Who to Blame for Your Subway Nightmare

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/opinion/who-to-blame-for-your-subway-nightmare.html

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Success has many fathers, the old saying goes, while failure is an orphan. Not in New York’s dilapidated subways. That’s where failure has plenty of fathers: governors and mayors who, one after another, siphoned money from mass transit to pay for whatever else suited their budgetary fancy. The sufferers, of course, are millions of riders for whom the daily commute is now a torment of delays, overcrowding, missed appointments and understandable anger.

How this meltdown came to be was chronicled in meticulous detail on the weekend in a Times article that explored a broad range of troubles. But almost everything boiled down to wrongheaded decisions by governors from George Pataki to Andrew Cuomo and by mayors from Rudolph Giuliani to Bill de Blasio, all of whom ride the subway about as often as they publicly admit error.

Collectively, over the last two decades, they diverted a total of $1.5 billion from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for other undertakings that caught their eye. Meanwhile, the M.T.A. deferred essential — but less eye-catching — maintenance on the guts of the underground network. The predictable result is that subway cars now wheeze along at the mercy of warped tracks, frayed cables and a signal system that was state of the art, maybe, when Americans were dancing the jitterbug.

New York leaders, in general, have been shortsighted about subway finances almost from the day the system opened in 1904. Even when the system was privately owned in its first few decades, the political class exerted influence. One consequence was that the subway fare didn’t change for decades, never mind that the cost of everything else rose. The fare was a nickel in 1904, and it remained a nickel until 1948, when it was raised to 10 cents.

Ever cash-starved, New York mass transit had a near-death experience in the 1970s, when subway cars were graffiti-scarred visions of purgatory. Miss your train back then and you could never be sure when you’d see another.

What makes today’s decay especially maddening is that the transit system had bounced back admirably in the 1980s, under the tutelage of able M.T.A. leaders like Richard Ravitch and David Gunn and with essential cash from an assortment of dedicated taxes. Ridership soared. So did the quality of service.

The average distance that subway cars traveled between breakdowns was a wretched 6,600 miles in 1981. That figure rose to about 200,000 miles by 2010. Trains came to be on time for the most part (even if the M.T.A. definition of “on time” was arriving at the terminus no more than five minutes behind schedule). Delays didn’t disappear, but they became almost bearable.

Today, the distance between breakdowns has slipped to about 120,000 miles. On-time performance has slid to around 60 percent. Delays have soared to about 70,000 a month from 28,000 in 2012. And average daily ridership, which exceeded 5.8 million in September 2016, dropped to 5.7 million this September.

You can shortchange the system only so much and get away with it. As the Times article showed, Mr. Pataki in 1995 started a trend of steering tax revenue away from mass transit to plug holes in other parts of the state budget. At least $850 million has been redirected in this manner over the past two decades. Mr. Giuliani, faced with a municipal budget shortfall in 1994, slashed the city’s yearly contribution to the M.T.A. by $400 million, equivalent to $675 million today. Subsequent state and city leaders stuck to this rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul pattern.

Labor contracts were signed even though not fully affordable. Instead of relying on steady revenue streams to pay for it all, the state, which controls the M.T.A., chose to borrow — a lot, with future generations left to pick up the tab. Interest payments now come to $2.6 billion a year, or 16 percent of the transit agency’s budget, a share expected to rise to 20 percent in a few years.

However misguided their predecessors may have been, Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio own this crisis. New Yorkers are still waiting for them to set aside mutual antagonism to figure things out, starting with where they will get the money needed to rehabilitate the wounded system. Instead of teamwork, we have dueling plans. The governor offers a congestion-pricing concept that is enticing in theory — if only he’d elaborate on what it would look like in reality. Months have gone by without his offering any details. For his part, the mayor sticks to a “millionaires tax,” with scant reason to believe that State Senate Republicans and their tag-along squad of allied Democrats would accept it.

The need now is for leadership comparable to what New York had for a while in the 1970s when the entire municipal government, not just the subways, stood on the brink of collapse. That was when everyone — bankers, union leaders and state and local politicians — all worked together to restore fiscal health. It required sacrifice by everyone.

That cohesion is absent now. But it’s desperately needed for costs to be kept under control, for the city and the state to each pay its fair share and for priorities to be set so that essential repairs count more than, say, amenities like cellphone charging stations on subway platforms.

Perhaps it’s time to create a ’70s-style coalition. That could be an assignment for Andrew Byford, who led a turnaround of the once-troubled Toronto transit system and on Tuesday was put in charge of New York’s subways and buses. High-tech whizzes or Wall Street hotshots, ad agency employees or hard-hat laborers — they all rely on mass transit and feel the pain of an undependable system.

In truth, as troubled as mass transit is, it isn’t as woebegone as it was in the ’70s. Not yet. But must it take sliding back to that abyss for political, business and labor leaders to get it? They have it in their power to be the parents of a new success, not guardians of a failure that is most assuredly not an orphan.