This subway crisis and others like it is the end result of the cycle of "Crisis Management". We have politicians who "never let a good crisis go to waste", a media which practically requires a constant state of crisis somewhere to attract meaningful attention (and thus ad-revenue) and the final result is that society can barely focus on whatever actively burning crisis is at hand. Future simmering problems are ignored and actively shortchanged, because the political class doesn't care (trains running on time doesn't get you votes, only smearing your political opponents messes do!). The media class cannibalized itself long ago, and no longer has enough revenue to run both a major online presence and deep investigative reporting that could surface future problems in advance. Citizens rightly distrust both as being myopic rent-seeking classes - and they are! Sadly, this mistrust does nothing to fix either situation, only giving both new excuses for why everything is broken.

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.