“We know your subway system is bad, we know your train system is bad. To really fix it we have to take lines out of service for extended periods of time.”

Thus bicycles. I predicted this long ago. Eventually the MTA will be so deep in debt and will stop maintaining the system, and only start repairs when service becomes so unreliable and unsafe that a full shutdown is required. And then those people who can’t bicycle all the way to their destination will have to at least do so to another subway line, or move out of the metro area (or move their business out).

https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/preparing-for-institutional-collapse/

https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/repost-how-then-shall-we-live-transportation-in-the-wake-of-generation-greed/

When I said this most people thought I was a doom and gloom nut, but it was simple arithmetic. And if you think the solution is a shift of resources to transportation from other things, understand that the big picture is what was done to transportation is what was done to EVERYTHING by Generation Greed.

Re DnaInfo (last story): “Last fall, the community petitioned the DOT to remove a Citi Bike station it installed closer to Second Avenue, saying that it would bring cyclists speeding the wrong way to the foot of the hill where the station sits.”

Too bad the reporter couldn’t rouse herself to interview the local anti-bike nabob from her Sept 2016 story or get stats on bike-ped collisions or otherwise do real reporting to see if any of those neighborhood “fears” ever materialized.

Not to dominate the discussion, but here is my pro-worker though perhaps anti-union and politician take on worker abuse.

Public services are going to become a worse and worse deal, with higher fees and taxes and worse service, because of what was done in the past. Unions and past workers, to the extent that retroactive pension increases contributed to the problem, and deserve some of the blame, a share that varies from place to place and public service to public service.

Most current and all recently hired workers do not deserve some of the blame — they are on the wrong side of the “screw the newbie, flee to Florida” contract and pension cycle with the rest of the serfs, and are left to work in a lousy environment Generation Greed is leaving behind. And yet the ignorant public will blame them. Which is just fine with the unions and politicians.

What has to happen, at all levels of government, is for taxes, fares, tolls, other fees to be cut to a level that reflects the amount of money going to actual public services and benefits right now. With all the costs from the past — pension underfunding, debts, catch up to to past inadequate infrastructure maintenance — assessed in a separate surcharge everyone can see. So they are reminded over and over how much they are paying with nothing in between, with current workers not getting it.

As in you put $60 in the Metrocard machine, and you get at $30 Metrocard and pay a $30 “Generation Greed surcharge.”

I don’t think the MTA politicos in Albany and on the MTA Board will want to go for it. But perhaps eventually the TWU will drop out of the group CYA on what was done in the past to be fair to its own (involuntarily) dues paying members.

True. But you have to add up the $ of damage and apportion the blame proportionately. Debt and contractors (and their pensions) are number one for NYCT. Pension increases for NYC teachers, high non-instructional staffing for schools in the rest of the state. Pensions and overstaffing for police.

If you want to concern yourself with worker abuses, look to the LIRR.

Maybe, but with what money?

Too bad they tore down the old els instead of converting them into what you describe.