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Comment by objektif | Hacker News Reader

I dont see any problem with subsiziding MTA fares by collecting funds through other taxes. The more people use the system the better. Based on my limited research on this topic, the root cause of the problem is the labor cost and inefficiency of MTA workers. I think everything else is noise. Here is great quote from NYT article on this subject:

“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

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I grew up in a third world country in SE Asia and moved to the US for college. One thing that astounds me about public workers in US is that they are super rude and entitled, while seemingly having poor work ethics.

I take MTA subway every week day and at least once a weekend. On weekends, you'll see workers repairing or doing maintenance on tracks because .... Hurricane Sandy (circa 2012) apparently destroyed the infrastructure. I mean I moved to NYC in 2016 and that maintenance has been going on every weekend since then (probably it started even before 2016). Some of the trains will not run or will skip over some local stops and it really inconveniences millions of commuters every weekend. The trains are supposed to slowly move around the areas worker are 'in action' (I read somewhere that it's because a few worker died by being hit by moving train, so they now require trains to move very slowly while blaring horns to warn workers ahead; I still felt that's unnecessary unless there's a clear distinction between which line workers operate on and as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines. Anyway, enough about that). While the trains move slowly, I see a lot of workers simply just sitting around or doing nothing.

The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.

No wonder these public projects take years to finish and have budget overrun. No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.

Our German au pair was astounded that every project that requires shutting down a lane on a road has two guys waving people through the remaining lane. Apparently in Germany they just use portable traffic signals.

I live in the US and am still astounded by this. I've seen cases where we have a portable traffic signal that's also manned by two guys.

There is a lot of featherbedding going on. Read this article about the Manhattan tunnel costs. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... There are people who are paid to do nothing because that job existed in the past.

A lot of times in those instances the guys are only there for the peak hours or when the site is active. The light lets them leave the site with only the single lane open and not require overnight staffing.

Some of the reasons are:

- When the site is active they often have a need to hold traffic or otherwise alter the traffic pattern to move equipment around. An excavator swinging an arm through the travel lane, loading a dump truck with debris that might fly around a bit, etc.

- The two guys are more efficient than the portable light at moving traffic volumes, since they can extend/shorten cycles as they see fit, and don't have to add in a big extra margin for the last, slowest possible vehicle to get through the work zone. They can see when it's cleared and let traffic through the other direction immediately.

In Germany we simply have driver education which is a bit more extensive complex than driving around a block once and making a single T-turn, then putting the car into park at the end. Sorry for sounding a bit snarky, but the consequences of leaving out a proper education, including driving etiquette, should be obvious.

It took me next to nothing to get a license in the US. In Germany, it took me months with a minimum set of mandatory lessons required by law - theoretical and practical.

I also don't think the argument about needing a driving license asap on the country side works because it is the same in Germany. Only major cities truly allow you the be car-free. Public transport elsewhere can at least be spotty if not outright disastrous and comparable to the US.

While I generally agree with you, the concept of people acting as "human safeties" isn't unknown to us Germans - look up "Bahnübergangsposten" or watch any railroad construction site. There will always be one human with a manual horn to alert the crew whenever a train passes by.

Usually because the lane is only being shut for a few hours, and it would cost more and take more work to set up a portable traffic signal. In Ontario, if the roadworks take more than a day, there's usually a traffic signal set up.

Interesting anecdote: I was driving through North Dakota this summer and hit resurfacing roadworks. It was the first time I've ever seen it, but rather than setting up hundreds of cones and directing traffic through them, then re-arranging the cones to do the other lane, they just had a flagman on each side and a pilot vehicle guiding 10–20 vehicles at a time through the work zone. No cones at all. I'm sure that project was completed in half the usual time.

> The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.

This looks bad, and some of the time it is just inefficiency, but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.

It's often better to employ a welder for the day than to stop work entirely when you don't have one milling around on site waiting for their next task.

The same queuing problem exists all over in computing as well and is similarly poorly addressed often as not. Japanese car companies and more generally lean engineering is all about fixing this. I highly doubt worker assignments are anywhere near optimal and are probably mostly whatever the job foreman feels like is right.

Some groups have this down to a science for their particular industry (say, Apple supply chain logistics) and others aren't even aware of the issue and pass it off as expected.

It would be an interesting study to get queuing theory people, lean experts, or some such qualified group to look into public construction and maintenance projects to simulate and analyze optimal vs. actual. No question this would be very hard to do because unions hate this kind of thing and people don't like being measured over their shoulders and the basic implication that they're "lazy" or inefficient or whatever. (it's hard to measure and improve worker output while actually making the worker happier too because there tends to be a Stanford Prison Experiment vibe where you get managers nitpicking lunch breaks and the basic pleasantries of working instead of bulk errors like allocating skill sets)

You may be surprised, but much work on British railway lines is done by private companies contracted by the government, and overseen by a public agency. There are several companies that compete for the work.

It could be fairly straightforward to compare the efficiency of the same task in both countries.

>but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.

You say that as though the policies and procedures by which worn is done haven't intentionally been made inefficient to create work for the workers.

I once sat on a train for 3hr waiting for a railroad employee to show up with a chainsaw and cut a downed tree of the track. There was another employee in a service truck equipped for brush clearing a couple miles away at the station waiting for his wife who was stuck on the same train. He couldn't clock in and deal with the downed tree, because rules. This story is fairly well known among people who ride that rail line so some here may recognize it.

In the US, because the government is not profit-driven, results rarely matter. So workers are seldom penalized for poor performance. So you end up with shitty workers. There are lots of people with great work ethic in the US, they're just mostly in private industry.

I don’t buy the whole “it doesn’t matter because it is the government”-thing. In the two bigger european cities I lived in service quality and government efficiency were usually very interesting voter topics. And local governments who didn’t manage to increase or at least uphold service quality would usually end up losing in the future.

So the thing that doesn’t seem to work in the US is the “hold them accountable”-part. Maybe public transport quality just isn’t an issue the typical US voter considers their business?

Its is not that it is not an issue. People in the US just do not vote. Compare the participation rates in your country vs the US. Majority of the people who vote are also uninformed I would say.

But isn’t it a bit hypocritical to first not vote, then complain about how things are paning out and then conclude that things in the hands of governments never work?

Democracy lives from everybody’s attendance — if you stay at home you got no right to complain.

Sadly even a strong faith in the invisible hand-shaped market-god doesn’t change that, because quasi monopolies like railway infrastructure and the invisible hand-shaped market-god never mix as well as promised for some weird reason.

It's not necessarily hypocritical say all.

If someone abstains from voting because they find all the choices equally unqualified, I don't think that eliminates the person's right to complain nor does it diminish the validity of their complaints.

There are also practical considerations, like voting taking place on a work day.

This is when you traditionally would vote invalid.

Governments are not profit-driven in many other countries with outstanding transit.

Why is America so bad compared to them?

My guess is that it has to do with low worker motivation, both from lack of individual incentives and organizational inertia. My friends in government jobs know what their promotions will be for the next 30 years and there is no allowance for variability based on personal performance. This prevents nepotism and corruption, but also means that leadership is based on seniority, not competence.

It would be interesting to see how successful governments manage promotion of talent.

My guess is that it has to do with the poor state of democracy in the United States. Local elections are dominated by moneyed special interest groups, many people don't vote in them, and those that do, often vote down the party line.

Result: It's difficult to run government services well, when we do such a poor job of picking good people to run the government.

I agree with your conclusion, but I'm not so confident "moneyed" special interest groups are the issue. I could speculate it has more to do with voter interest priorities in general.

Take California DMV for example. The DMV is led by state governor appointees. No governor will be voted in or out office based on DMV improvement performance. Running government services well hardly ranks in voters minds

The influence of the car industry in actively undermining alternatives through favorable regulation, direct handouts and access to the administrations by indirect bribes and revolving door delayed favors should not be underestimated.

Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. I'm putting in 'so-called' as in practice they still receive close to as much in subsidies as the state-run enterprises they replaced, but now only serve cherry picked parts, most often with lower quality, and divest the required upkeep investments in infrastructure into separate businesses that are completely reliant on public funding.

There is a real myth about the effectiveness of private enterprise vs public enterprise.

Large private companies are not more efficient than a comparably sized public endeavor. Small companies can be, but that is systemically only true if you ignore the waste of 99% of the 'competitors' that are perpetually failing.

> The influence of the car industry [...]

Doesn't Germany have proportionally an even bigger car industry?

> Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. [...]

Most public transport used to be private in the 19th century and was nationalized as a combination of cash cow and for military purposes.

The graphs on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... look pretty good.

You mean, exactly the same as in any other large enterprise, private or public?

If you think everyone in the private sector is 'profit-driven', and you don't mean 'personal gain driven', which is the larger the company the less likely to be aligned with or incentivized by the benefit to the enterprise, I'm guessing you never spend time in such environments.

In the UK, there are various accepted ways of safe work on a railway, followed by both public and private sector employees and contractors.

One of them has a lookout at each end, who alerts the workers whenever a train approaches. Work stops until the train has passed, because the distraction caused by operating loud and heavy machinery is ao high. (The train only sounds the horn once, unless the driver fails to see an acknowledgement from the lookout.)

However, this isn't really practical on a busy line like a metro, so they'd much prefer to work overnight with the line closed if possible.

It's also possible to fence off the work area from live tracks, but installing the fence is then the disruptive work.

> as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines.

That attitude is completely at odds with the European approach to worker safety.

(I cannot comment on whether either point applies to the USA.)

As an example, there's are descriptions of the failures of the safe working system in the reports of accidents, such as this one: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/report-122019-near-miss-w...

This style of working (where working lines are in physical proximity to workers) was called "Red zone" (where "Green zone" would be if the workers are not in proximity to a working line because the line was closed to traffic) and now is called "Open line" working.

It is unavoidably dangerous, and planners are supposed to choose it only when other options aren't practical, but in reality they often pick "Open line" for convenience. For example maybe the workers would prefer to do this on Tuesday midday, so we plan it as "Open line" and schedule it for Tuesday 1145, rather than for 0400 on Thursday when we can just shut the line to do it safely. This gets people killed, but because it doesn't reliably kill the specific people you scheduled most of the time it feels OK to them and to you.

This is also why unions aren't enough to implement safety. Unions represent workers and the workers feel like convenience is more valuable than safety. A 1-in-1000 chance to die, for five minutes extra coffee break is a good deal, until you're the 1-in-1000 and then it sucks. In the UK signaller unions fought very hard to continue working 12 hour shifts instead of maximum 8 hours. Because working 3x 12 hour shifts and then the rest of the week off is _convenient_ even though it was excessively dangerous if anything goes wrong.

> No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.

"better work ethics"? I prefer "unfair competition and dumping enabled by sometimes outright slavery".

That's the problem with most of the current free-trade agreements, they do not contain anything to protect the respective weaker parts getting exploited. As a result, scandals about child work and slavery conditions (e.g. in China) are commonplace, while at the same time European/US people lost millions upon millions of jobs because there was no way they could compete with what is essentially dumping.

I don't understand why this comment was voted into the negative, but I suspect that it has something to do with the world view of the people who oppose taxes on a fundamental level.

To those of you, I ask - why?

New York's flat non-distance based fare is one of the great democratic institutions of the city. Whether you live in Flushing, Rego Park or Gramercy; whether you ride one stop or make four transfers - you pay the same fare. The only way this can work is if those of us with more wealth take care of those of us with less. What seems wrong about this?

It encourages people to live in inefficient places and mooch off everybody else.

You want people to live in inefficient places, it's not doable for everybody to live in the nearest location. All that does is skyrocket housing prices, and drive out people with lower paid jobs.

That's the idea. You drive people with low paid jobs out of living in places they can't afford without mooching off of their neighbors. They move closer, get a smaller apartment, people build more densely, or they get a job elsewhere, or they eat the true cost of travel, less want to do it, wages increase somewhat.

I used to travel, in Philadelphia, from a Main Line-adjacent community, on a bus to 69th Street Station, and then on the Market-Frankford Line, and then switched to the Broad Street line, all the way up to Temple U. for a $10/hr job, on a $1.30 token plus a $.60 transfer, each way. That's outrageous. I was mooching off the system, and my employer was mooching off the system as well. If they made me pay higher fares, well, I could afford it. What's an extra $3.80 when you're making $10/hr? At that wage, it was a small fraction of the time spent commuting.

Encouraging people to live attached to a subway and then incentivizing their usage of it, regardless of distance in almost any circumstance, is a huge transit efficiency boon for the economy.

If you price people out of the trains so they start driving cars again or even taking busses you are suddenly losing a huge amount of volumetric efficiency in your transit system.

Optimal cities can get almost everyone anywhere either walking, biking, or riding train all the time. Any requirement for road bound vehicles is an infrastructure failure of city planning. There are exceptional circumstances (moving heavy items that can't be carried) but they should be just that - exceptional, and rare.

> Encouraging people to live attached to a subway and then incentivizing their usage of it, regardless of distance in almost any circumstance, is a huge transit efficiency boon for the economy.

Discouraging people from working where they live is the worst inefficiency you can create.

In Buenos Aires you can ride the entire subway track for 0.30$, which is about 1.5 hours of subway. Without subsidies, the subway would cost at least 1$ a ride.

The hourly rate of a great part of the city workers is below 3$ and do not have full day employment.

What do these numbers mean? That a worker can get a 3.5$ an hour for 3 hours a day on the other side of the city will do it because it will cost him 0.6$ a trip. But if he had to pay 2$, that worker might not do it.

He doesn't have the choice now: he pays a tax when he buys food that forces him to take long trips to make a difference in the subway.

Overall result:

Economic efficiency: bad, because it costs more to do it this way

Welfare: bad, because it increases commute times, and reduces wages

Transit & demographics: bad because it concentrates people on the expensive side of town and increase transit exponentially

You are assuming that there are jobs anywhere in the city!! No there are no jobs in most places even in NYC. Most jobs are concentrated in and around manhattan.

Subsidizing transport is subsidizing that concentration.

Is it possible that getting rid of the subsidies might improve worker efficiency?

If only there was a way to decide on what local governments should do based on certain topics. In most cities where public transport is in the hands of the local government, the direction things should take is decided by voting and governments that fuck up public transport, are voted out. This is how it works on a city level in many european cities at least.

MTA operates near capacity during peak time. It doesn't need more riders then. But NYC lacks peak pricing.

Peak pricing is an interesting thought that hadn't occurred to me. Seems like a good way to increase rates in a somewhat progressive way. Presumably rush hour commuters could afford more than others.

Peak pricing is also a market approach that embraces supply and demand. It’s a good idea.

Except it will wildly harm the poor who rely on the subway

Market approaches work when demand is elastic.

It's pretty easy to deduce that there is an anticorrelation between ability to adjust riding schedules and ability to pay increased fees.

Why, shifts can change - especially when it works out for everyone.

Restaurants aren't going to change their hours, hospitals aren't going to change their shifts, what motivation does an employer have to make changes? It doesn't cost employers anything so they are unlikely to care and jobs aren't exactly elastic goods either.

Restaurants don't need to change their hours - they need their employees in before the rush hour and working during it because that is when people are going to be there. You 7:45 coffee on the way to work was made by someone who got in at 6:00 am to setup the coffee pot. Hospitals aren't going to change their shifts (unless staff demands it - they might), but a large number of people going in at rush hour are not doing shift work where they need to be in at a particular time. I can adjust my schedule a lot if I want, fares (and traffic) can be motivation to doso.

> Seems like a good way to increase rates in a somewhat progressive way.

how is it progressive, exactly? seems like it’s just another tax on the poor who have to get to jobs at exact times.

Because professionals working full-time jobs and commuting at rush hour can typically afford the higher fare, while people working part-time/odd jobs/commuting to interviews/not working at all probably aren't the ones taking the rush hour trains.

Sure, there are some working poor who need to be in the office 9-5, but the majority of people working full time regular hours aren't poor. And for people who can't afford the increase, you just introduce an exception (if you make under $40,000 per year you don't pay the increased fare, or something like that)

You realise there’s a lot of people between wealthy professionals and part-time/odd job workers right? A secretary has to be on time, so does a cashier. I’m not sure what good peak pricing would do, apart from push them to less carbon-efficient forms of transport?

As long as the lines are still running at max capacity, you are still taking the same number of vehicles off the road. If you extend the period of max-capacity, you taking more cars off the road.

The question is if the benefit of more revenue and environmental savings warrants making the secretaries an cashiers adapt to less efficient schedules (eg come in earlier, stay later)

It's sad that making lower earners' lives even more difficult would even be a consideration in the first place.

Increasing capacity would also result in taking more vehicles off the road.

Increasing capacity can only be done with money, which needs to come from somewhere - most likely a tax increase elsewhere that will hit not only those same poor people, but also their neighbors who walk to work.

Peak fares to encourage people to work non-peak hours if possible can shift demand enough to mean you don't need build more transit now saving a lot of money now. Eventually there is no substitution for building more, but better utilization can ease that somewhat.

I agree that it is sad, but it is a real consideration. Nearly every environmental proposal has the potential increase hardship on low earners. Most commonly, this comes in the form of higher costs for consumer products, utilities, and housing.

There are are a lot of similarities with road congestion pricing going into effect in San Diego and NYC, and planned for LA and SF. Who will bear the greater burden, high earners who can easily pay the fee or low earners with rigid schedules.

>how is it progressive, exactly?

Presumably rush hour commuters could afford more than others.

Maybe that's an incorrect assumption but if all we can do is time slice, I would expect rush hour commuters to have the most means.

MTA doesn’t even have variable pricing for distance. It’s a pretty poorly designed system qua system. It has good coverage. Everything else is substandard internationally.

Peak and especially distance based pricing are fundamentally regressive and unjust tax schemes that penalize the poor. Subway fares are already regressive in that they represent a larger share of income in poorer people than in the rich, making it distance based so that people who can't afford to live in the core are charged more makes the problem 10x worse.

Just because you may have a larger income than others doesn't mean you should pay more money to equal a lower income person's cost percentage of income wise, that's unjust in itself.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't, either. There's nuance to every situation, particularly when we're discussing the means by which some people quite literally survive, vs. luxury or leisure goods and services.

Distance pricing seems to work just fine here in Japan, although I did't dig into the data on public transit, just based on my personal experience.

Fares in Osaka or Tokyo are ~$2 per 3-4 stations from your departure point. Riding to Kyoto from downtown Osaka (40km) is ~$8 and 8 stops across two lines. The prices overall are low (IMO), and Japan has lower wage inequality than the US (IIRC).

It’s not an unjust or regressive tax scheme to charge more for greater service. This is incorrectly repurposing the language of taxation to the reality of transit fares.

It is certainly correct that having fixed fares across time and distance is a government subsidy which arguably may even effectively target poor riders.

The lack of a subsidy is fundamentally not the same as a tax.

But when a subsidy distorts the market to the point where it causes inefficiencies in the market, those inefficiencies can undermine the value or effectiveness of the subsidy, sometimes altogether.

I.e. lack of peek pricing causing massive ridership spikes at specific hours overloading the system and making it break down.

A theoretically better system might be one with a fixed monthly fare credit for low income riders, while also having peek pricing. This shifts demand to keep the system running more smoothly while also making transit more affordable for lower income riders.

But then, why not ask the question, if we’re giving money to low income riders, why give rebates only to low income people who ride the train? Why have a low income subsidy specifically for subway ridership versus any of a dozen other things people fundamentally need. Why micromanage to that level?

I'm not against welfare agencies subsidizing the poor. If we are subsidizing the poor that should be from a different budget: as far as the transit system is concerned rich or poor use the same resources so the income to the transit system should be the same even if it comes from a different pot.

I always liked the social implications of flat fares - poor people tend to have to live farther away so distance pricing, and especially peak pricing, basically makes life harder for people who already have a hard life.

I think that the whole narrative around trains needing to justify their cost based on fares is ridiculous. Few people ride trains for the experience of riding a train. They ride to go somewhere, and do something, and the real value of the fate exists outside the transportation system.

I think Japan, and HK got it right by letting train companies act as real estate developers and build out the areas around stations. That gives them enormous profitability since they can charge rent, commissions for the stuff that people actually care about - what’s at the destination - and literally funnel people in the millions to their shopping centers, office complexes, and apartments.

Last bit about operators in Japan etc, fantastic idea. Thanks for pointing out.

People are probably reading too much into flat vs. variable fares. Historically, you probably tended to have flat fares on transit systems in no small part because it was so much simpler when people mostly paid using tokens (or transit passes, in which case flat or variable didn't matter).

This is becoming less relevant with the increased prevalence of contactless pay as you go systems. (Although the newer systems tend to be more complex for irregular users like tourists.)

Yes! With modern systems, if you want to give poor riders reduced fares you can… give poor riders reduced fares. It's not hard. Just program the contactless system to do it. There are no real arguments for using flat fares in NYC besides tradition (which is not nothing). No one designing a system today would choose it for a system the size of NYC's.

Flat fares are much better for customers who need to understand what they will pay. The ability to automatically change me an extra fare where I go on is nice only when I know and have budgeted for that fare. Flat fare, pay $x and go it easy to understand. Every time I need to pay I need to decide if the transit system is really worth it for the trip.

Now in a system the size of NYC you probably should do something, the person only riding a couple miles shouldn't pay as much as the person riding many miles (I'm not sure how you can get in NYC). However a simple easy to understand system of fares is important and very hard to design. Part of that needs to be a guaranteed maximum you will pay in a month - with the idea that a significant portion of users will hit that maximum - when you know you will hit the maximum you are more likely to take transit in off-peak times even though you have a perfectly good car.

Every metro system everywhere supports pre-paid value cards.

If you find different prices for different services confusing, how do you grocery shop?

Eh, but identifying the poor riders opens a door to a system to game, a sprawling bureaucracy to manage all that, and the social stigma/hit to dignity of being seen in such a program... I like the simplicity of a flat fare since the overhead of doing so is so low.

Your comment assumes that this does not exist: https://new.mta.info/fares-and-tolls/subway-bus-and-staten-i...

Emm how about increasing the capacity? For gods sake why would do such a thing like “peak procing” to a public transportation system :). Not everything is a optimization honework assignment. This is real life some unfortunate people who have less income than you have go to places too. Number of people during peak hours is enough deterrent itself. You dont need to introduce extra cost.

Shall we introduce peak pricing to fire trucks as well?

Then the best thing to do is increase that capacity! Every rider on the subway is a bit less pollution in the city air

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