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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

(Former NYC resident here.) For those who don't know, the state of the NYC Subway System is abysmal and plummeted several years ago due to neglect and underinvestment.

I went to NYC last weekend and, just like the previous 7 times i went there, subways weren't running normally after-hours (growing up, it functioned well 24-7). This time (last weekend) no subways were running to where I needed to go. The only option was Uber/Lyft. It took me ~$17 instead of the $2.75 for the subway, but I was just glad to have some means of transportation.

Removing Uber/Lyft is a bad idea. But removing Uber/Lyft without first fixing the mass transit system is insane.

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Yes weekend service has gotten to the point of being unusable, with repair work (both routine, and fixing up tunnels flooded by Sandy) limited to off-peak and weekend hours. Unfortunately we aren't really addressing this in any sane way. Replacing mass transit with vehicles for hire is just making surface congestion awful, when options like expanding and enforcing bus-only lanes, bike lanes and more bike-share are not getting the attention they deserve. There are more solutions than just Uber and Lyft.

Watching communities vote down protected bike lines because they lose 1-2 parking spaces per block (I'm looking at you, Sunnyside) or fight increased bus service (the village..) is very frustrating.

>Replacing mass transit with vehicles for hire is just making surface congestion awful, when options like expanding and enforcing bus-only lanes, bike lanes and more bike-share are not getting the attention they deserve.

Department of Transportation thankfully is expanding bikeshare services to areas currently not covered by Citibike: https://twitter.com/NYC_DOT/status/1017803095491973125

For those new to the topic of NYC Subway decline, see this NYC Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

Subways not running between 1am and 5am seems like a good thing to me if it means they can use that time to maintain the tracks and stations.

The trains and subways in Tokyo are amazing, clean, on time but they stop at 1am and start up around 5am. That sucks for you if you don't want to cab it home after around 12am. As a night owl I love it though as it means there are tons of night venues that are open until at least 5am and I just add the cab fare into my "entertainment budget" if I don't intend to stay out all night.

Similar in Paris. Subways cease between 1am and 5am (approx), and instead there are night busses (Noctilien)

The streets are not crowded between 1am and 5am so night busses make a lot of sense. Then of course you can do scheduled maintenance on the subways.

A similar situation exists in London. When I was traveling there for school, we had Oyster cards that let us travel on the tube trains and buses but the underground transport would shut down sometime after midnight and when we stayed out late, a bus was usually available.

So the problem with NYC is often poor/no service all weekend long. I encountered my issue last weekend at 10pm on Friday when I got into the city via train.

> just add the cab fare into my "entertainment budget"

This sounds OK, but now think about the working class who have to get to work, or work night shift (at those bars where you're going), or work on weekends, or night school, etc. They cant just take cabs all the time. Uber/Lyft pool has been an expensive but somewhat reachable stop-gap but yellow cabs, especially to far-off outer boroughs where working class live is simply untenable.

Unlike Paris, there is a bit of a different "social contract" in NYC where generations of working class have depended upon, come to expect, and carved their lives/jobs around the expectation of a 24-7 subway system...often not for convenience but for sustenance.

Would you mind sharing what stops you were trying to travel between?

I was traveling from Manhattan into Ft. Hamilton Parkway on the F Train. There were no F Trains running to the stop without having to transfer to two other trains, which would have their own problems and outages.

On the way back, it was even worse:

PICTURE EVIDENCE: https://imgur.com/a/p4JCaPP

EVIDENCE NOTE 1: Monitor claiming F trains would arrive

EVIDENCE NOTE 2: Sign contracting what monitor says

EVIDENCE NOTE 3: Monitor and Sign side-by-side

I used the MTA Subway Time app and it claimed F trains were on their way, these were obviously schedule data and werent changed despite the weekend-long outage. So if you used the MTA Subway Time, you'd wait forever.

I used the Google Pigeon app to report it. Given the official app had fake arrival times, best to use (or in this case, to contribute to) a crowd-sourced data source based on reality.

Hah, I grew up off of that stop. Used to be kind of a forgotten part of town.

Haven't lived in NYC for more than a decade, it's a shame to hear how far downhill the subway has gone.

> The only option was Uber/Lyft

New Yorkers have relied on cabs for generations before Uber and Lyft.

> Removing Uber/Lyft is a bad idea

They aren't removing them, just regulating the number of cars, of which there is an oversupply: the number of for-hire vehicles in the city has surged, rising to more than 100,000 vehicles, from about 63,000 in 2015, according to the city.

An oversupply according to whom, the taxi drivers? Given how much eager so many riders were to pick them over cabs, they were obviously supplying something that was missing.

> An oversupply according to whom

The article raised several negative consequences due to oversupply, which are generally well known. How should we address them?

Regarding the negative effect on taxi drivers, the economic consensus is that this is weaker than the positive effect on consumers. Generally as a society we prefer benefiting consumers over producers, as if all producers had monopolies and no competition, everyone's quality of life would be worse (producers are consumers too). There's a nice work from a few hundred years ago by early French economist Bastiat that explores the issue: http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html.

That aside, their situation could be improved by the same general solution as other unemployment hardships: better welfare or some kind of basic income. This distorts the market less than giving taxi drivers an artificial monopoly and forcing New Yorkers to suffer allegedly sub-par service.

Regarding increased congestion, the standard solution is a congestion charge of some sort, applied equally to all non-critical passenger vehicles. This is what large cities like Shanghai and Singapore do (with massive taxes and/or licensing fees). Just because Uber contributed to the problem most recently, doesn't mean that their usecase is somehow worse than the cars that were already there. Increased use of such services can actually be a positive in the long term, if it reduces the time spent parking and the city's need to waste land on parking spaces, encourages carpooling, or increases quality of life of residents by allowing them to more easily get across the city. Increasing the cost of driving in the city via congestion charges or taxes will cut off the least important use-cases first (those that people are least willing to pay for), which is more efficient than arbitrarily banning ride sharing without data on the value it adds vs existing car usage.

How do you have an oversupply of cabs/Ubers?

There is a certain demand by passengers and cabs/Ubers will meet that demand. If there are too many cabs/Ubers, then they won't make money and will stop driving.

Exactly. An oversupply first according to the City. Where they get their data is a mystery. Or not, considering modern politics...

Isn't that a good thing? Supply goes up due to demand at a specific price point. So either the supply is increasing to meet demand (which is good), or the price is falling so more quantity is demanded (which is also good).

Hi - see my comment here, to save redundancy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17626412

the limitation is the capacity of the roads, which this is addressing, for New York City.

> the limitation is the capacity of the roads, which this is addressing, for New York City

I live on 26th Street. It used to be two lanes of traffic and two lanes of parking. They redid this to have one lane of bike lanes, one lane of traffic, and kept the two lanes of parking. (You see a similar issue of self-inflicted policymaking at the MTA [1].)

This decision is a handout to medallion owners, who are prolific political donors in this city [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subw...

[2] https://nypost.com/2014/05/17/taxi-industry-gave-de-blasio-o...

The means by which they address this works only for the wealthy.

I can afford a $30 yellow cab fare once in a while, but it cannot be the de facto option day to day. The same with congestion pricing -- great...if you're wealthy.

Perhaps the way to address the overuse of the roads might be to fix the reason the are being overused...because subways dont work in NYC anymore

They relied on the subway for generations, too.

Does that mean everything is exactly the same as it once as?

>> The only option was Uber/Lyft

> New Yorkers have relied on cabs for generations before Uber and Lyft.

Subway: 2.75 Uber/Lyft Pool: $17 Yellow Cab: $30++ (depends on how round-about a route they decide to take, often just to make more money)

Uber/Lyft Pool hurt. Yellow cab would be a punch to the gut. Perhaps Uber/Lyft Pool isnt the answer, but i'm evaluating options in the context of what my current available options are, not what they might be in a perfect world.

Plus, they disappear as soon as it is raining and a bunch refuse to take you into Brooklyn (i know they are not allowed to refuse, but what do you do if they refuse, call a lawyer?)

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