1 week Ago
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is North America’s largest transportation network, serving a population of 15.3 million people in the city and surrounding areas. It has 472 subway stations, 665 miles of track and 5,800 buses.
In 2023, the subway had a daily ridership of approximately 3.6 million and an annual ridership of 1.15 billion.
Recently, the MTA unveiled a record $68.4 billion capital improvement program with the bulk of spending marked for upkeep of a teetering 120-year-old subway system — even as funding for nearly half the five-year plan is no sure thing. MTA officials concede that the system is in “real danger of failure.
” Much of the funding was supposed to come from a vaunted congestion pricing plan where cars would be charged an additional $15 to enter Manhattan at 61st Street and below, while trucks would be charged between $24 and $36 depending on size. The plan was supposed to contribute billions of dollars to the aging transit system for a variety of improvements. But the plug was pulled weeks before the start date.
Clearly, Gov. Kathy Hochul calculated that the plan would alienate suburban voters who want to use cars to get into the city, so she indefinitely paused it before the election. Whatever the reasoning behind her decision, the MTA is in trouble, and the lack of funds means cuts on maintenance for tracks, signals and trains as well as the yards and the electrical equipment that riders don’t see.
It also means putting on hold efforts to make 23 more subway stations accessible to people with disabilities and buying 250 new electric buses. NYC transportation faces innumerable other problems. For example, in the first six months of 2024, 127 people have been killed in traffic fatalities in the city, the most since the city’s Vision Zero program began a decade ago.
Although it’s not fully clear why deaths are rising, the fact that traffic enforcement has fallen sharply may be a prime reason. The fact is also that New York contains the world’s worst traffic, causing deadly results for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists who speed without regard for red lights. Any trip through midtown Manhattan, especially at the wrong time of day, risks getting stuck in gridlock that increases pollution and arouses drivers’ rage and anxiety.
The plan to repair the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is the latest development in a nearly 20-year chronicle that has highlighted the political and financial obstacles to building and repairing major infrastructure, even when most stakeholders agree it’s needed. Then there is the problem of fare evasion on the city’s buses, which even before the pandemic was a serious problem. The evasion rate was roughly 18 percent in 2018, according to a 2019 MTA report.
However, in 2023 bus fare evasion cost the MTA $315 million, which was even more than the $285 million in subway fare evasion. In the last three months of 2023, 45 percent of local bus riders did not pay their fare to board. Some riders feel entitled to a free ride or find it inconvenient to swipe their pass, and there are some who can’t afford to pay for their trips.
The MTA needs the revenue and is searching for ways to solve the problem. Some possibilities proposed are downgrading enforcement so that a first offense earns a warning before a fine or summons and expanding the income eligibility for its underused Fair Fares program so another 500,000 passengers would qualify for discounted service. Still, until the MTA can reduce fare evasion, some form of control has to be instituted.
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber has trenchantly made the argument against fare evasion: “It’s stealing from other New Yorkers. It’s destroying the value system of our shared public spaces. And most importantly, it creates this sense of illegality and disorder in the system.
” I totally agree with Lieber that even a great many small, seemingly harmless acts of illegality help create a climate of chaos that leads to a society where nothing seems to function — a world of misrule that must be dealt with. The other side of evasion is that paid ridership in June was at about 70 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, and it failed to grow at the expected pace in July and August. A report from the state comptroller highlights how uneven the ridership recovery has been across the MTA’s various systems with the Long Island Railroad being closest to pre-pandemic levels.
Finally, the city is releasing a new plan to fix a deteriorating stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which carries more than 153,000 vehicles daily. A number of those vehicles are overweight trucks that go undetected by law enforcement and cause wear and tear and higher maintenance costs on this aging but important piece of infrastructure. The plan is the latest development in a nearly 20-year chronicle that has highlighted the political and financial obstacles to building and repairing major infrastructure, even when most stakeholders agree it’s needed.
Still, Brooklyn is years and millions of dollars away from the renewed BQE depicted in the report, and only a few of the large-scale projects, like capping, are likely to come to fruition The city’s plan would replace a less-than-half-mile portion of the 75-year-old BQE that hugs the East River south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Known as the “triple cantilever,” it stacks two decks on top of each other, both suspended above street level, and is crowned by a pedestrian promenade. All this only scratches the surface of the city’s transportation problems, but I hope some of it is beginning to turn around.
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