Do you actually know a real person who makes that much, or are you just parroting?
In those data, one sees Mr. Arthur Harkin, a Long Island Rail Road conductor, made $195,000. ($220 thousand in 2017 dollars.)
[1] https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MTA-...
[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=69.489&year1=2...
So about the same as the average CRUD app developer? This doesn't seem outrageous to me.
He makes 80k a year.
My political ideology is deeply in favor of the working class. I believe in strong worker protections, in the unionization of labor in most industries, and that capital controls a disproportionate amount of wealth and power in this country.
But I must also insist that these costs are unfair and insane.
He's also getting about another 70k in benefits, for a total compensation well into the 6-figures.
People wonder "why is the subway so filthy?" Well, if you wanted to hire people to keep the subways clean, they would have to be paid $100K+ in total compensation.
Ok, so why not hire a private company to keep subways clean? A private company would be able to pay free-market compensation to hire cleaners.
Can't do that either! Subways must stay filthy!
Because we run our system 24/7. We can’t flood our stations with bleach like they do in D.C.
"In terms of cleanliness, which is also an issue of public health - why doesn't MTA have a dedicated crew of 4 or 5 people with a power washer, soap and squeegees to move methodically through each station, working on the weekends or overnight? "
Can't have it, because the MTA is not in the moving-people-business, they are in the wealth-transfer-business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/nyregion/with-new-vacuums...
So it's frankly absurd of the commenter to say that just 4-5 people could manage this task. One manager mentioned in the article leads a team of 300(!) cleaners.
But where the people are, the stations, they don't keep them clean. That's what the commenter was refering to.
The stations don't stay clean because they move millions of people per day, not all of whom are clean. Today I saw a kid throwing up on her way into the station; she and her mother were somehow polite enough to pause above a drain to do so. Combine that with people tracking upstairs dirt in, and littering, intentional and accidental (I dropped a candy wrapper while getting my kid home; I'm not stopping to pick it up mid-tantrum), and you've got a pretty messy situation.
https://nypost.com/2015/07/16/heres-why-your-subway-fare-kee...
I used to work for a far less offensive agency in NYC, a public library system, and IT managers there make a cool $200K -- though most librarians who are in unions make much less. I wouldn't feel too bad if they were competent folks who deserve the market rates, but many of them didn't really deserve what they were getting.
Also a lot of the value created by a subway shows in land values rather than being captured directly in fares - the article says the MTA is 60% funded by fares which is high but, well, not 100%. You need a mechanism for those who benefit (i.e. owners of buildings near subway stations) to fund the subways. In some countries the transport authority will essentially own large shopping mall complexes around each station and fund the subway that way; in Japan employers often pay for workers' subway tickets.
However, it doesn't work in London. There are a dozen train franchises, remnants of the privatized and sliced-up British Rail system. They are all atrocious in service quality, frequency, capacity and usually price when compared to the parts of the system that were never privatised (the Underground) or that were renationalised (the Overground).
I can't see NY selling off their subway to a private entity anytime soon but what if a Mayor allowed MTR or another corporation to come in and build a competing line in some part of the city? The amazingly efficient new line might light a fire under the ass of the broader NYC subway to start operating more efficiently. Or as the new line begins to make more profit it could buy NYC lines one by one until it's running most of it. This way the debt bomb of the MTA won't destroy the city because it won't affect all major transit lines.
Would love to see similar systems for Queens -> Times Square or Brooklyn -> wall street.
The Queens to Chinatown bus fills a gap in services from Flushing to Chinatown. If that bus is really transporting multiple subway trains worth of people each day, that in my mind means we ought to build better mass transit between those two places. Not that we should cannibalize our working people-moving infrastructure for something worse.
> Cannibalize
What's wrong with cannibalizing a system that's fundamentally broken?
No such culture exists in the US.
The particular competitive business environment in the US makes it almost impossible.