> The subway shuts down in nearly all the major cities with much better and often times more expansive systems than NYC, Tokyo in particular stands out. People against shutting down the subway usually argue against it because they just want to be able to go out drinking at night and not have to pay for a Lyft or Taxi back home.

Or, you know, people who actually have to travel those hours for work or other reasons. NYC is a 24-hour city in a way that cities like London are not.

> 1. Run a night owl bus service that replaces all or most lines like Philly. Don't know why this isn't more common.

Bus service, even with optimal traffic, is way slower than subway service.

> Have overnight service Friday and Saturday for the party crowd. Apparently there are systems in Europe that do this.

Yeah, London just introduced this. It's pretty terrible compared to what we have in NYC. I wouldn't trade it for what NYC has now.

> NYC is a 24-hour city in a way that cities like London are not.

I highly doubt that’s true.

> I highly doubt that’s true.

Having lived in New York for a decade and also spent time in London, there's absolutely no comparison. Heck, even just looking at the nightlife: pubs in London shut down before midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. That's completely unheard-of in most of NYC, even bars in the relatively residential areas.

NYC also tends to have other businesses open earlier and close later than London (or most of Europe). In order for that to happen, it's necessary to have people who work the early/late/graveyard shifts, and those people are incredibly dependent on overnight service.

It's unfortunate that you're mixing in overnight service with the rest of the points you make, because you're correct about the rest - the fares are a little too low right now, and rampant corruption at the TWU wastes what little money they do have.

So you admit that you want to go out drinking and this is the only reason you want the trains to run all night? Bars, izakayas, and clubs in Tokyo also stay open extremely late like in NYC and yet the city doesn't grind to a halt when the subway system closes.

> So you admit that you want to go out drinking and this is the only reason you want the trains to run all night?

I guess that's a way you could interpret my comment, if you read only the first paragraph and ignore the sentence that literally comes next.

So what if they do want to go out drinking? What's your beef about this? Are bars and restaurants only OK to go to before a certain time?

This citizen lives in a city where LOTS of stuff is open late and he/she would like to participate in this city. Not just bars. But even the bars have workers who still need to get there. And I'd guess the nightlife sector of NYC's economy is MUCH larger than any other city in the US.

To live without a car is to make a complete and total surrender of your movement through life to the government. Even for the BDSM community, that's an extreme level of power exchange.

The MTA is exceptional among American institutions in receiving this level of trust in large part because it's neutral. Sure, you can only move around at the government's whim, but the government is happy to take you anywhere at any time.

If it starts to get moralizing and opinionated, i.e. "you don't really need to go out drinking at night," that trust will evaporate rapidly. As it should.

Systems that merely augment car cultures, or that serve collectivist societies which already trust government with even greater degrees of control over their lives, are not useful precedents. New York is basically singular in getting Americans to surrender to central planners so thoroughly.

I actually have no problem with it. I enjoy going out to bars and drinking and in the US that's my main use case for the subway late at night. But I've also seen around the world how proper continuous maintenance can make public transportation clean and almost a joy to ride. I'm willing to give up some of my fun for a better system that runs smoothly. NYC has the largest system in the US, but DC had one of the best and their lack of maintenance has nearly destroyed it. Subways are barely profitable as is, but I would never want to live in a city without one. I find the weekend schedule in Europe and the night owl system to be a pretty fair compromise for something that will benefit everyone as opposed to just wanting it open for my own selfish reasons.