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As a person living in Osaka, Japan right now, I always find it funny reading people comment on NYC Subway. Not your specifically, but in general.

In Osaka, Hankyu Railway (granted, a commuter train operator, but most if not all commuter trains service in Japan runs like subway) still runs multiple 3300 series, manufactured in 1969. They (the 3300's) actually also run into the Osaka Metro system, and you cannot really tell it's built almost 50 years ago.

And CTBC... Most of the newslet says that one of the problem with old system is that it cannot accurately tell where the train is... Well, I know NYC signalling system is ancient, but not being able to tell accurately where the train is IS NOT the problem. Most of the Japanese lines (including various subways) still run on block system (though sometime with a block length of just 100m). Communication-based system is in place on some line, though, but mostly for lightly-traffic line to save on signalling equipment cost.

Yea I figured this may be mentioned, it's the same in the UK they were running very old train stock of the same vintage until (I think) this year? I know it's also not the only problem but both the Japanese and UK cartridges aren't complete shit and falling apart.

Three times in the past 2 years (since I moved to the G line) the train had to be evacuated because the brakes locked on a car and someone smelled the awful burning it thinking it was an actual fire in the car. THREE TIMES.

If you maintain the cartridges there's no problem at all but there are so many problems it's way beyond that.

I'm a little of a train nerd (if not obvious) so I went to the train stock as an example but other underground systems prove that proper, well funded and well managed maintenance will make this a non-issue.

"Proper. Well Funded. Well Managed." - Not the MTA Subway System

London's oldest trains are from 1972, the 1969 stuff was withdrawn by the end of 2014.

But England runs older trains, and this has recently been newsworthy [1]. I think the underlying problem is the electrification of two lines has been delayed, so the newer diesel trains used on those lines are still needed, and can't (as originally planned) be used to increase capacity on the other route.

It also shows that London's transport, which is directly managed by a government body, works far better than the privatized mess in the rest of the country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_rolling_sto...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/03/unions-criti...

It's not a question of whether "one of the richest cities on the planet" can "fund serious upgrades." It's how much money are New Yorkers willing to throw into a system where it takes several times as much money to do the same thing as other countries? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-....

New York is rich, but so is London. Based on that wealth, there is a certain amount of money New Yorkers are willing to pay for subway service. If it costs twice as much to do the same thing, half as much service will get purchased. (Indeed, it's worse. Crappier subway service reduces demand, which decreases the money available to fund it.)

Costs are the fundamental problem with the MTA (and D.C.'s WMATA), and those are union problems, not management problems. If it cost Lenovo twice as much to build the same laptop as Acer, Lenovo would simply cease to exist. Transit systems generally cannot go bankrupt for political reasons, but they can decline to a state of government-funded life support where nobody uses them except people who have no other choice. (See, e.g., the transit systems in most cities outside NYC/Chicago/DC/Boston). Consider:

> France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double that (although that included health insurance).

This is a large-scale problem in the U.S. Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population. In turn, people have limited willingness to fund them (because people naturally are less willing to spend money on safety nets versus something they also use and benefit from). Unions aren't the only reason for our public services sucking, but to the extent they drive costs out of alignment with what is the case in other countries, they're a big part of the problem. If you can buy less service with the same amount of investment, that's a problem.

One of the things that's happened in the last 30 years that nobody talks about is that Europe became far more market oriented, and their unions adapted. Anti-union rhetoric in the U.S. yielded a very different result, with most private unions dying out, and the public sector unions that survived remaining a bulwark of the "old way" of doing things.

>Costs are the fundamental problem with the MTA (and D.C.'s WMATA), and those are union problems, not management problems.

Managerial corruption causing cost overruns like this does not even tangentially involve unions:

"The New York City subway system has continued to deteriorate, rankled by massive delays, misspent funds, and widespread claims of corruption. On Friday, the feds confirmed the corruption part by securing a 46 month sentence for a former employee who promised subway contractors future work in return for bribes."

https://jalopnik.com/ill-be-damned-feds-indict-new-york-city...

What is the acale of that in comparison to paying more worksrs than you need more money than you need to? Most of MTA’s expenses are labor costs. Contracting corruption is bad and illegal, but is not what’s driving the costs.

That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

> That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

If you're saying that the MTA is trying to misrepresent their role in their own dysfunction when speaking to the news in order to generate coverage that makes them look more favorable, then the MTA should fire their whole PR team, because they're clearly incompetent.

It's pretty clear to anybody who's following the issue that the MTA and TWU have an unethically incestuous relationship, in which the TWU and MTA essentially collude to extract as much money from the state as they can while literally not even doing the bare minimum to keep things running.

The relationship between the MTA management and TWU is fractious at best.

The relationship between MTA management and the scores of construction companies that curiously increased their costs 50% in recent years is curiously pretty good, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with the increased costs.

Of course tried to spin a corruption problem as a union problem. Are they really going to blame themselves?

Both of those things can be true simultaneously. Anyone insisting on a single, isolated cause of badness in such a complex system is pushing an agenda.

As the NYT article explains, the companies’ construction costs are driven by labor costs. The construction companies negotiate with the unions, and pass the higher labor costs onto the MTA, which does not negotiate directly with the unions.

Construction is a labor-intensive industry, and labor costs dominate. If you look up the public companies that do civil construction work, you’ll see that the profit margins are razor thin (2-5%). These are not companies like Facebook making 20-30% profit margins.

This is not a moral issue. It's not about evil construction company CEOs. Reducing executive pay at these companies wouldn't amount to a drop in the bucket for these multi-billion projects. Nor is it about evil union workers. We're just talking about hard-working folks who are getting paid a rather more comfortable wage than their counterparts in Europe. Which is good for them, but wrecks the economics of the MTA, an entity where payroll, health, and pension make up more than half of expenditures.

> Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population.

If roads, trains, schools, water, electricity, libraries, etc. don't count as widely used, what exactly does?

Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead). Rich people either send their kids to private schools, or carve out enclaves with public schools that have just other rich people (while the “safety net” inner city schools deteriorate). Electricity isn’t a “public service.” For the most part, private companies provide electric service in the US using private infrastructure. Nobody uses libraries.

That leaves our roads, which are much crappier than in say Germany or Japan.

Total attendance, NYPL system in FY2016: 13,867,000 (2M library card holders, 729,000 active)

Total attendance, New York Mets in MLB 2016: 2,460,000

Total attendance, New York Giants in NFL 2016: 630,312

"Nobody" uses libraries, indeed. http://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/20...

2M library card holders, which represents about 10% of the number of people who are eligible for a library card, and fewer than 1/2 checked out a book.

So 5% of the total eligible population used one.

Don't get me wrong, I love libraries and I go every week with the kids, but I think OP is right -- few people actually use the library.

> So 5% of the total eligible population used one.

That's not a good metric to use because everyone who lives or works in New York State is eligible to join, but for most people it only really makes sense to join if you live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Staten Island. Otherwise you'd just join your local library.

So really ~60% of all residents (i.e. including young children) have a library card, and the overwhelming majority take advantage of library services and events.

Our roads are not much crappier than Germany's roads --- or, at least, not much crappier than the roads in Bavaria.

I know it’s anecdotal, but coming from DC/Baltimore I was pretty amazed by the roads in Munich.

I drove around Munich for a week, then from there through Austria for a couple weeks and back into Bavaria.

The roads are good. The autobahns are probably better than our interstates --- though not by that much. Traffic congestion was as much a problem there as in the American midwest. Their surface streets are on average not as good as Chicago metro area surface streets (but are probably better than Baltimore's). And I feel a good deal safer on US rural highways than I did on German and Austrian rural highways, which are beautiful, well-maintained, nightmarish death traps.

I think you'd be setting yourself up for a pretty tough argument if you wanted to claim that the US doesn't do public roads well. Do we do them better than Germany? No. But we do public roads anomalously well, especially for the degree of difficulty involved in providing them across a whole continent.

I'll concede that I don't have data to back up my claim, and that anecdotally roads might be the area of infrastructure where we're least bad compared to Western Europe and Japan.

> Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead).

Rich people consume way more public water than poor people. How many poor people have huge single family homes with lawns and swimming pools? How many buy tons of consumer products, own several cars, and are buying large amounts of organic food?

And given that basic filtration removes 99.9% of lead, you'd die of hypernatremia long before it would be possible to get lead poisoning from drinking filtered tap water.

It's worth noting that the problem in the article is not that the MTA negotiates poor contracts with the construction unions, it's that they don't negotiate with them at all.

The contractors that do the negotiation are more than happy to oblige the union's demands, as long as their margins are fat, and so far the MTA has not cried uncle about the costs being passed on, although that looks to be (very slowly) changing.

1. Each employee on a train costs well over $100k/year: going from 2 employees per train (driver & conductor) to 1 would save on the order of $200+ million dollars a year.

2. Wifi in stations is entirely paid for by the advertising portal, so that upgrade was "free" for the MTA.

These all look like they're made in the 70s, including the supposedly modern R160.