubes like you can with roads. So there has to be some kind of centralised ownership. (indeed, the NYC subway used to be a system of independent private systems, and they all failed as businesses).
Personally, I don't see how the blame here lies with the usual tired party politics blame game. There are so many different factors at work.
The next time one of your managers takes this approach, remind them Amazon did not accept "we kept everything working" as good enough infrastructure. We're in a unique period in history where nearly every part of the infrastructure of future generations is up for grabs for re-imagining, because most of our civilization's infrastructure does not embed computational capabilities. Does your management want the status quo, or do they want 10X or better improvements in cost and utility that can be sold as the new infrastructure?
The last time Amazon did that to a widely-accepted status quo infrastructure, we ended up with AWS.
It comes back to incentives. If you don't support high-volume infrastructure to enable city growth - in an economic climate and era where practically all work is optimized in cities, and where living outside a city is simply an extravagant luxury - but you do support broad low volume high upkeep infrastructure all over rural areas, you build an incentives structure to artificially drive more people out of efficient, high density cores and into twig mcmansions guzzling water to feed lawns that nobody uses for anything because they are inside all day anyway.
The better structure would obviously be to promote what costs less per capita while also promoting economic growth - promoting high density living, even if the upfront costs are high. Electoral incentives, however, are practically opposite such a notion, sadly.
The rest of the state wants NYC to gtfo as bad as NYC wants out.
The problem is that their unfortunately economically interdependent enough that when the idea gets floated the people who stand to lose money make a big fuss, sway public opinion and the idea is dead in the water. IIRC there was a little bit of noise about a similar split in Washington recently. NorCal would probably be much happier without SoCal. The rest of IL would probably do ok without Chicago, etc.
The pattern is that people in the country really don't like a bunch of people who are nothing like them running the state and telling them what to do and the city thinks the country is full of backwards hicks who are holding them back. They'd be better off without each other.
IMO being able to actually self govern is well worth whatever the price is.
The inerta relates back to why large empires and countries formed to begin with. With the advent of NATO and the nuclear deterrent it is ludicrous to think anyone who is either nucularly armed or has defensive pacts with the armed could possibly be attacked or invaded by a traditional military. War today is predominantly economic, but allowing disparate populations to go their separate ways while maintaining positive relations and trade for mutual self interest only serves to grow economies in the long term.
Previously the new York city mayors had much more control, but they always had a lot of pressure to not increase fares. Note that the nickel fare only ended a decade or so before, after having existed for more than sixty years. So the system needed to increase fares to become more viable, but the mayors needed to run on platforms of not increasing fares.
Putting the mta in state hands was seen as a better, more technocratic solution, allowing the agency to do things that are necessary even if they aren't popular.
Of the 63 seats in the New York State Senate, 26 represent NYC. Of the 150 seats in the New York State Assembly, 65 represent NYC. Those represent ~41% and ~43% of the seats in the upper and lower house, respectively.
One big difference, besides upgrades and maintenance, in addition to ridership is the absence of a flat fee. On the other hand they ate self sustaining and keep updating their rolling stock as well as infrastructure.
However, you also need proportional representation, so you can actually have multiple parties. Otherwise, the "other" big party can just "wait its turn" to win the elections again - it doesn't have to prove anything.
I think the underlying problem is more a lack of accountability and the very low give-a-crap factor for politicians.
How do countries like Japan or Switzerland manage to keep everything relatively pristine?
Making this feasible would require a more efficient platform for soliciting ideas from citizens, voting on them and tracking overall execution which doesn't exist today. This isn't, however, an intractable problem - there are distributed trust systems (based on so-called "trust algorithms") that are being designed today such as Ethereum.
A big problem with things now is voter education, and people go to the polls without actually understanding what they are voting for - they are rushed and push through, or don't vote at all.
All discussions on politics really boil back down to this - representation sucks because first past the post sucks. Changing the voting system in most places is a constitutional amendment. Hence, it will never happen. Nothing can get better because the only people who can change it (and don't say third parties, remember, we are in a system structurally designed to kill opposition to the ruling duopoly) are the ones in power because of the system the way it is.
If people could vote for the person they want to rule, with (preferably) proportional instant runoff elections (and thus no fear of "the lesser of two evils"), almost none of the current politicians in any state would be in power.
The majority of people in Australia don't even know that we don't have FPTP voting, despite being asked to fill out preferences on the voting form. They also have no knowledge of how the senate voting works or even the senate's purpose in the government. The major parties and media conspire to keep this attitude prevalent.
The situation seems unsolvable. There's no incentive for the average person to dedicate any more time to politics than it takes to read a headline each day when they have their own lives to worry about. And such a shallow level of understanding is totally abusable by anyone and everyone with a pen in their hand.
The system is broken, but the voting system is just the tip of the iceberg.
The US, due to its founding documents, is permanently stuck on the surface, where at best people see the iceburg and can't even fathom the depths beneath - hence the near willful ignorance.
But isn't your example just demonstrating the incentives problem? Instead of it being at the level where, in the US, politicians are incentivized to preserve the status quo because that is what elected them, and to enable better representation would be to use power only they wield against their own self interest, you are just a graduated level lower - you start to enable more democratic elections, but then have the problem about educating anyone about it.
It is truly a hydra, because the education example plays out the same way - those that set the policy agenda of what is taught in schools, where civics and voting and taxes and budgeting should be taught but are not (at least stateside) were put in power by the ignorant, and thus it is in their own self interest and continued viability in politics to keep their voters ignorant. And it really does not matter who is elected or when - any person elected is always in a position to minimize the degree to which their electorate is educated, because emotional appeals are much simpler, and much more useful for personal ends, than rational and factual ones. You can't say one thing and do another and still get reelected when being scrutinized by an engaged, logical electorate who operate in a system that enables them to actually pick who they want to rule.
Unfortunately, 50-65% of people who are eligible to vote actually do so. Often, they do end up voting along party lines, but that's not because of party loyalty so much as a lack of knowledge regarding the candidates. If you give people the opportunity to learn about these things and impress upon them the importance of doing so, they will be more likely to vote rationally.
Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States? My understanding of the blockchain concept is that what it provides is a proof-of-effort consensus-based system for creating an open and auditable ledger for transactions which would seem to fit the requirement of having an open and verifiable voting ledger for ballot initiatives.
The better question is: what do you gain from using a blockchain? Distributed ledgers aren't magically faster, more reliable, and secure than a centralized ledger. They just don't require trusting any single party. But you're proposing using a distributed ledger to record voting on policies executed by centralized political entities.
At the end of the day, you still have to trust the MTA or some state or local government to do what your voters tell them to. And your voting eligibility is tied to citizenship and/or proof of residency, as established by your inclusion in some centralized database anyway.
So assuming electronic direct democracy is the solution here (and that's a big assumption), you're probably better off just having the MTA set up a webform tied to a database and calling it a day.
Ignoring for a moment things like hard forks, 51% attacks, lost keys, theft of votes via malware, etc., the biggest non-technical objection I'd see to it is that the concept of a secret ballot is considered absolutely critical in the US.
NYC is the only American city which relies on heavy transit, just a little more than half the people working there use it. Only one other city crests ten percent and the after that its five percent and down.
It is the most expensive transportation option available to commuters at all stages when you calculate it per passenger mile, this is with subsidies included. Even building all those roads the automobile less that a fourth of the cost and most public transit will be superseded by autonomous cars and buses; the later which can adapt to changing needs that subway and heavy rail cannot.
Besides all the deferred maintenance and NYC is not alone in this, many lines are tens of billions in deferred maintenance, many lines face hundreds of millions with a few at a billion in underfunded pensions. Worse, subsidies have not increased ridership but instead employment. When most lines came about in the hay days of such it was nearly 60k riders per worker, that has fallen to less than 30k riders being served per worker.
the simple fact is that such transit is expensive to build and maintain and even with incredible subsidy they cannot get enough people to ride it though NYC gets close. NYC has the same problem the rest do, no one wants to pay anywhere near what the actual cost is per passenger mile to use it.
and lol at heavy rail can't meet needs that cars can. A single subway line in New York can carry 60k people _in each direction_ at peak capacity. Autonomous cars are years away and will never achieve that efficiency just because of space.
Silicon Valley's VTA is among the worst, as its routes were chosen more for political purposes than optimal service.
Chicago absolutely does also. While the total passenger numbers are lower, mass transit is critical to Chicago's economy.
Easily available figures suggest you're... way off with that estimate.
Where are you getting your numbers from? Other countries build subways that are better and cheaper than they are in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
Can anyone rebut Shivetya's claims?
1. Subway is the most expensive transportation option per passenger mile, when you include subsidies.
2. Only one other US city (besides NYC) has 10% of workers riding the subway. (If I'm reading that right - is heavy transit distinct from "light rail" here?)
If you can't rebut them, what good is voting them down?
From former Amtrak CEO David Hughes:
"The accumulated deferred maintenance and lack of attention really makes it almost a third-world operation." [2]
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amtrak-crash-philadelphia-highli...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/nyregion/nj-transit-sched...
The Northeast routes should have been sold off to regional transit authorities and the rest of the system shut down.
There are effectively 3 types of services Amtrak runs.
1. Long distance trains. These are the 1-2x a day or less cross-country runs, the legacy of pre-1971 history, effectively. Because they run 95%+ on freight company rails in most cases, they're often very late, very slow, and often do not provide a very practical service or even come close to generating reasonable revenue number. Amtrak runs these at the behest of the federal government, who picks up the tab for their losses.
It's easy to say, "cut these!", and not necessarily wrong. But while it's not a very good service, it gets Amtrak into 46 states. It's often the only transportation option of any kind in those rural areas besides driving yourself. Even buses don't serve a lot of the places Amtrak rumbles through. The losses are relatively small per year, and as such Congress is generally loathe to kill service that affects THEIR state. That's the political angle.
The other angle is that it serves as a placeholder of sorts for the future. It keeps the idea of long-distance passenger rail in existence. It keeps the right to run that 1-2x a day service over those lines active. It's a lot easier to negotiate to run a couple more trains a day than it is to negotiate to start running on a line you don't run on. It's a lot easier to get community support to expand/improve a thing that exists than convince people to bring what they've never had before. Many recent expansions of the state supported services (more on what that is next) have been over that.
2. State supported services are what they sound like. States pay Amtrak to run service. States may buy equipment that Amtrak runs or it may be part of the general Amtrak fleet. States pay for the operating costs/number of trains, capital improvements, etc. Amtrak serves as the operator fulfilling the contract. Many of these provide "real" service that is regularly used by people where it operates. Some states are putting in enough in upgrades to even get time-competitive with driving. There is no reason for the federal government to be altering how Amtrak handles this. If states want to, they're perfectly free to hire someone else. Attempts at that have mostly not gone well.
3. Northeast Corridor. Pretty much vital to the Northeast, without exaggeration. It moves more people than planes or buses do between most of the 1-2 city hops. It's badly in need of billions of $ of improvements, which is the primary issue with it, not Amtrak's management of it. Even as it is it's critical infrastructure. It turns an operating profit, but doesn't cover capital expenses. It would probably be a legal and political nightmare to try to split it up among the states or come up with a successor given how many states are involved in it, it needs to be one entity.
“We know what we need to do. He mentioned the subway’s
aging signal system. We live in a digital age. Our signal
system isn’t even analog. It’s mechanical.”
Original controls were all mechanical.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw...
What's worse is that perpetual firefighting is 10-100x more expensive than fixing a crisis in advance. Perpetual "Crisis Management" is a large driver of the cost disease that infects many industries, like infrastructure and healthcare. Why will "fixing" the subway cost billion of dollars? Because NYC eagerly let the technical debt and maintenance build up in exchange for it not being $poitician's problem yesterday. There was no incentive to improve and fix the situation in advance. There still isn't. So whatever Cumuo does here, don't worry - we'll be back again for a repeat next decade.
In the cases you described, putting a wifi mesh net topside is something that can be done in weeks. Revamping a hundred year old subway that woefully needs tens of billions of dollars of renovations that would probably take a decade to complete raise taxes while you are in office while your successor 2 terms later reaps the rewards.
If they even get that far - the tragedy of ignorant voters is how long term vision doesn't get anyone votes. If you raise taxes now, you probably won't be in office tomorrow, even if that tax raise would make every constituent you have a millionaire 5 years from now, and they would elect a replacement whose entire platform is to undo what you did, because the immediate pain is much more meaningful to them in the voting booth than the long term promise.
Don't fund the public service and it fails.
The first paragraph is about 'entrepenuers' lining up to fix the subway...
There's going to be contracts.and aton of money to be made
Look at the mess the UK rail system is in - absurdly high ticket prices, confusing interconnections, bad service, finger pointing, bad maintenance, it's a mess.
The original railways were privately owned and apparently worked pretty well but it is a different world now. Minimal costs trump all else and that's no way to run a city's mass transit system. They will never be profitable enterprises, they are a public service, for the good of the public and the city itself.
Ever wonder why airplanes had wifi before the subway? Private vs public.
Ever compare the privately owned NYC ferries (fully open to the public) with the publicly owned ferries?
I'm wondering if ferries are easier to run as there is less infrastructure. There are the equivalent of stations and maintenance depots, but not rails. I don't know who owns the ferry infrastructure or if it is shared.
If you privatised the trains, would the different operators share tracks and stations? If so who would own and maintain them? My guess is the operators would baulk at the idea of maintaining ANY infrastructure and just want to run trains leased from the govt, over a system maintained by the govt, who now has less revenue from the fares.
In NSW our railway barely if never got to operational status under private ownership. The govt took it over immediately and it has been priceless for the state ever since. But of course bean counters have been complaining about it for decades now. I think there has been privatisation stuff going on for a while like the airport line. They were also trying to disentangle the various routes so they could sell them off, but that is hard because they didn't need to be planned that way when built.
It seems to me like a city's metro system is too important to leave in the hands of private operators whose only reason to exist is to make a profit and that will bail out the second things are not worth its time and money. If the metro chokes, so does the city.
Who owns and builds roads and gas stations? Private bus companies, taxis, rideshares, chauffeurs, and shipping companies run on these.
Who owns ports? Private cruise lines, ferries, and shipping companies run ships out of these.
Who owns freight rail and associated stations? Private freight and logistics companies move products over these.
Elsewhere in this thread are comments about Tokyo's private subway companies (three of them).
Airports (and baseball stadiums) are built with public money because of competition between municipalities. They are primarily funded by the people who use them though.
Gas stations are private enterprises.
And to think they claim living in NY is dehumanizing!
Yeah, it's hard to imagine the amount of money it would take me to live there.