New York Times online video about the decline of the NYC Subway system

Nigel, our e-correspondent from NZ, calls our attention to this video, which is a good little primer in advance of tomorrow's piece on "60 Minutes." Basically it makes these points:

- underfunding
- New York State taking MTA monies away for use on nontransit purposes
- and ripping off the MTA by charging it when it issues bonds, to the tune of $325 million
- and other financial engineering moves
- not investing in maintenance
- it doesn't exactly say they need newer equipment
- except signaling systems, which would allow faster trains closer together
+ the effects of Superstorm Sandy
+ along with an increase in ridership
= system breakdown

They did miss one big problem, a story brought to light by the now defunct Village Voice, a systematic reduction in train speeds, instituted after a crash, which makes it impossible for trains to make up time when needed, and slows down the system generally, which isn't so great when ridership increases.

-- "The trains are slower because they slowed the trains down"

The Voice made a great point in another article, "Maybe We Didn't Need the Second Avenue Subway," that an equivalent investment in signals instead of building the short section of "Second Avenue Subway" would have had a lot more impact on throughput and service improvement.

It's great that the Times did the video, and also that they put it on youtube and allow others to embed it--most newspapers seem to restrict the ability for their video content to be reposed.  I wish that a media outlet would do something similar here concerning transit generally and WMATA specifically.

I saw Jarrett Walker, the transit consultant and author of the blog and book Human Transit, speak a couple weeks ago. In contrasting the success of bus transit in Seattle, he ascribed it to municipal leadership.

But it's not just municipal leadership there, it's citizen commitment too, in terms of passing tax increases for transit. And that's Seattle specifically, not King County generally.

Seattle has taxed itself to increase transit service, even when King County failed to pass similar taxes. And it allowed Seattle to separate itself from previous political decisions by King County elected officials, who heretofore had dictated that increases in service in Seattle had to be matched by increases elsewhere in the county, irrespective of demand.

The NYT video does discuss how Rudy Giuliani cut the city's contribution to MTA significantly. Mayor Bloomberg cared about the subways but was more interested in expansion. Mayor De Blasio is pretty much not interested in sustainable mobility issues outside of the ferries, the only mode that the city directly controls.

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On a totally unrelated note Alon Levy in Pedestrian Observations ("Rapid Transit on the LIRR") discusses how to make the Long Island RR function as "rapid transit" within the city, in response to a report released by City Comptroller Scott Springer, Expanding access in one swipe: opening commuter lines to Metrocards.

The thing is, once you ride a system where trains and subway are truly integrated, like London, Paris (I presume), Hamburg, Berlin, etc., you completely understand how this can be done. In London and Hamburg it's quite seamless. That being said, for it to happen in London, the local transit authority had to be given the right to take over the operation of various intra-city train lines, which it did, and rebranded them as London Overground, along with the institution of a whole lot of other changes, including fare readers (not fare gates) ("One big idea: Getting MARC and Metrorail to integrate fares, stations, and marketing systems, using London Overground as an example," 2015). It works brilliantly.