NYC: the city that never moves
New York City, arguably still the capital of the world — if such a title exists — , suffers from a failing transit system that has all New Yorkers worrying and wondering whether it will threaten the Big Apple’s economic future.
99 problems of maintenance
June 2017 holds the record for the worst month of delays in the subway’s worst year since the transit crisis of the 1970s, leading New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo to declare on June 29th 2017 a state of emergency for New York City subways. In addition to rush hour malfunctions, the city was also paralysed by a series of transit accidents during the summer of 2017:
A rush-hour Q train careened off the rails in southern Brooklyn;
A track fire on the A line in Upper Manhattan sent nine riders to the hospital;
A crowded F train stalled in a downtown tunnel, leaving hundreds in the dark without air-conditioning for nearly an hour — a situation close to unbearable during a New York summer;
A packed A train derailed in Harlem and injured 34 people, which raised concerns over whether the subway was even safe to ride.
Those problems plaguing the subway did not suddenly sweep over the city, but are merely symptoms of a bigger issue: lack of maintenance. Indeed, the A train derailment was caused by a spare piece of rail that lay atop the track, on the path of incoming trains: a basic lapse in basic subway maintenance. To give you a better idea of the extent of the damage incurred, let’s rewind to that month of June 2017. Of the 82 000 delays recorded — any instance in which a train runs more than five minutes behind, or misses a scheduled stop — , more than a third (~30 000) were attributed to overcrowding. About 15 000 resulted from planned work to repair the system’s failing signals and worn track. 10 800 were caused by signal and track problems and about 2 200 were triggered by car equipment trouble — the equivalent of 18 late trains every hour, every day, for 30 days straight. Such delays cost New Yorkers more than $300m in lost work time a year, according to an independent budget study.
Those failures were years in the making and have been extensively reported, among others, by The New York Times. For an in-depth analysis, I cannot recommend enough this thorough coverage of the situation at the end of 2017 : How Cuts in Basic Subway Upkeep Can Make Your Commute Miserable.
Keeping a 24-hour subway system up-to-date is a herculean task, and even the best-maintained signals, tracks and tunnels will sometimes fail. Adding to the complexity is the system’s age — the first line opened 115 years ago — and size: 665 miles of track, 13 000 signals and 1 600 switches. It operates 6 400 subway cars, which are maintained at 14 facilities across the city. And because New York’s subways operate 24 hours a day, basic maintenance work must be done while trains are running. In short, it’s almost a miracle the subway runs at all. But it appears that today’s maintenance problems are a combination of bad luck and questionable decision making.
The multi-headed MTA’s governance
Bad luck first came in the form of the 2008 recession, which struck a major hit to the authority’s finances, and then in 2012, with Hurricane Sandy putting an enormous strain on the system’s already fragile infrastructure. The MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the public transit authority in Greater New York) rightfully chose to do everything it could to save critical pieces of the subway from damage — but it meant less time and resources for other, less pressing maintenance needs. As the economy rebounded, leaders did not restore cuts made during the recession, even as train delays skyrocketed. To understand how decisions regarding public transportation are made in New York City, one needs to know about MTA’s governance.
The MTA serves the New York metropolitan area, including all 5 boroughs of New York City and 7 suburban counties. It is governed by a 21-member Board, all nominated by the Governor of New York State. Four members are recommended by New York City’s mayor and one by each of the 7 counties (4 of them casting one collective vote). It also has six rotating non-voting seats held by representatives of the unions and passengers. In short, there are 12 votes, and 4 of them, including the Chairman/CEO, are nominated exclusively by the Governor. This is not problematic in itself, as long as the Board is independant, but concerns were raised regarding Gov. Cuomo interfering with its decisions, stemming from no less than a former chairman of the MTA.
Indeed, the MTA is dependent on political decisions by both Republican and Democratic politicians — governors from George E. Pataki to Mr. Cuomo and mayors from Rudolph W. Giuliani to Bill de Blasio. As it turns out, each of them cut the subway’s budget or co-opted it for their own priorities.
Money, money, money
According to the New York Times, political decisions stripped a combined $1.5 billion from the MTA by repeatedly diverting tax revenues earmarked for the subways and demanding large payments for financial advice, I.T. help and other services transit leaders say the authority could have done without. This approach favored showy projects, like opulent station makeovers, instead of upgrading the invisible 1930s-era signal system with unravelling, cloth-covered cables. Moreover, the state eliminated subsidies for the MTA under Mr. Pataki, opting to make the authority rely entirely on fares, tolls and revenue from taxes and fees earmarked for transit. It also ended state funding for capital work. Such budget shortfalls led transit leaders to inevitably raise fares just to stay afloat. The subway now derives more than 60 percent of its funding from fares, a higher rate than almost any other transit system in the world (around 30% in Paris and 47% in London in comparison). At the same time, public officials who took hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from MTA unions and contractors then pressured the authority into signing agreements with labor groups and construction companies that obligated said authority to pay far more than the international average on maintenance and construction. Faced with funding shortfalls and raising costs, the MTA thus resorted to borrowing. Nearly 17 percent of its budget now goes to pay down debt — roughly triple what it paid in 1997.
But the state is not the only one to blame for this policy. Indeed, while the MTA operates the New York subway and bus lines, two commuter railroads and several bridges and is run by the state, the subway is actually owned by the city. In addition to creating confusion, this dynamic triggers funding battles.
Historically, the city funded about 10 percent of the MTA’s total budget. In today’s dollars, it means the city gave the MTA roughly $1 billion in operating funding in 1990. In 1994, as Mr. Giuliani became the city’s first Republican mayor in two decades, he immediately decided to change that. Facing a budget shortfall and willing to show he could run the city without raising taxes, he cut the city’s contribution to the MTA’s operating and capital budgets by $400 million. In 2017, not counting funds for managing some formerly city-run buses, the city gave the system about $250 million. In short, the city’s contribution to MTA operations has dropped by almost 75 percent since the early 1990's.
The subway lifelines
The city, which owns the subway, and the state, which operates it through MTA’s agency New York City Transit, have fought for a long time on how to fund it. For instance, congestion pricing was proposed more than a decade ago by then mayor Michael Bloomberg, failing to be put into law after a fierce political battle. Facing raising complaints from transit riders fed up with bad service, Gov. Cuomo then pushed for this solution, which has existed in cities like London for years but has never been tried in the US before. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who long objected to charging the small proportion of working-class New Yorkers who drive into Manhattan, finally endorsed the plan this year. It is expected to raise $15bn for the MTA, but the new fees will not go into effect until the end of 2020 at the earliest. Another lead to explore is taking advantage of the surge in property values that the subways helped create. Indeed, New York real estate values — and property tax revenues — have quintupled since the early 1990s, according to the Independent Budget Office. For now, none of that increased property tax revenue was earmarked for the subways.
New York’s subway system has always struggled to get the funding it needs and short-term decisions keep making history repeat itself. As a reminder, decades of cost-cutting and deferred maintenance already led to the darkest days in the history of the 115-year-old system: the 1970s transit crisis, when the subway became a symbol of urban decay. Officials then rescued the subway with a simple formula: invest in the system, and it will improve. And it did, after more than a decade of spending about $50 billion in today’s dollars, reliability soared, cars traveled 10 times farther before breaking down, riders returned in droves.
Some recent decisions signal a better understanding of the issues at stake. Following the June 2017 state of emergency, Andy Byford, former CEO of the Toronto Transit Commission and respected member of the transportation community, was hired in November 2017 as president of the New York City Transit Authority — the MTA’s agency that operates public transportation in New York City — to basically “save” the subway. He came with a $40 billion proposal called Fast forward in May 2018, that plans to overhaul the subway in the next decade instead of the 40 years initially scheduled. More than a year later, he is still struggling to fund his plan (the 2020–2024 MTA capital plan is expected to be voted next October and hasn’t been released yet) while facing public clashes with the governor, such as the unravelling of the L train shutdown plan (part of a political battle between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio), to the point that some of his colleagues now fear he might quit. Mr. Byford has been handed an almost impossible task, but he has shown resilience and commitment to his job — and he is not alone. Ups and downs are inevitable in this mission, but the city of New York and its transit still holds all the cards to save itself. If it plays them wisely.
Sources:
Transit problems threaten New York’s economic future — City&State New York (Feb 2018)
Cuomo Declares a State of Emergency for New York City Subways — The New York Times (Jun 2017)
Subway Train Derails in Brooklyn, Disrupting Morning Commute — The New York Times (Jul 2017)
Subway Track Fire Sends 9 to Hospital and Snarls Morning Commute — The New York Times (Jul 2017)
A Hot Mess for F-Train Subway Riders Trapped in Cars — The New York Times (Jun 2017)
Subway Derailment in Manhattan Injures Dozens — The New York Times (Jun 2017)
How Cuts in Basic Subway Upkeep Can Make Your Commute Miserable — The New York Times (Dec 2017)
Opinion/New York’s Subways Need an Independent M.T.A. — The New York Times (Mar 2019)
How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways — The New York Times (Dec 2017)
Why building trains in New York costs more than any other city — New York Post (Aug 2018)
New York becomes first city in US to approve congestion pricing — The Guardian (Apr 2019)
The L Train Shutdown Plan Was 3 Years in the Making. It Unraveled in 3 Weeks. — The New York Times (Jan 2019)
Subway Chief May Quit Over Tensions With Cuomo, Colleagues Fear — The New York Times (Apr 2019)
