
What Would It Take to Fix New York’s Subway? - thisisit
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/22/nyregion/what-would-it-take-to-fix-new-yorks-subway.html
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spike021
I find this situation incredibly interesting as an outsider.

I live in the SF Bay Area where we have a Muni "subway", if you can even call
it reminiscent of one and BART. They're both absolutely awful, between not
having good/expansive coverage/timely service. A plethora of issues plague
both.

Both times I visited NYC this year I took the subway everywhere. Out of
probably 40-50 subway rides, only a handful were delayed either in-tunnel or
while I was waiting in the station; the trains were pretty much all clean
without odd (read: nasty) smells. And, of course, the routes go all over
Manhattan rather than just through, say, Lexington or Park Ave (like how SF's
Muni basically converges and mainlines under Market St.).

I found NYC's subway a pleasant improvement. Yet I keep seeing articles about
how it needs to be fixed.

Just interesting to spectate as an outsider.

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chimeracoder
> I found NYC's subway a pleasant improvement. Yet I keep seeing articles
> about how it needs to be fixed.

Decades of underinvestment means that it's not as good today as it was ten
years ago, or as good ten years ago as it was a few decades before that.

That said, even with all its problems, the NY metro area still has far better
and more extensive public transportation than any other metro area in the
country. Over a third of all subway stations _in the country_ are located
within New York City's city limits, and that's not even counting the three
separate commuter train options, Amtrak, bus service, or Staten Island
railway.

~~~
Joeri
Yet I have heard horror stories of how it was so run down in the 70's and 80's
that people were afraid to even take it at all.

Isn't this a case of people glorifying the past? Are there objective metrics
that demonstrate service quality has degraded (reduced train frequency,
reduced amount of seats, etc...)?

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keevie
It was really terrible in the 70s when the city went bankrupt. Then it got
better, and now it's getting worse again.

~~~
Animats
The state took over the subway system when the city went broke. The MTA is a
state agency.

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randomerr
New York doesn't have enough money to get it done. The politicians are too
busy paying for all the election promises they've made over the last 50 years.
And they absolutely need to cut the bureaucracy (code word for 'unions' and
'government agencies') that are deeply entrenched in the government.

I don't think New York can do it until the people get tired of watching the
decay and the current political machine gets voted out.

BTW: If you disagree please talk out your points.

~~~
perfectstorm
I'm curious how much money is needed. Why is it that Japan, Hong Kong and most
developed European cities have much better rail transportation ? I don't think
money is the only issue. NYC is probably one of the richest cities in the
world and yet you say they don't have the money to fix this ?

I know construction in US is expensive but it can't be that bad.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Hong Kong has a really interesting answer to that question: they turn a >$1B
profit each year. But they can be better described as a real estate company
that runs a subway as a side business to make their real estate more valuable.

~~~
owenversteeg
Yep, I've always been fascinated with that approach and I think it's one of
the best solutions. The station itself enriches the land it's on. Even better,
it makes the whole public transit system more efficient. If I have to go to
another city to shop at a specific store, then it's far more convenient if
that store is located there in the station instead of having to take a bus
from the station and back.

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rayiner
Better article with real numbers: [https://medium.com/@johnnyknocke/the-mta-
loses-six-billion-d...](https://medium.com/@johnnyknocke/the-mta-loses-six-
billion-dollars-a-year-and-nobody-cares-d0d23093b2d8). TLDR version: when it
costs you $2 to do the same thing comparable European systems can do for $1,
you’re going to have a bad time.

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acranox
What would it take to fix the subway? Money of course. Where's it come from?
Who cares, just spend it. Transit is necessary. Tax the businesses that
benefit from good transit. Raise the gas taxes, because driving is a luxury if
you could have taken mass transit. Boston's transit is a mess too. Some of the
problems can be fixed just by throwing money at the problem. The Boston subway
breaks down all the time because the cars are way past service life. You can
just buy new cars, and service will improve a lot. But they waited so long
that breakdowns are constant. The new cars won't be here for years, but we
don't need any upgrades other than buy the cars and put them on the tracks.
It's seriously frustrating that these things are in such a bad state when
massive improvements can come by just spending money to fix old broken stuff.
Call me naive, but I just want better public services, and I understand it
costs money.

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MR4D
After reading your comment twice, I still can't tell if it's sarcasm or not...

~~~
fjsolwmv
Why would it be sarcastic? NYC area is one of the wealthiest areas in the
world, in large part due to the subway. Pay it its due, like Hong Kong does.

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MR4D
Because the parent poster basically is ok with throwing money at it. But that
won’t work. Not even close.

The NY Times started this earlier this year:

“Parts of the system are more than a century old; replacing everything would
cost upward of a trillion dollars.”

Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/nyregion/subway-
service-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/nyregion/subway-service-mta-
age.html)

~~~
acranox
You don’t need to replace everything. You can fix things. It’s probably
billions still, but I still say the money should be spent. Even if it’s
hundreds of billions over the new couple decades, spend the money, fix the
subways. Start with essentials. Then continue maintenance while doing
simultaneous improvements.

Let’s be clear, if you don’t spend money you definitely can’t fix the problem.
Will only money fix it ? No, but if you need to change management, change
expectations, change schedules, do that. All that will cost money as will
buying new cars and new signal systems and hiring crews to install the signal
systems. What’s needed to fix the system is a lot of changes and they will all
cost money. But the reason the changes haven’t happened is due to money.
Boston’s system has certainly suffered from lack of money. Sure they have
billions, but it isn’t enough.

If you don’t have enough maintenance people to do the work, that is still a
money problem. If you pay more for that job, more people will want to do that
job, and then you can hire people to staff the positions correctly. It might
take a few years for the next generation to come into the workforce, but I
believe it can be done.

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CoolGuySteve
I still don't understand why the signal system takes so long to upgrade.

Can't they install most of the new system while the old one is still working
on the same tracks? And isn't digital signalling available from contractors
that have already done the work in other cities?

~~~
lr4444lr
No downtime. The system runs 24/7/365.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
I'd believe you if my local R line wasn't shut down every weekend for the next
year.

~~~
lr4444lr
Precisely my point: no regularly scheduled downtime to do these things results
in major outages when the situation gets too bad to ignore. Same with the
impending L-train shutdown.

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andy_ppp
I was a bit shocked by New York’s subway; you always seems to have to wait a
loooong time for a train. On the London Underground the carriages are much
smaller but waiting even 5 mins for a train is vanishingly rare. Tokyo has a
crazy subway that guarantees to almost the second when the trains go. You can
literally say exactly when you’ll be somewhere across town down to the minute
and it’s nearly never wrong.

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dreamcompiler
Completely agree. Paris, London, and Tokyo all have better and cleaner subways
than NYC. But NYC is about as good as it gets in the US. Believe it or not, as
nasty as NYC subways are now, in the 1970s they were far dirtier.

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HorizonXP
Andy Byford just left as CEO of the TTC to take this challenge on. He’s a more
ambitious man than I, to actively seek to try to fix the NYC MTA. I wish him
luck and wish we did more to support him while he was here.

~~~
etimberg
Totally agree! He was able to accomplish a lot at the TTC with pretty tight
resources.

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nimbius
Apparently an act of congress wouldnt be an uphill battle if history is to be
any teacher... [http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/president-ford-
announces...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/president-ford-announces-
won-bailout-nyc-1975-article-1.2405985)

service runs very well in NYC (anecdotally), but compared to cities like LA or
Phoenix their trains are the haggard burro's of times long gone. Sad to say
but I feel the only thing that will improve the quality of this service over
time is cascading system failures similar to what BART is experiencing.
Politicians are gleefully divorced from the concept of public transportation
in their largest city, so until the NYC Subway begins to impact titans of
industry and their ability to call upon the masses to come to work on time,
its likely to remain a grisly reminder of just how real living in america can
be.

A culture shift might not hurt either, although full disclosure im not
entirely steeped in the culture of the big apple. Here in Los Angeles,
extending our purple line train to the tune of four billion dollars seemed
like a generally wise investment to everyone; the tax passed easily.

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esmi
As non-NYC resident the first thing I though was, "Huh, I wonder what's wrong
with New York's subways?" But alas they went straight into solutions so I am
still left to wonder what problems they are trying to fix and in what
priority. Pretty webpage though.

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rockarage
Maybe you should try reading the article?

from the article:

"Many stations like this one are not prepared to accommodate a larger volume
of passengers, even if a new traffic control system allowed trains to come
more frequently."

"Much of the subway’s signal system uses antiquated parts like the
electromechanical relays shown above from the West Fourth Street-Washington
Square station in Manhattan.

Train traffic for about two-thirds of the subway system is monitored in rooms
like the one shown below at West Fourth Street. Little has changed in a
century.

The old signal system uses a network of switches and cables along the track to
keep trains a safe distance apart. The technology is outdated and expensive to
maintain."

~~~
esmi
You are right. The article only claimed to provide a list of expert
suggestions on how to fix the New York subway and it did that. I'm the one who
wants it to be more.

It strikes a chord because the suggestions offered feel like so many tech
roadmap planning meetings I've been in where the technology itself is the end
and not a means to an end. Without the greater context I am not sure how
anyone can evaluate the suggestions to try and predict whether or not they
will accomplish the stated goal.

Assume the hallways were widened, all the relays, monitoring rooms and signals
were updated addressing each quote you provided. Is New York's subway fixed
now? Maybe it's better for some definitions of better but I digress...

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mancerayder
The theme is often money, but here's where I think NYC (and the U.S.) get it
wrong, and how other countries like the UK and France get it right. I'm no
civil engineer or government contract negotiator so I'd love to be corrected
here, but here goes.

The U.S. prides itself on local government, private industry and so forth,
public-private cooperation ideally leading to more money efficiency since
private companies 'care' and governments are 'wasteful'. Great. However, some
problems I've noticed here:

\-- Local government is actually more inefficient. The ARC project cancelation
which would have already dug a tunnel under the Hudson river between NYC and
NJ in the biggest commuter hub in the country was canceled because three
government organizations, NY State, NJ State and the Port Authority, couldn't
agree on funding and were playing politics. The NJ governor (Christie) later
allocated the moneys to lower the gas tax before his re-election campaign as
well as for highway repair

\-- MTA, the parent organization that runs the NYC subway system, is said to
be woefully underfunded and so forth. __Yet, the Port Authority, a totally
unrelated organization FUNDED BY TAX MONEYS AND PUBLIC TRANSPORT TOLL
COLLECTIONS, spent $4B to refurbish a single station and erect a dinosaur
skeleton and called it the "World Trade Center transit hub." While the subway
system this transit hub is attached to is utterly failing apart due to
repairs. A strong centralized government would have made this less likely.
__Fulton St Station was refurbished for the cost of 1.4B, again at the same
time that signals are failing and trains are breaking in other parts of the
subway system this station is attached to.

How do either of these projects get away with giving billions of dollars to
select contractors, to select private corporations, (st)architects and so
forth? How do we ensure that someone in power didn't get in bed with one of
these private developers?

\-- The NYC Mayor and the NY State governor fight seemingly daily over blame
for the disastrous subway system. The Mayor himself is something of a
scatterbrain, getting involved in issues when he gets screamed at, while the
governor cares more about his constituents upstate. Both are fairly corrupt.

There IS money, the money just goes to insane places due to the scattered
players: private organizations, cross state organizations like the Port
Authority, city governments, state governments, federal governments...

Isn't this one of the reasons why NYC transit construction and repair costs
are so much more than places like London, where A) the system is WAY older b)
the tunnels are MUCH deeper and narrower and yet C) they override these
problems by establishing new lines like the Overground, the DLR and the
Crossrail.

London (a city I lived in a few years) seems to be moving at a much more rapid
evolutionary path than NYC, which seems like it's crumbling around us.

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cft
Privatize it. Like it was originally built.

~~~
gotofritz
London Underground was privatised, then the government had to step in to
rescue the firm that went bankrupt...

~~~
jblow
Tokyo subway is privatized and is very very good.

~~~
fjsolwmv
What works in Japan may supremely fail in US.

This article looks promising, but then think about the disaster that is the
private ISP industry or the red-light camera industry in the US. The US is bad
at privatization, we tend to turn it into exploitative subsidies of crony
capitalists. [http://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-
wh...](http://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-what-it-can-
teach-us/)

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3327
Bring in the Japanese.

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hahla
If Philly had a subway system as connected as NYC I would be happy.

~~~
bobthechef
The connections aren't the problem under discussion. The problem is that it's
a crumbling subway system that is having trouble operating at the capacity the
city requires. For a city as rich as New York, you would expect something much
better.

~~~
spyspy
> having trouble operating at the capacity the city requires.

It's not just having trouble. The capacity the city requires is far beyond
what it's currently running at. Meeting current demand would've meant planning
for it two decades ago.

Anyone who lives here will tell you that the subway is wildly unreliable. Huge
time gaps between trains, train cars that are dangerously overcrowded, random
line shutdowns, local trains randomly going express and vice versa, straight
up train direction reversals, "signal problems", "mechanical issues", sick
passengers who can't get medical help because there's no medical staff in that
station, "police investigations", etc are all part of daily life here.

~~~
mancerayder
Yes, all of this.

It bears mentioning that prior to 2015 it was not this bad.

In the early 2000's it was common to easily get a seat. I recall the main
lines that seemed crowded were the 456 line.

Around 2008 or 2010 they canceled a few lines, reduced bus service, and more.
To me what smelled fishy was that the prior year, they had a budget surplus
and gave everyone free trips on a Christmas weekend.

Add to that there were less homeless back then, and then complete the picture
with the number of homeless people sprawled out in a heap on several seats on
a crowded train, and you start to see how people are questioning why they live
here.

What's interesting to see is sometimes during rush hour, and if you see a
train car that seems less crowded you avoid it either because

a) it's summer and the A/C died in that train car b) you have a homeless or
crazy person harassing people or sprawled out, except exuding an unusually
strong odor that day.

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a-dub
Why are they talking about moving stairs? Why is this first on the list? What
is this madness? The stairs don't need to be moved. They simply need to add
more brand new lines and stations and invest in infrastructure to improve
reliability. That's it.

The NYC Subway is not "broken" because the stairs are in the wrong place. The
NYC Subway isn't even "broken."

~~~
niftich
I'm actually happy they listed something as "trivial" as station configuration
first. The list is full of things that are either politically fraught, or are
already in progress and just take of a lot of time.

Reconfiguring individual stations may be a big win, because they come with
only a modest one-time cost (y'know, sixty-to-a-hundred million, also known in
the US as "cheap"), but result in immediate and appreciable gains in
particular spots. The nature of these projects makes them easy to brand,
boast, and sometimes fund, and you can do them (largely) independent from
other, large-scale things you have in the pipe that will take years to come to
fruition.

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ChrisBland
The more I think about our future with self driving cars/busses; I wonder at
what point will subways no longer be needed? If you look at the capital cost
of a new bus compared to the cost for the operator(s) who work it, we could
greatly increase our fleet of bus services simply by removing the driver. If
that and the cost per mile falls under $1/mile for uber and the like, I don't
think we have a massive need for subways anymore.

~~~
francisofascii
You could be right. The key for making this work is creating more dedicated
bus lanes which can then act like a small above ground train.

~~~
ChrisBland
That is exactly what I believe will happen.

