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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

“The subway service and the bus service has become unreliable enough for people to stop using it. If people aren’t using it, there’s less money, and they have to keep raising fares without delivering better service.”

I was a daily rider of the DC metro for 8 years. This is exactly what happened there. Reliability plummeted, then ridership, and all the while major fare increases.

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If you haven't been back, I think you'd be surprised at the (weekday) reliability of the metro now. The metro is almost always terribly messed up on weekends (with single-tracking and line closings), but they make a damn good effort to get weekday commuters to work on time. I've been living in the DC area for the past two years and it seems like they have really been making the metro a priority. I have a transfer during my commute during rush hour times, and I hardly ever have to wait more than five minutes for either of my trains.

I second this. I don’t use Metro often, but my wife commutes by Metro almost every day. There was a period of a couple of years where she’d pretty routinely get home an hour or two late because of some huge fuckup with the trains, but recently it’s been very smooth.

I think this is connected to the constant weekend problems you mentioned. The trouble before was that they weren’t maintaining the system properly because they didn’t want to cause disruptions. They finally realized that maintenance isn’t actually optional and started doing what it takes to get it done. The system doesn’t have enough capacity to have sections out of service for maintenance without major disruptions, but at least now they happen at a time of their choosing.

When I was back in DC a few months ago the system seemed to be about 30% closed, some short-term closures and some multi-week closures. I realize the closures are due to the accidents and deaths and are necessary for safety. I haven't heard the words "reliable" and "Metro" in the same sentence for many years.

Can ridership in NYC really plummet? It's not like everybody there has a car that they can take to work.

This claim I found really confusing. The subway has been more crowded the last 5 years than I've ever seen it; that's an anecdote of course, but if you search "NYC subway crowding," you'll see the MTA has been claiming that the subway is more crowded than ever these days. Not sure how they explain that discrepancy.

As for the alternative options like Lyft and Uber they mentioned, those are only viable for privileged upper middle class commuters, so it really can't go that far to explain a claimed drop in ridership. And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.

"The subway has been more crowded the last 5 years than I've ever seen it"

There was an article in the New York Times in May, titled "How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway Into Crisis" that claimed higher ridership is not the main cause for the recent decline:

> For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told us that rising ridership and overcrowding were to blame. Yet ridership actually stayed mostly flat from 2013 to 2018 as delays rose, and the authority recently acknowledged that overcrowding was not at fault.

That statement doesn't contradict yours (shakes fist at well-qualified statement), but I found it surprising when I came across it and I imagine others might as well.

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

I suspect a lot of the decrease happens at night. Late trains are a bit of a Russian roulette. If you're going from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan, it might be faster and more reliable to share a car with friends or strangers.

And it's just crass to claim that there's a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.

Genuine question: why is that? I'm not familiar with the mechanics of the NYC Metro area, but I'm familiar with SF's BART, which certainly claims to have statistics on this -- about 22,000 fare jumps a day, as compared to around 433,000 trips per weekday, meaning about 5% of riders are freeloaders. (They claim this costs about $25M a year.) The San Francisco Chronicle did their own reporting on this, and at the very least it backed up the assertion there were a statistically measurable number of fare jumpers.

Ahh those extrapolations. Just like MPAA and their piracy spiel. Multiply 22`000 * 365 days * $3 and you get their $25M. Except a lot of those people simply would never pay the actual fare and the cost of moving additional weight is negligible, so the number is way inflated.

You're comparing people who pirate media that they'd never have actually bought to... people who take BART trips for free that they've never have taken otherwise? You're going to have to work harder to make this comparison work for me, sorry.

They wouldn't pay the full fare anyways? Would they... take cheaper transportation?

The 60 minutes video posted in another comment claimed that ridership was near a 70 year high, I believe

EDIT: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone...

Seems unlikely to plummet to ruinous levels. Ridership has risen by 800 million people since 1990, but there's fewer miles of track and only a few dozen cars. It seems that the system is strained well beyond its limits and that it might be possible that having fewer people use the subway might allow a chance to fix it? The issue seems to be largely administrative based on every article I've read. There needs to be an agreement by everyone on what how to move forward, and then for that plan to be implemented uninterrupted until its completion. But good luck with that since the mayor of NYC is basically a governor and the governors of NY always seem to butt heads with them.

> and only a few dozen cars

Did you mean to say "a few dozen more cars"?

yes. good catch. They've only ADDED a few dozen cars in that time.

What rail got destroyed since 1990?

It's not so much that the rail itself was destroyed, but that the tunnels and stations have been closed for various reasons. Usually it's down to either a new replacement station being built, consistent signal issues, or some other passenger safety concern. Of course there have been closures due to the maintenance gap, but those aren't the bulk.

The ridership is definitely not plummeting. A lot of people have started moving to deeper parts of Brooklyn and Queens because the rents are rising, so they depend on trains even more. The only people who've stopped using trains and buses on a regular basis, are people who can afford Uber or Lyft.

I just commented to someone the other day- I loved how clean the metro was but hated the prices for sub-par services. I hate the distance based pricing.

What's wrong with distance based pricing?

Distance based pricing is fine. But can't they make it a little simpler? Increments of $1 would be nice. Instead of $3.85, just make it $4.00.

NYC is nowhere in the mess that DC is in. Mostly, because Manhattan, at least, is well-shaped to be navigated efficiently by rail. Because of height restrictions, DC has a relatively sprawled, 2-dimensional core, which means many common routes require transfers (also, the metro being so deep means a nontrivial amount of time is spent on escalators). For me, I often faced the decision of "$6, 10 minute Uber vs. $3.50 1 hour metro". Manhattan is long and skinny -- there's almost always a 0-transfer ride that can get you from point A to B + the wait is almost never longer than 10 mins. Every time I've said "I'm running late, I'll take a cab", it turned out to be a mistake. The situation is certainly different in the boroughs, though.

I hear that a lot about the DC height restrictions, but I wonder if it might not have the opposite effect. Plenty of European cities have tons of density in a low-rise skyline, such as Paris. I wonder if height restrictions actually encourage the 10-story pedestrian-friendly, urban core to keep expanding into the single family home residential areas.

As soon as you cross the Potomac into Virginia there may be high-rises, but everything is built for cars, not transit.

Also, quite a bit of the metro system is cut and cover and quite shallow. A few spots were tunneled deeper to cross waterways.

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