City Hall unveils 47-point transit improvement initiative; MTA issues 48 delays before lunch
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Plan, In Overview
NEW YORK — The Mayor of New York City unveiled a comprehensive 47-point plan to improve subway service this week, calling it the most ambitious transit initiative since the last most ambitious transit initiative, which was announced in 2023 and is currently in the implementation phase of its planning phase.
The plan addresses service reliability, station cleanliness, fare evasion, signal infrastructure, accessibility, and the general experience of being underground in a city that has been underground since 1904 and has had approximately the same complaints about it since 1905. The MTA issued a statement welcoming the plan and noting that 14 of the 47 points fall under existing initiatives that are currently being implemented, 18 fall under initiatives that require state funding approval, and 15 require further study, analysis, and the development of an implementation framework that the MTA expects to have ready for review in 18 months.
The remaining points, an MTA spokesperson confirmed, were either already done or not the MTA’s jurisdiction. It was not specified which was which.
The Commuter Response
New York subway riders, who form one of the world’s most experienced communities of transit criticism, responded to the announcement with the measured enthusiasm of people who have heard this before. Several riders who were interviewed on the platform at Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center during a 22-minute signal delay expressed a range of views spanning from cautious optimism to weary acceptance to a philosophical position that one rider described as I’ve made peace with the Q train being whatever it’s going to be.
According to Dr. Marguerite Fontaine of the fictional New York Institute for Transit Expectation Management, New York subway riders have developed what she calls calibrated hope — the capacity to process transit improvement announcements without updating their behavioral expectations until at least 18 months of measurable service improvement has been documented. This is not cynicism, she clarifies. It is the rational response of a population that has been asked to calibrate hope many times.
The Numbers, Such As They Are
The MTA carries approximately 3.5 million riders on an average weekday — a figure that reflects both the subway’s essential role in the functioning of New York City and the fact that 3.5 million people have decided that the service, whatever its limitations, is preferable to the alternatives. This calculation is correct. Driving in Manhattan is an exercise in competitive suffering. Ride-hailing is expensive and slow in traffic. Walking is only viable in a city that has been sensibly designed for walking, which New York has been, with the result that you can walk many distances that seem long on a map and aren’t, which means the subway’s competitors include human legs.
The city’s MTA currently operates 472 stations, 665 miles of track, and a customer complaint resolution process that has been optimized for documentation rather than resolution. Service reliability metrics have improved since the 2017 nadir, which was when the Governor described the subway as in a state of emergency, a characterization that was both accurate and approximately 90 years overdue. Gothamist continues to cover service disruptions with the dedication of a publication that has found its niche.
What Would Actually Help
The subway requires approximately $60 billion in capital investment over the next decade to achieve a state of good repair and the service improvements that the 47-point plan envisions. This is a large number. It is also a smaller number than the cost of gridlock that would result from a subway system that cannot absorb the 3.5 million daily riders who currently use it. Infrastructure investment of this scale is the kind of thing that democracies do when they decide to, and don’t do when they decide not to, and the deciding is the hard part, not the engineering. The engineering is straightforward. The money exists in the economy. The question is whether it will be directed at the subway, which is a political question about priorities, not a technical question about feasibility. New York will have a subway as good as its politicians decide it should have. The 47-point plan is a beginning. Implementation is the rest.
The signal delay at Atlantic Avenue cleared after 24 minutes. The Q train continued to be whatever it was going to be.
New York, New York
New York City operates at a scale and intensity that makes every story a larger story. The subway delay is a story about infrastructure investment and political will. The rent increase is a story about housing policy and urban economics. The bagel dispute is a story about cultural identity and immigration history. The rat is a story about urbanization and ecological adaptation. The tourist is a story about how cities present themselves to the world and how the world receives what cities offer. Even the pizza disagreement is, underneath the comedy, a story about regional identity and the human need to have things that are ours, specifically ours, that we defend with disproportionate vigor precisely because they are ours and because the world is large and we need to stake our territory somewhere. New York is where many of these stories happen simultaneously, in a density that produces the particular creative friction that has made the city a cultural generator for a century and a half. The people who live here tolerate the cost and the noise and the subway delays and the rent and the rats because the city gives back something that cannot be fully quantified: the experience of being in a place where things are happening, where ideas collide, where the next conversation might change how you think about something, where the scale of human activity is so concentrated that you are reminded constantly that you are part of something enormous and ongoing. This is the deal. Most people who make it find it sufficient. Some find it extraordinary. None of them are moving to the suburbs.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com