Subway performance has slipped for the first time in a decade and this comes on the heels of calls by the MTA to raise fares yet again. Service slipping, higher fares, and a city that depends on those subways to operate 24/7 to survive is a recipe for disaster.
MTA officials and some city officials point to a failure of state and federal funding of mass transit. This much is true. NYC is an incredible generator of monies for the world and national economy, so that investing in NYC mass transit infrastructure is absolutely necessary.
Reducing funding means that capital infrastructure projects go unfunded, which means that monies that would go to other projects have to be prioritized and allotted less money than needed to complete projects in a timely fashion.
Some of the problems arise because the system operates 24/7 unlike the subway and metro systems in other cities. In Washington DC, the Metro runs until around midnight and then shuts down for several hours. For PATH, the trains run on a greatly reduced schedule at night, which allows track and signal work to proceed. There is no such thing for the NYC subway system.
That is one of the greatest advantages of the NYC subways, but also its Achilles' heel. Permitting 24/7 travel means that people can travel throughout the city without driving at any time of day. However, it means that construction, maintenance, and repair work must be done over a period of days, weeks, months, or years to accomodate the constant stream of subway traffic.
There are no easy answers to solving the maintenance and repair dilemna, but providing adequate funding for mass transit would go a long way to keeping the system from sliding back into the oblivion of the 1970s, when subways routinely broke down, graffiti was the name of the game, and people avoided the subways whenever possible because they were completely unreliable. No one wants to go back to those days, but the politicans don't want to pay for the costs of seeing that it doesn't happen.
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