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.