Transit Authority Releases 47 Billion Dollar Modernization Plan That Is Different From The 2019 47 Billion Dollar Modernization Plan
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report, with context from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has released its latest comprehensive plan to modernize the New York City subway system, a 47-billion-dollar, eight-year program that the MTA describes as “the most ambitious transit investment in the system’s 122-year history” and that transit historians describe as the most ambitious transit investment in the system’s 122-year history since the previous most ambitious transit investment in the system’s history, which was the 2019 48-billion-dollar plan that produced similar press coverage and has since been superseded by the current plan in ways that the MTA’s communications materials decline to specify.
The plan includes: implementation of Communications-Based Train Control on all remaining lines by 2030, which was the target year in the 2019 plan before it was revised to 2032, which is the current target year in the new plan with a note that implementation is “subject to Federal Transit Administration approval and contractor availability”; accessibility improvements at 70 additional stations, bringing the accessible percentage from 28 percent to “approximately 42 percent,” which remains significantly below the percentage that the Americans with Disabilities Act compliance settlement from 2002 required by 2020; and a new fare payment system that will replace the current fare payment system that was itself the replacement system for the system it replaced. “New Yorkers deserve a world-class transit system,” said MTA Chair Janno Lieber. “This plan delivers that.” A reporter asked when. The briefing moved on.
The New York Subway: What It Is And Has Been
The New York City subway is simultaneously one of the great urban transit systems in the world — 472 stations, 245 miles of route, operating 24 hours a day in ways that no other major urban subway system matches — and a daily demonstration that infrastructure maintenance deferred for decades produces outcomes that no amount of branding can fully address. The system carried 1.2 billion passengers before the pandemic and has recovered to approximately 950 million, serving a city that cannot function without it in ways that are visible every time a signal delay backs up the system and Manhattan’s surface streets fill with people walking who had planned to be underground. The 47-billion-dollar plan addresses real needs. So did the 2019 plan. The gap between plan and execution is where the subway actually lives.
The signal system on several lines uses technology from the 1930s. This is not metaphorical. The signal relays are physical devices installed before World War II that require maintenance from engineers who learned to maintain them because the manufacturer has not existed for forty years and the manual for the specific relay model is available in one copy at the MTA maintenance facility in Coney Island. The CBTC upgrade will replace these with computerized signaling that allows trains to run closer together, increasing capacity. The estimated cost of the CBTC rollout has increased from the 2019 estimate by approximately 40 percent. This is called construction cost escalation. It is a known phenomenon that was predictable in 2019. It was nonetheless not fully incorporated into the 2019 estimate.
The Timeline
2034 for full completion. The MTA notes this is an “aggressive but achievable target.” For NYC transit satire at NewsThump.
New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition
New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.
Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/