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New York City’s subway and bus service is already in crisis. It could be getting worse. And more expensive.
Officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) warned last week that without a major infusion of cash, they will have to drastically cut service or increase fares on the system that carries millions of New Yorkers around the city.
[...] The system’s financial straits have gotten worse in part because it has fewer riders, and is collecting less money in fares. Expected passenger revenue over a five-year period has dropped by $485m since July.
“They’ve entered this death spiral,” said Benjamin Kabak, who runs the transit website Second Avenue Sagas. “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.”
Bike-sharing and ride-hailing apps have emerged as alternatives for commuters. Is mass transit finding itself in a valley of death between those who are price-conscious and those who want maximum convenience?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday November 21 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
While I agree with what you're saying, the NY subway system hasn't had any significant new work done on it since something like the 1940s. There have been endless plans and attempts to revamp it, but none of them have gone anywhere. So it's easy enough to suggest simple measures to try and fix it, but before you can even begin with any of those you'd need to spend billions of dollars (that's not a typo, billions) on fixing the system up to a point where you can then start making changes to modernise it. The death spiral issue isn't so far-fetched, decades and decades of "deferred maintenance", or more accurately "letting the infrastructure rot while performing just enough patching to prevent it breaking completely" have now reached the point where you can't ignore the problems any more. They're really screwed, they can't do much to modernise it without first catching up on decades of lack of maintenance, but the cost and time involved of doing that, just to get them to the starting gate for actual upgrades, is prohibitive. There is no solution, or at least none that's palatable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @09:43AM
The subway was privately built. The government put a price cap on fares, then didn't change it while 40 years of inflation happened. The companies were forced into bankruptcy and thus the government took control.
So your point that it "hasn't had any significant new work done on it since something like the 1940s" checks out with that change. Yeah, socialism!