NYC MTA scavenges for parts on eBay to maintain subway system | Hacker News Reader

NYC MTA scavenges for parts on eBay to maintain subway system

wsj.com

20 pointsfortran7717 comments

Why is it that cities in Europe and China can afford all this stuff and we (Americans) can’t? Interest on national debt can’t be it, this is NYC.

Loss of state capacity, everything outsourced including design and oversight.

Politicians focused on spending as a win (jobs) rather than the outcome of a well run transit system.

Shiny object syndrome funding unneeded cavernous mezzanines in the handful of new stations on new lines we do build, each custom designed instead of cookie cutter.

Multi state regional agency run on political patronage operating our biggest transit system with funding coming from a variety of unreliable sources.

List goes on.

Not to mention the endless legal fights to get anything new built.

Contractors skimming off the top...

Absolutely not even in the top hundred biggest problems. Fundamentally the problem is that we don't care about infrastructure maintenance because we have the political inclinations of angry toddlers. We are incapable of making decisions with long-term ramifications in mind. The USA is in the slow decline phase, and I'm not sure it's a process that is reversible.

Name three bigger cost drivers for taxpayers.

I'd say the main reason is that Europe has been doing it longer and they don't outsource.

In Europe the biggest suppliers of public transportation vehicles and equipment are Siemens (Germany), Alstom (France), Solaris (Poland), Hitachi Rail and Iveco (Italy), CAF (Spain). Each of these companies export products worldwide, and they have mature supply chains with the majority of parts sourced from Europe.

Plus Europe just has a lot more demand, meaning more experience in how to do it right. In the US there are maybe 25 cities with trams or light rail, in Europe there are over 300.

This is a pretty sweeping generalization both on the Europe+China side and the US side.

I'm certain that there are cities in Europe and China that struggle just as much with corruption and graft as NYC does and there are also cities in the US that have substantially less corruption and graft than NYC. It's just that it's vogue right now to cherry pick American problems and European/Chinese successes rather than the other way around.

This type of pseudo-intellectual skepticism seems typical for HN, but the truth is that the NYC subway is an absolute horror show compared to the subway systems of equally or more corrupt European/Chinese cities.

I am actually baffled that this is even up for debate... Have you seen/smelled the NYC subway? Yes, it's NYC's most used public utility other than perhaps water and electricity, but people use it despite its qualities.

I'm not questioning that NYC's subway is a disaster. Yes, I've spent time in it and have spent time in a few specific European subways and am well aware of the difference.

I'm all for questioning why NYC's subway is worse than London's. I just think that questioning why "cities in Europe and China can afford all this stuff and we (Americans) can’t" is a bad framing: it's so general as to be meaningless and perpetuates misleading stereotypes about both sides of the pond.

The fact at hand is that NYC specifically is a deeply corrupt and extremely filthy city by any standard, European or American.

Hostility on the state and federal levels toward the idea of letting the city’s tax dollars be used to support the city instead of the rest of the state/nation. NYC contributes WAY more in tax money than it receives in state and federal funding.

Car brain that causes people to resist investments in transit. Failure to recognize how much transit and especially the subway contributes to the city’s function as an economic engine.

At this point, I'm grateful and in awe that it runs reliably at all. I can easily imagine a case where the same or more resources are spent, and the outcome is that still nothing runs.

At some point, the rot in institutions can not be covered by dumping more money onto it. Luckily, NYC is not there yet, but also I don't think we have a good recipe on how to reset these kinds of institutions back to excellency

America is unlikely hampered by having 3 strong tiers of government Federal, State, Local.

Europe still has a weak ‘federal’ government, and China has a very strong ‘federal’ government either can work but what we’re doing falls flat when basically every layer of government can interfere with projects.

I'm not exactly sure, but I bet you the next destroyer that North Korea launches won't fall over on its side

The billionaires and their supporting parasite class of Wall St. hucksters, police, military, and politicians take it all, turning America into a third-world country unnecessarily. No amount of gates can make gated communities not reside in relative shitholes they created through corruption of policy realized by their de facto bought establishment.

https://archive.ph/gVyZ3

seems only slightly biased towards privatization. slightly.

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