I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out.
BTW: If you disagree please talk out your points.
We're tired of it, but New York government is not a democracy. The two ruling parties have passed an complex network of laws which, in effect, mean that officials are accountable only to the political party, not to their constituents.
Case in point: one of the largest advocates of eliminating business service was Silver (a Democrat), despite the fact that his constituents were almost entirely dependent on bus service. When he was finally convicted of corruption, people were shocked - not shocked that he was corrupt (everyone knew - it was completely conducted in the open), but shocked that he was actually going to be held accountable to it. Unfortunately, the conviction was overturned on appeal due to a technicality - a law had been passed which narrowed the definition of corruption, meaning that the things he was convicted for were no longer criminal offenses.
We can't vote them out when there's literally no one to vote in, and both the Democrats and the Republicans have a gentleman's agreement not to compete with each other seriously, the same way Comcast and Time Warner Cable do.
New York is literally the most corrupt state government in the country[0]. Nothing short of a series of multiple federal court rulings will change that, because both parties benefit from it, and neither has the incentive to change it.
[0] http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2016/sep/19/el...
And people wonder why Trump got elected.
Pervasive desperation for anyone who might actually shake up the system.
Except he lost by something like 8:1 in NYC. Why? Because the folks in NYC knew he was as crooked or worse as the swamp he claimed he would drain.
Fusion voting is actually one of the exact mechanisms that the two dominant parties use to ensure that third-parties remain completely non-viable. As you point out, fusion voting means that third parties have a stronger incentive to endorse one of the Democratic or Republican candidates instead of running their own, because it ensures their right to ballot access.
> primarily because if they don't get enough votes in the elections they cease to exist (i.e., why Working Families endorsed Cuomo instead of Teachout last gubernatorial election).
It's a little more complicated than that. Cuomo promised the Working Families Party that, if they endorsed him, he'd push for a particular piece of policy that they'd wanted. After they endorsed him, he then started the "Women's Equality Party"[0], which also endorsed Cuomo, in a direct attempt to split the vote from the Working Families Party.
His goal was to drive the Working Families Party vote under 50,000[1], which would have denied them ballot access in future elections, so that he wouldn't have to worry about their influence or endorsement in the future.
Fusion voting is an embarassment to democracy. It's "hilarious" when you show up to the ballot box, and the same candidate is running unopposed on three party lines: as a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independence party candidate[2].
[0] led by himself and his family, run mostly by men.
[1] Don't quote me on the number, but I think that's the threshold
[2] For those who aren't from New York: yes, this is sadly pretty common. Though more often than that, only one party even bothers to front a candidate in the race in the first place, so the general election is a series of uncontested elections, with each candidate running on only one party.
NYC density increases costs in some ways, but it also makes means they can spend far less to maintain roads / street lights / etc. On top of that the high average and median earnings means NYC has an enviable tax base.
Not all lines have four tracks (some only have two), and even for the ones that do, running trains while work is going on means incredibly slow and delayed service.
I understand what they meant; I'm explaining that even when running trains on dedicated tracks (e.g. the local line is shut down for maintenance, but the express line still runs), it causes delays that many find unbearable. Running trains in both directions on a single track would degrade service even further. At that point, it may very well just be better to shut the entire line down temporarily, which is what they generally do.
For comparison, the entire PATH system supports changing the track direction, and single-tracking is relatively common during weekends. Of course, the PATH is much smaller and has a different history behind it, not to mention totally different legal requirements (it is a "railroad" rather than a heavy rail system).
Thanks for adding this - I'd forgotten about that.
I know construction in US is expensive but it can't be that bad.
Also, isn't there an interesting relationship b/w the state and the city wrt funding where the state is responsible for the subway and not the city?
The MTA's internal organization is also a total mess. Metro-North and LIRR use nearly identical equipment (identical except for power systems) but are considered separate agencies within the MTA. The subway system is also considered separate, and in fact there is yet another internal division in the subway: IRT, BMT, and IND (internally referred to as 'A', 'B1', and 'B2' divisions). So there is needless duplication in the management structure. Beyond that, there are two more MTA railroads that are easy to forget about: the Staten Island railroad, and the South Brooklyn Railway (which may be operated as part of the subway's "C" division maintenance group, I am a bit fuzzy on the details there). Incredibly, the SIR uses the same equipment as the BMT and IND, so it is a bit difficult to understand why it is managed separately.
"Subway workers now make an average of $170,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is about $100,000 in total compensation annually.
The pay for managers is even more extraordinary. The nearly 2,500 people who work in New York subway administration make, on average, $280,000 in salary, overtime and benefits. The average elsewhere is $115,000."
Why are we paying these employees such an insane amount of money relative to our peers? Political failure[3]. Due to the Triborough Amendment clause of the Taylor Law, anytime negotiations with the union fall through, the terms of the previous contract continue. Thus, the Transit Workers Union (TWU) have no incentive to negotiate in good faith. They can't strike, but they still get a pretty sweet deal.
The solution to this starts at the top. We need to vote out our current corrupt (or at the very least, easily cowed) government and put in place people who will make this a priority and not be completely beholden to special interests.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/mta-wrote-4-9m-chec...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Law#Criticism_and_refor...
I also have no idea what better alternative there is when a contract negotiation fails. Is the system supposed to stop altogether until a new contract is agreed upon? Are the workers expected to go without pay? The fact is that the union's demands have not been unreasonable -- they ask to keep benefits, to have pay increases that basically track the cost of living in NYC, and occasional to expand low-cost benefits (e.g. allowing all employees to ride LIRR and MNR for free, rather than just employees who live outside NYC).
MTA has other unusual issues... they have a very powerful union that has negotiated wacky deals over the years. In some areas, pretty much everyone retires with dramatically more expensive disability retirements. (See: https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d... )They also have the ability to "spike" pensions with overtime that most NY government workers outside of police and fire cannot do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Retirement_Act
The subway workers are represented by TWU local 100; LIRR workers are represented by 7 different unions, all separate from the subway workers.
Usually if the figure includes benefits (as it does in this case) the pension contributions are included. Along with things like medical,life, and disability insurance.
Usually when you total everything up it comes to around twice what people get paid. I worked at a place with federal civil servants, and the total cost to the government for a civil servant was costed out at 2.2x salary.
There's the problem. Half the population is convinced that the people who do all the work to make living in a city possible should not be able to afford to live in said city.
San Francisco is the most extreme example of this insanity, where everyone in the service sector either has multi-hour commutes, or live in a closet with 3 other roommates.
Japan is an interesting comparison because the lines are private and independently owned and so there's competition[1]. Once upon a time the NYC train line were private and independently owned they were the BMT, IRT and the IND[2]. You still vestiges of this in some stations. At any rate it was thought that that having privately owned train lines might allow them to hold the city hostage and so they were bought by the city. Obviously there's a great irony in that now.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/30/nyregion/about-new-york-al...
The question I have is, why were things like the Hudson Yards station, work on the perpetually delayed 2nd Avenue subway, Fulton St. station renovation prioritized over the core signal and preexisting aging track infrastructure?
[0]http://web.mta.info/mta/budget/pdf/MTA%202017%20Adopted%20Bu... (page II-1)
Which gets votes? Renewing existing infrastructure is something nobody understands.
BTW 2nd avenue subway should be seen as "less crowded green line trains", which matched popular demand rather well, and it did work, to my mind.
But people expect it to keep working as it does today, as far as I can tell. It's about expectations, not realism.
Politicians love being able to do a big ribbon-cutting ceremony for adding something new. At the very least, it's easier to point to a new subway line and say "I helped make that possible" than it is to do that for improved maintenance of infrastructure.
The 2nd Ave. subway would also have helped to reduce crowding on the Lexington Ave. line if it had been built to 125th St., where there is a Metro-North station. That is an unfunded plan at the moment, and there would likely be opposition from the wealthy Upper East Side residents to such an extension (not just the extra crowding, but also the poorer people who live in East Harlem taking the train).
I'm not saying you're definitively wrong, because I don't know from where you get your information, but that is simply not what I've heard from every other source. What I've read is that the signal system and the track structure is antiquated[0], equipment dating almost a century old, which is the cause of most delays and prevents safe running of trains at more frequent intervals, and that certain components of the track are so old that no one manufactures their replacements anymore, so the agency cannibalizes out of commission lines for parts. If you've got something to link that suggests otherwise, I'd be glad to read it and expand my horizons.
I don't deny that increasing track coverage with new lines is very important too.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
What happened in the past few years is that the MTA allowed maintenance schedules to slip, hence the problems.
(Edit: to be clear, yes, there are limits to what the old system can do and modernization can improve a few things. Those shortcomings are not really what is causing the problems that we are experiencing lately. Modern equipment will also require maintenance and will fail when that maintenance is not performed.)
Who cares what budget it comes from? It's just money in the end.
Now after 20 years of underinvesting this needs to be done against the backdrop of a population boom and ridership explosion.
>"I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the decay and the current political machine gets voted out."
Unfortunately this is even harder to fix than the MTA. Its not just the long-standing culture of corruption in Albany, but its the culture of corruption from City Hall, the MTA's contractors and MTA's Union.
Of course just fixing the governance structure of the MTA would be a great start but when you look at how this structure actually works you might be forgiven being cynical: