How Cuts in Basic Subway Upkeep Can Make NYC Commutes Miserable
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
American cities are so far behind. D.C. is probably one of the best metros, but NYC and Chicago, while having quite extensive systems for very large cities, have no budget to expand or move them into the future.
For cities that large, these systems have to be maintained. They cannot afford to cut train lines, unless they want to end up with grueling traffic like you have in LA.
Many modern subway systems have similarly huge networks with far higher traffic than NYC but manage to maintain low failure rates and CLEAN tracks simply because they value and prioritize maintenance and quality of service. Some are private, some are public.
It truly baffles me why NYC and actually the SF BART both fail so utterly to even attempt to provide quality service.
I live in Europe and to me it seems that its a general American mentality of everybody having a car
The problem seems more attitude wise. We want great infrastrure while paying low taxes. This contradiction, of course, isn't really solvable as can be seen in the generally pretty rotten state of infrastructure in the US.
I live in a city with one of the most cost-effective public transport systems. People in Tokyo tend to think of the railways as an extension of themself / their home / their city. Whereas I imagine most Americans tend to look at such systems from an external perspective: hence "they".
So there's nothing special about the Japanese (or bad about New Yorkers)
Oh and the person in charge of selecting the escalators for BART was eventually hired by the escalator company. It’s a perfect example of everything wrong with public goods in America.
Apparently union labor rates are 3-5x more expensive in transit than Europe. Considering how labor heavy it is to do repair work on old subway lines it means you need an insane budget to do any more work. And guess what, as soon as the budget gets raised the union notice and want a larger slice.
So many examples of this. Another is the way NY subway cars have 3 staff minimum. Whereas London, Paris, Berlin have one. Assume they make 3x the money and you need 3x more than other cities and you have a 10x cost increase in operational labor costs. Plus the complexity of ensuring you always have 3 people there with no sickness etc, as if you lose one you can't run the train at all.
It's really insane and will take a mayor with serious backbone to fight.
(there are plenty of well-documented reasons why NYC comes up short on money for its transit system, and "unions are the devil" is an insufficient explanation for them)
Actually, it is a 2 person crew for full-length trains and a single person for half-length trains.
"It's really insane and will take a mayor with serious backbone to fight."
The MTA is a state agency and the mayor has almost no say in contract negotiations.
I think union membersip is more widespread in western Europe than in the US, but I feel they could even be a bit more powerful here. They can barely keep the power balance in most industries, and have to fight long for modest raises (compensating inflation at best). Even when the economy is prosperous like in Germany, it seems they can't get many concessions.
But still there is some power balance between unions and employers, and this balance is considered the normal system how wages are negotiated in many fields.
In the US, unions seem a bit like rackets. For example, some places are only allowed to hire union members (per deal with the union). Woah, I wouldn't think this is allowed in Europe. Instead of painfully negotiating a 1% raise over a couple of years (by hinting at the possibility of announcing a warning strike), they seem to dictate ridiculous policies to make a few people rich.
Can someone explain this difference? Is it just anti-union propaganda that makes them look bad in the US? Or did they kill off the European style unions a long time ago and just left the rackets?
Nobody does propaganda quite as well as Americans.
http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-funding/
(the Petroleum tax and State & Local operating assistance combined are less than 10%)
Metropolitan Mass Transportation Operating Assistance Fund: This is a pot of tax money collected for the MTA and other downstate transportation systems. It’s made up of revenue, such as statewide tax on petroleum companies, a sales tax in the 12-county MTA region and corporate franchise taxes and fees both statewide and in the MTA region. MMTOA this year will collect a total of $2.3 billion - 72% of which goes to the MTA.
That fund isn't "purely" statewide.
But the broader point still holds if statewide taxes are contributing all of 20%, the MTA is quite locally funded.
Upstate depends on the MTA region's economic engine for its tax base. Making sure that economy runs smoothly (and that the employees and consumers necessary to that economy can get to and from their jobs and stores) should be a priority for rational, well-informed actors.
I would guess, though, that only a tiny percentage are well informed about what percentage of state taxes come from vs go to various regions. Can't comment on rationality, but with the wrong assumptions, rationality can be counterproductive and irrationality is no better.
NY safe is a great example how far the influence of NYC goes in state government and it wound up getting done despite practically the entire rest of the state being opposed to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Green-Star-Map-05-Feb-14....
NYC blaming NY for it's problems is an incredibly out of touch with reality attitude. If something NYC wants isn't getting done at the state level it's probably because NYC's goals do not line up with those of its own elected representation, not because the rest of the state is standing in your way.
The city proper (served by the subway) represents about 20% of the population.
The metro area including parts of Connecticut and NJ (not represented in NY State gov't) is about 20M people. Even if they were all in state, that's still a bit under half the state's total population. And the metro area outside the city proper is still heavily dominated by car culture.
NY State also has several other much smaller but still significant population centers, including Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo. These areas are not served by the MTA and are also automobile-centric, despite having been founded and initially become boom towns in part due to the Erie Canal (that is, before the railroad dominated shipping and travel, let alone cars).
Some things the city gets its way about, especially when its interests align with those of its suburbs or the smaller urban centers of the state. When it comes to non-car-centric transportation initiatives, however, it generally doesn't.
70% of SF households own a car, so still a majority by a long shot [1].
[1] http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
40% drive alone, while a bare majority 51% use a car, bus or van for transport (including carpools).
It's so popular, nobody does it anymore.
People also cycle a lot. Most Caltrain services almost always have two bike cars.
We get crappy subway and infrastructure b/c of the efficient public sector workers and unions.
For example, in Spain we high speed rail between major cities which is great but regional and local rail is terrible.
The union took the city hostage many times. Enough is enough.
You're going to get downvoted for this because there's a very strong pro-union contingent on Hacker News, and most people reading Hacker News aren't from New York.
That said, it's true that many of the problems that New York transit faces stem from the extreme incompetence and greed of the TWU. It's not even about protecting their members' interests; it's about the TWU protecting its own interests as a corporate entity.
> The core problem with the NYC subway system is a management culture that does not value long term problem solving, instead preferring quick fixes and short term band aids
Do they have the time and budget horizon to do long-term planning ?
To me it seems like SF and NY subways are underfunded
Transport for London budgeted 2.26 billion pounds for the London Underground in 2016. Even at peak exchange rates from 2014, that's $3.8 billion. The MTA spent $8.18 billion on the subway in 2017. The London Underground handles about 5 million rides per day, versus a bit under 6 million per day for the NYC subway. So the NYC MTA spends 120% more to serve about 20% more subway riders.
The management culture you're referring to stems from the TWU, which actively fights efforts to impose long-term planning and solutions, in favor of quick, short-term responses that pad their bills.
The government doesn't push back against these, because (for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article), New York city and state government are not really accountable to their own constituents. To give you an idea of how bad it is, the mayor of New York hasn't ridden public transit regularly in decades and doesn't even know basic transit ridership facts[0].
The former Speaker of the NYS Assembly (who was convicted for corruption a few years ago) was one of the strongest advocates for cutting the bus service that his own district was entirely dependent on[1]. Because of said corruption, he was essentially untouchable, so there was no democratic avenue for holding him accountable.
Corruption in NYS is widespread; it's the most corrupt state in the country[2], and it's no surprise that this corruption impacts the public transit infrastructure.
[0] https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/943158489064624128
[1] His district has essentially no subway coverage
[2] http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2016/sep/19/el...
Related to this. We're finally starting to get rid of the stupid metrocards and switching to a tap/scan system. I saw one at 34th on the A/C/E line (34th & 8th West side entrance), just one turnstile had it so guessing they are just testing it there. Baby steps.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/nyregion/metrocard-subway...
If you're out in the evenings or need to work early in the morning on the weekends you're also out of luck. Train service ends early Sunday-Thursday, and starts late Saturday-Sunday. Going to a concert is an eternal crapshoot, the last train on our line during the week can be as early as 10PM. This all disproportionately affects service workers and people without consistent access to personal transit as well, which bothers me on a more fundamental level than the personal inconvenience in my life; I perceive it as a failure of the urban social contract.
Also, LA is basically the only one of the largest American cities that is actually expanding their system in a meaningful and relatively quick way. Alexandria (where I live) has been trying to get an infill station in Potomac Yards added for something like 20+ years.
I live a half mile from a metro stop (out in the suburbs) and I STILL would rather drive into DC whenever I need to go into the city. It's faster, more reliable, and more convenient even with the hassle of driving in DC and finding/paying for parking.
Oh dear -- that's a scary thought. Here in DC it's unanimously understood that the metro is a train wreck, literally and figuratively.
Yet upgrading the system to modern signals and interlockings is even more expensive, especially since maintenance is extremely hard when the system has to run 24/7.
It's complicated, difficult, and the people who can do this are expensive. Railway signaling systems, alongside air and spacecraft, and sometimes consumer devices that would be expensive to firmware update during the warranty, are the few places software verification is used.
The specification we are verifying the software against must also be proven to be correct, including failing safe.
The hardware also has to perform, at all reasonable temperatures, humidities, with vibration, poor power, and for an expected life of at least 50 years.
The people installing the hardware must be checked, to ensure the work is done correctly. A crossed wire is a critical fault, I imagine there's a long and detailed procedure for connecting every wire.
[1] is an interesting read, a retrospective on a bad crash in 1988 in Britain which led to many improvements in signaling safety.
https://www.railengineer.uk/2014/01/06/25-years-after-clapha...
According to Wikipedia[1], there are about half-dozen commercial systems that get heavily reused.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...
- planning and then (re)locating points/switches
- planning and then (re)locating signals or balises
- updating trains
- configuring the software to reflect the track and signals
- verifying the final configuration
The signal lamp itself is probably a small part of the cost compared to all the wiring and the time spent installing it.
Edit: googling for "cost of railway signals" produces this very comprehensive PDF on the subject: www.credo-group.com/downloads/tco_of_rail_signalling_systems.pdf
However in the rail world signals encompasses much more than that red light. There's sensors on the track which detect when a train enters a section of the line and when it leaves, and on modern systems there's communication with the train itself to force the brakes on if the driver runs a red light, making it near impossible to enter a section with a train already in it.
All those parts need to communicate with each other, and they need to be ridiculously reliable, and capable of self-reporting when they fail, because in the worst case a failure in any one of those components results in a few hundred people dying in a dark underground tunnel.
Most other countries have subsidized or even free mass transit systems and they realistically don't expect them to be profitable, but helping people/goods to be moved is considered more important.
It is one of those natural monopolies where privatizing stuff doesn't really work.
However, there is one way to make it work privately, and that's to capture some of those economic benefits by buying the land around stations. If someone buys some relatively cheap land near a city and then builds a train line from there to the centre, the value of that land increases and so they can charge higher rents on any housing, offices or shop units built there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintetsu_Department_Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetan#Subsidiaries
Here is a good map of "farebox recovery ratio" (the percentage of operating costs funded by fares): https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/gallery/Map_World%20.... Quite a few asian systems recover more than 100% of operating costs, and a couple of European systems do, but no American ones. London's public transit system, for example, gets 25% of its funding from the government. The NYC MTA is at 45%.
I can do the same with 1-dollar modern parts.
FYI, MTA operating procedures require trains to stop when a signal is not lighted, then coordinate by radio before proceeding. There is also a defense-in-depth strategy: the interlocking maintains 4 red signals between trains, so a collision in theory would require 4 failing signals, 4 failing stop arms (which automatically stop trains that ignore red signals) and a train operator ignoring the rules.
Fundamentally, verification system is a traffic light problem. In case you do not know, the blinking yellow is "i crashed". That condition is not checked via code verification of Red/Yellow/Green state machine. It is checked via crossed green detector: a circuit that checks for a condition "green energized" on both and should that condition occur it crashes the Red/Yellow/Green state machine. That state machine will never recover until Bob shows up at a traffic box, looks to see if a sensor is dead, looks to see if box is OK and resets it by hand.
Also, in case you do not actually know this, a metric crap load of this special electronics that NY metro uses have Windows 98 running IBMs inside.
Source: Neighbor MTA grunt
You assume wrong; the MTA has no difficulty finding people to work on the old equipment (I have a close relative who actually works on this equipment, there has never been trouble finding willing workers). Also note that the old technology is mostly restricted to interlocking machines and telephones; everything else (train sets, radios, MOW equipment, etc.) is much more recent.
London Underground in the 1980s was like NYC Subway now - but after sustained 15-20 years of funding it improved immensely (while passenger levels more than doubled, if not tripled).
Of course this could not last - with the current Conservative government Underground is getting less and less money, so starting to defer upgrades... Politicians are incapable of learning.
What the MTA needs to do is:
1) Disband the union
2) Cut service overnight to increase maintenance times
3) Double fares (Tube fares are 15-100% higher depending on distance; using exchange rates from a few years ago, minimum Tube fare was like $5 versus $2.75 for the NY subway)
[1] http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-mayors-budget-2017-18.pdf (page 10) versus http://web.mta.info/mta/budget/pdf/MTA%202017%20Adopted%20Bu.... (page II-A). Just look at the Underground versus the subway + the Staten Island Railroad.
The funding for the tracks and the other parts of the system come from different places, with the farebox only having to partially pay for their upkeep. And there's a lot of politics involved because the rest of the state of NY helps pay for the subway.
There is no reason for the NYC metro to be cheaper than the London Tube. They should raise fares to what the market will bear, and use the money for expansion or save it for a rainy day.
It might maximize ticket revenue if they priced some people out of taking the train. Doesn't maximize good for the city, or even revenue for the city if some marginal person decides to stay home instead of going to work.
So only rich people will ride the subway but those who do will have a better experience?
> To the extent that people are priced out at the margin, that can be addressed through targeted subsidies (or guaranteed minimum income).
Please provide examples of this working in practice.
It doesn't seem to work for healthcare, education, etc.
The places with "good" healthcare, education, transportation, internet, etc, don't make it expensive and then hand out vouchers to poor people. They make it free or so cheap everyone can afford it.
Most people can afford a $5 subway ticket.
> Please provide examples of this working in practice.
London Tube fares range from 2.4 to 5.1 pounds. That’s $3.50-$8.00 using typical exchange rates, versus just $2.75 for the NYC metro. Somehow non-rich people in London manage.
Absolutely not! Overnight service is an essential element of the NYC subway system. It's what makes the subway go from being a convenience to being a utility. Knowing that I can absolutely rely on subway, or at least a shuttle bus, at any time of the night, is a completely different experience than living in a city where I have to plan might night around the train. Even if it very slow at night, I know it will be there. Like a road.
Besides, I doubt that shutting down all 400 miles of the network will significantly improve maintenance efficiency. They already severely cut back service to a few trains an hour, and they coordinate with maintenance crews pretty well, and crawl past them at 5mph. And the system is big enough so that they can shut down parts of it.
I think the only time the city completely shut down service was during 9/11, but they had partial service again a few hours later, to areas that did not pass through the neighborhood.
But I can tell you that proposing we shut down all service after a certain hour is as ludicrous as saying we should close most of our bridges after a certain hour. The subway is not an add-on for NYC like in it is in most cities, it is an essential feature.
Who defines essential? The cost of overnight running, does it justify the value?
The biggest cities in the world does not have overnight sub, and they carry far more people around the city, is that a problem? No, of course not.
I don't think we want to use Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Delhi, Jakarti, Beijing, Mumbai, São Paulo, or Lagos[0] as models for New York City's transit. A casual observer might claim Tokyo is a decent model, except that Tokyo is structurally a radically different city, to the point where the comparison doesn't provide much of value.
> The cost of overnight running, does it justify the value?
It absolutely does. Shutting down the subway overnight would cripple the entire city. Even though overnight service is limited compared to daytime service, it's an essential part of the city's infrastructure.
Moreover, eliminating overnight service isn't actually necessary for providing the improvements that the subway needs, so talking about eliminating overnight service is a red herring.
[0] the nine cities in the world, excluding Tokyo, whose metropolitan area is larger than New York City's.
> Moreover, eliminating overnight service isn't actually necessary for providing the improvements that the subway needs, so talking about eliminating overnight service is a red herring.
I see statements & 0 facts... Please check your references and come back with data.
For starters, I provided facts that debunked your un-cited and inaccurate claim about subways in other large cities.
If you're going to make the claim that overnight service is the root of the MTA's current problems, the burden is on you toprovide evidence that
(a) temporary closures for routine maintenance are not sufficient, (b) something changed drastically in the last 15 years, because the MTA has run overnight for most of the subway's existence without a problem; and (c) the problems that overnight service allegedly causes are somehow more significant than the other problems the MTA has (which are discussed extensively in this article and comment thread).
It's your responsibility to show that the saved maintenance cost is hurting the "essentials" of NYC subway.
Yeah, see, that's the thing: you're making a pretty big fallacy assuming that the costs of providing overnight service actually impact maintenance work in any meaningful way.
As it turns out, overnight service is relatively inexpensive to provide, and temporary disruptions to evening or weekend service for maintenance (which already happen) are sufficient to address most maintenance problems that can't be handled during working hours. Cutting overnight service wouldn't solve the problems that are actually preventing the maintenance that's needed.
I'm not going to bother to go into more specifics, because they're well documented, not just in this comment thread but also the exact original article. If you're interested, those are both excellent places to start.
And also, providing all night service adds to the value of working in the city. Knowing that I can stay at my office until 3AM makes living in NYC such a good value. And it also makes transportation something you don't have to think about; you just know it will be there. It would be really inconvenient if I had to wait until 5 or 6AM for the first morning train. I should have the option to get a train at 4:30AM if I want.
Finally, NYC's subway is unique, and, for various reasons I mentioned in another post, would probably be more expensive to shut down at night.
> Even if it very slow at night, I know it will be there. Like a road.
Sure, the subway rails aren't going anywhere either. Perhaps you'd like drive your own car underground? While I see little or no utility in keeping lights on all night, MTA will find other ways to waste money and won't save much money.
Theres a few things that NYC could do that would easily alleviate this:
1. Run a night owl bus service that replaces all or most lines like Philly. Don't know why this isn't more common. Theres less traffic at night, so the people relying on the subway for work will not be inconvenienced significantly.
2. Have overnight service Friday and Saturday for the party crowd. Apparently there are systems in Europe that do this.
Or, you know, people who actually have to travel those hours for work or other reasons. NYC is a 24-hour city in a way that cities like London are not.
> 1. Run a night owl bus service that replaces all or most lines like Philly. Don't know why this isn't more common.
Bus service, even with optimal traffic, is way slower than subway service.
> Have overnight service Friday and Saturday for the party crowd. Apparently there are systems in Europe that do this.
Yeah, London just introduced this. It's pretty terrible compared to what we have in NYC. I wouldn't trade it for what NYC has now.
I highly doubt that’s true.
Having lived in New York for a decade and also spent time in London, there's absolutely no comparison. Heck, even just looking at the nightlife: pubs in London shut down before midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. That's completely unheard-of in most of NYC, even bars in the relatively residential areas.
NYC also tends to have other businesses open earlier and close later than London (or most of Europe). In order for that to happen, it's necessary to have people who work the early/late/graveyard shifts, and those people are incredibly dependent on overnight service.
It's unfortunate that you're mixing in overnight service with the rest of the points you make, because you're correct about the rest - the fares are a little too low right now, and rampant corruption at the TWU wastes what little money they do have.
I guess that's a way you could interpret my comment, if you read only the first paragraph and ignore the sentence that literally comes next.
This citizen lives in a city where LOTS of stuff is open late and he/she would like to participate in this city. Not just bars. But even the bars have workers who still need to get there. And I'd guess the nightlife sector of NYC's economy is MUCH larger than any other city in the US.
The MTA is exceptional among American institutions in receiving this level of trust in large part because it's neutral. Sure, you can only move around at the government's whim, but the government is happy to take you anywhere at any time.
If it starts to get moralizing and opinionated, i.e. "you don't really need to go out drinking at night," that trust will evaporate rapidly. As it should.
Systems that merely augment car cultures, or that serve collectivist societies which already trust government with even greater degrees of control over their lives, are not useful precedents. New York is basically singular in getting Americans to surrender to central planners so thoroughly.
I don't think you're right about this. There's just a lot of maintenance work that needs to be done that can't be done even with slow-moving trains going by a few times an hour. Signals need to be replaced, rail surface need to be smoothed, ballast needs to be cleaned and redistributed, ties break and need to be replaced, signals need to be replaced, etc. London and Hong Kong crews can do something like replace a section of rail overnight. It's very hard to do that in NYC.
They are also doing massive upgrades and maintenance on the L line, but the J/M/Z parallels much of the L's route.
This is fine, it makes sense to do that. It is not as useful to shut the entire system down each night. It makes much more sense to shut parts of it down piecemeal.
NYC's subway network is vast. It actually used to be three different systems that were merged together. The numbered and lettered lines have separate maintenance facilities and hardware.
What's truly unique about NYC's subway, is how redundant it is. Most neighborhoods are serviced by more than one line. When I lived in Washington Heights (northern Manhattan) the 1 line needed emergency maintenance when a roof in a station collapsed, and I believe that reconstruction took almost a year, but the A/C parallels the 1 by only a few blocks.
More accurately, unionized working relationships enforce safer working conditions (both by contracting for conditions better than the legal minimums and providing better avenues for addressing situations which don't meet the legal and contractual minimums) than non-unionized relationships.
I don't see why we need the union today -- especially when the NYC city transportation employees are known to earn more than $100K in wages alone.
Yea... that's a real bad idea. This city operates 24 hours a day, pretending otherwise is a mistake.
Welcome to the world as seen by most UK residents, who don't live and work in London.
Cities with expensive transit typically have mandates that x% of costs must be paid by fairs. In Wellington, NZ and Chicago, US, this is 50%, leading to some pretty high fares or low service.
Just having transit makes revenue though, in taxes from the increased commerce. Access to transport is also the single largest factor in escaping poverty. It's difficult to measure those numbers in revenue though.
But transport always must be subsidized by the State, going back to the roads of Rome.
Since this is not the case in NYC and Chicago - private individuals / the city owns the property adjacent to transit, there needs to be some other way to capture that value. Enter a sane, necessary taxation / subsidization mechanism.
* The value is real. Property adjacent to transit was insulated from the 2008 crash: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/03/22/study-homes-near-tran...
Ironically many car drivers object to the public subsidy of rail, arguing transit should never be publicly subsidized.
Your link seems to prove the opposite. It says that Colorado has the 24th largest share of roads paid for by gas tax, tolls and user fees with 49.9% paid for in that manner. That means that only 23 states have a majority of road spending paid for by gas tax, tolls and user fees, so most states (>50%) have less than half of road spending paid for by gas tax, tolls and user fees.
Once the rail lines are paid for, the cost per passenger is very low. Hence, we should maximize value by making it free.
Once the rail lines are paid for, the cost per passenger is very low
You also need massive capital investments into the rolling stock and all this requires significant maintenance.
An argument can certainly be made if public transport should be free, but stating that the costs are low and essentially paid for once the (very expensive) infrastructure stands is just ludicrous.
If that were the case, the whole reason for this article wouldn't exist, because NYC wouldn't need any maintenance for its subway system.
This is demonstrably false. There are plenty of systems where fares make up close to 100% (or even exceed 100%) of their costs with fares: https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/gallery/Map_World%20...
when it comes to deferred maintenance, if you were to look into the 2015 DOT reports there is nearly a hundred billion dollar backlog on rail maintenance. This is on top of the tens of billions spent building it and building new rail.
the estimates to bring just DC's Metro system back up to maintenance date is over twenty billion.
Just remember in the US most transit rail lines are for the purpose of politicians to cut ribbons.
Our western society seems to find ways of fund investments but when it comes to maintenance there is a void. Why the US is particularly bad at this and what needs to change across the board is the question. The current course is not sustainable.
Where I live is an example of that: during weekdays the light rail closes IIRC between midnight and 6, they only keep it running on weekends because of all the people going out at night (the metro always runs but that's fully automated). Just because the bus system isn't enough to handle a city's peak load, it's usually fine for handling the load on periods where the load is the smallest.
Also note that the MTA's troubles have nothing to do with running the system 24/7. The subway has run 24/7 for a century, and for most of that century maintenance was not a problem. What happened recently was that the state started cutting the MTA's subsidy, so maintenance started to slip and the system fell apart -- something which happened in the 1980s, but people have no ability to learn from past mistakes.
You move them off the train ( 2 minutes ) and let the train continue moving.
Improving signal system won't fix delays. The article is about what about makes commute terrible. MTAs customer does not give a flying f!ck about why there are the delays. MTA customer wants to have no delays. MTA's solution? Contractless payments! New L cars with folding seats!
Subway in NYC runs on electricity. It is not possible to run more trains on most of the lines than already run. MTA got a stupid grant from feds of several hundred million dollars to upgrade one of the L substations. It will add two or maybe three additional trains in the rush hour when trains already come every 3-4 minutes. No improvement in switching infrastructure would fix it. A train stopping for twenty minutes on Bedford St would affect the system for hours because of the idiotic 8th St design.
Oh how about someone having an episode in a tunnel, followed by a dumb-ass passenger pulling emergency brake. In a tunnel. Guess what happens? The conductor has to check every car before the train moves forward even though he or she knows where the emergency brake was pulled. So you now have a sick passenger in a tunnel and entire system again stops. Fun, huh? But sure, through the magic of signal system improvement we will totally address dumb design ideas.
Also, most of the emergency communications buttons now connect you to speak with the driver. They presumably have a procedure, depending on the problem, but for someone sick they will call ahead "passenger in front of carriage 3".
Police probably given up on throwing them out.
A full shutdown is absolutely the best option as much as it sucks for people dependent on the line (like me and my neighbors).
That sounds like an excellent campaign poster.
The city is a public institution it shouldn't have opinions. But the politicians who govern it are very much encouraged to do so.
I suggest you try to run on a political platform of taxes and better services. Then you'll see of Americans want that.
Apparently, when you're injured in the US, the first thing to do is not go to the hospital, but call your lawyer. I'm not sure what to think of it, but it does make me feel uneasy.
For example: "$person was burned by your hot coffee so we're awarding them $smallnumber for medical expenses, lost wages, suffering, etc. and $bignumber in punitive damages because you shouldn't be serving coffee that hot in that manner in the first place"
The possible prejudice for that can range in the millions. Even if those aren't punitive, they sure feel like it.
That is no longer true as a result of the ACA.