In many ways, the New York subway system is like the bloodline of the city.
New Yorkers have this love and hate relationship with it because it's extremely convenient,
it does get you everywhere, it does run all night but it's also disgusting.
It's one of the most historic, one of the first, one the must use in of the most famous cities in
the world, it's an iconic subway system, but how does it fall into this terrible decay?
I also ran this little survey experiment thing with everybody I would be visiting the
ugliest stations that you guys pointed out. That's make up for our Company Forensics story.
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The NYC Subway is the heart that beats beneath one of the busiest cities in the world and has done so for almost 120 years.
It carries five million passengers per day with more than 1370 km of track and
472 stations. Plus, it’s the largest subway network in the Western world.
And, by the looks of it, it was pretty swanky at a point in history.
In the 30s and 40s, the NYC Subway was amongst the best in the world.
It was vital for the city as still as today.
Nowadays, it looks like this.
I actually remember the first time I came to the station... Wow!
It's also the city whole station I feel it should be better
It gives me some of like these Minas Moria vibe cuz the columns are so high but
I'm gonna said 2 out of 5 trains I think there's worst.
So the first key person in this story is a guy named Robert Moses.
This Moses is, by all means, a controversial character.
Some say that Robert Moses was the master behind 20th century NYC.
But, he also ruined public transportation, was racist and corrupt.
By the 20s and 30s, Moses was in charge of parks and even the Central Park Zoo.
Moses had a vision: New York would be filled with parks, beaches, and pools.
To get to these places, people would drive cars.
Most historians agree that Moses HATED public transport.
Plus, Moses had one thing in his favor. He was a brilliant negotiator, so he got what he wanted.
As a public official, he would sell his ideas better than anyone else.
The bad thing was that all of them included highways and cars.
Now, this was a sign of the times. In the 40s and 50s, a car was part of the American dream.
And those who couldn't afford one were left to their own devices.
The problem is that Moses took it to another level. He built more than 13
expressways across New York and, by doing so, altered public transportation forever.
These expressways also cluttered poor neighborhoods with traffic, ramps, and overpasses.
Meanwhile, the rich neighborhoods remained rich and trafficless.
Many of the bridges, that were built, they just lack mass transit elements.
Frequently, Moses managed to leverage budgets for rail and train projects
and use them for bridges, roads, and massive highway loops.
Historian Robert Caro wrote: "When Robert Moses came to power in New York in 1934,
the city's mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968,
it was quite possibly the worst."
14th Street will normally be a good station, next to the green, yellow, and L line that's a useful station
It has its regular problems like trash and disgustingness but this station
it's placed in a curve that's why it needs a special platform
and the noise and screeching it's just insane!
I graded 3 out of 5 trains.
To reorganize transportation, New York would create the MTA in 1965.
The MTA is the largest public transit authority
in the US, and it controls buses, trains, and the subway.
So, yes NYC had this new authority in charge of these things.
But, it was massive, complex, and would face some of the most brutal years in subway history. If
you think that the subway now is terrible, the seventies were the stuff of nightmares.
By the turn of the decade, New York was in deep shit, with rampant crime and drug use. Plus,
thanks to a fiscal crisis, there was no money for either police or repairs for years maybe decades.
So, the city chose to defer maintenance on the subway system.
These factors made the NYC Subway one of the most dangerous places during the 70s and early 80s.
So, New Yorkers tried to avoid the tunnels and stations and trains altogether.
Trains ran into delays and mechanical problems. So, waiting at a station was almost a death wish.
New Yorkers rode subway trains covered in graffiti and got off at lonely, dirty stations.
With such few passengers, the 70s brought along with them a
vicious cycle of low ridership and price hikes.
Again, money becomes the issue.
The MTA was desperate for money. So it increased the pricing, sometimes many times
a year. But that money then disappeared in a web of corruption and lies.
Battling through this all, by the late seventies, the MTA made massive efforts to improve.
The thing with 181st Street is that there are no stairways out,
there's only one elevator, several elevators upper down and you have to take them.
The station itself is average, it's just that the elevator thing really triggers your claustrophobia, fire, fear, etc.
for that, I'm gonna give it 3 out o 5.
Somehow, the 80s become a decade of slow but meaningful change. By the end of the decade,
riding the subway was no longer about life or death.
Newer trains meant that, first of all, they ran more on time.
Plus, in 1989, the city celebrated that graffiti was gone.
But, then, in the 90s, people chose to scratch the trains.
The 90s brought a lot of change. The MetroCard made traveling much
more accessible. The token was gone, and now people could pay for unlimited rides.
This helped increase ridership. With better trains, on-time performance improved
consistently during the 90s and early 2000s.
By 2003, the on-time performance reached an impressive 97%.
But, there was still a problem lurking underneath: the system's age.
Some of the trains are so old that the MTA can no longer buy spares from the manufacturer.
And, this means a lot of breakdowns.
A 2017 New York Times article showed that the average subway car breaks
down every 400,000 miles. The newest one breaks down every 750,000 miles.
On average, an NYC Subway train breaks down every 33,000 miles!
That's 12 times more than average.
Then, there's the signal system.
The NYC subway separates its tracks into 1,000 ft sections with signals.
Electricity runs through these sections. So,
whenever a train enters that section, it short-circuits the system. Then,
it sends a signal, indicating that a train is going through that section.
It can warn or even stop other trains.
But, it's from the 1930s. So, the system that prevents accidents is almost 100 years old!
Not only that, personnel doesn't know where the trains are!
Instead, they know in which section of the track they are. So,
most of the time, they're guessing and estimating.
The problem is that this system fails once every 11 hours or so.
The system is so primitive that even soda cans generate failures and delays.
We'll talk about trash later.
I came to the 14th Street Station, there's this underpass you have to go through if you're connecting from the green line and the orange line
And is usually super gloomy, disgusting, and a little scary to cross in at night, today there was this guy selling incents so from the passage actually smell good
I'm going to give it 5 out of 5 trains for effort
The New York City Transit Authority, an affiliate of the MTA, runs the New York City Subway.
But the MTA isn't the owner. That's the City of New York.
The City of New York leases the system to the MTA.
So, all these parties have to agree on how to finance the subway. And, they rarely do.
Take those glorious 80s and 90s.
After a lot of investment,
the city turned its back to the subway and started cutting funds for the MTA.
This, and I'm only beginning with this
Investigations have revealed that the MTA is the politician's piggy
bank. They take millions that should go to transit and use them on other expenses for the city or not for the city.
So, desperate for cash and unable to increase fares to cover expenses,
the MTA turned to manage its debt through bonds.
Since 1981, The MTA issued millions of dollars in debt and,
by the year 2000, it had reached $12 billion in debt through these bonds.
It was getting so out of control that the MTA
decided to restructure its debt with some wall street dudes.
That never ends well, and critics had warned of this.
Sure, it would give the MTA money in the short term, but it would prolong payments until 2032.
The problem is that, once they refinanced, the money never got to them.
The same problem persisted. The MTA was still the government's piggy bank for other projects.
Here's an example with ski resorts.
But, the debt still exists. It's estimated that, by 2017,
one out of every six dollars the MTA spent went to pay the debt.
Not only that. Every bond comes with a fee.
The MTA has paid more than $400 million in fees for those bonds alone.
That was one of the reasons why Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency in 2017. But,
the problems were far too big for that moment.
The problem of fixing the NYC subway is almost impossible.
It runs 24/7, and it's the busiest system in the Western world.
Before the pandemic, 5.5 million people rode the NYC subway every day!
That was about 1.7 billion people per year.
So many people mean a lot of problems.
But the subway is so key to New York, the MTA can't stop the entire system, repair all its problems and then restart
So, the best thing is to tackle the individual problems one by one.
And, for that, they need money. The problem is that the pandemic screwed up the MTA's finances.
The total operating revenue for 2021 was around $1,773 billion, less than 2019, $5,061 billion.
Out of these, $1.26 billion came from tickets and farebox.
Taxes and subsidies added $4,5 billion.
Then, there are operating expenses, which total $12,1 billion.
After depreciation, in 2021, the NYCTA had a deficit of $2.1 billion.
And, let's not forget that, by the end of 2020, the MTA had
$38,5 billion in outstanding debt, which has tripled since 2000.
Worst of all, it projects deficits of $3.5 billion in 2023 and 2024.
All this had a direct effect on the repair budget.
Instead of the $13,4 billion the MTA planned for construction in 2020,
it only dished out a third of that.
As for the plans, they don't look great either in the long run.
The MTA has the 2020-2024 Capital Program, estimated at $55 billion,
to bring the subway to modern standards.
But, by August 2021, it had only seen $2 billion.
$15 billion should come from congestion charges. But, these will start in 2023, at the earliest.
The problem is that the MTA becomes much more expensive to run year in and year out.
The equipment is older, the debt is larger, and the budget is smaller and I'm not even talking about inflation.
In fact, the MTA's debt issues have become so uncontrollable
that legislators want to cut part of the Capital Program funding that they originally had approved.
It's just too expensive to fund the subway
As for the State of Emergency, it ended in 2021.
Sure, it helped. Authorities cleaned drains, fixed broken signals, and repaired damaged rails.
But, some of the solutions seemed improvised. For example, they removed the trash cans
they actually decided they need it to remove them from the stations
to prevent fires. So people threw trash on the tracks and caused more fires.
In the end, authorities reinstalled the trash cans for millions of dollars.
Passenger safety is another issue, which sparked authorities to take action.
But, all these solutions, in the end, are patches, nothing else.
Even that massive repair bill might not work. After all,
there's probably a lot of hungry hands trying to get a bit of it.
It’s fascinating how NYC relies on the subway, and the system somehow manages to live on.
It takes millions of people to and from their jobs every single day
but I guess there's also no other choice on how it goes
Once, it was the pride of New York. It even managed to overcome the darkest of years.
It's embedded in our pop culture
And, still, the city can’t change its ways to help it.
These trains that we ride keep NYC alive, even though they are absolutely dying.