About 8 years ago there were a few house ads in the cars that were effectively gaslighting riders. It was one of the craziest things I'd ever seen as a consumer -- borderline antagonistic. The agency, and the workers to some extent, can be pugilistic when criticized.

http://cdn.journalism.cuny.edu/blogs.dir/176/files/2010/03/f...

For those of us who aren't familiar with the price history what's the lie here?

The MTA is comparing single-ride fares with "effective" cost per ride of a then-$81 30 day pass, which they amortize over around 70 rides, which is a bit high for the average person in my experience (though not ridiculous).

It might be more accurate to compare the single-ride fare then with the single-ride fare at the time the photo was taken, which was either $2.00 or $2.25 (the price changed in 2009, I think).

I surprised that they don't have a commuter ticket system. In my city the commuter ticket price is calculated to be somewhat cheaper than return fare*20 as well as being a tax deductible.

Did they have multi-day passes back then? It might be reasonable to compare the cheapest options available then.

They did not. You actually bought metal subway tokens that you dropped into a coin slot on the turnstile.

See:

https://untappedcities.com/2011/07/06/subway-tokens-a-dose-o...

They're comparing a single-ride fare to a monthly-pass fare. A single ride fare cost $2.00 in 2008[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_transit_fares#Fa...

The obvious part of the lie to me is that they would raise fares to increase revenue, and claim that because of the 30-day and 7-day discounts you wouldn't be paying any more.

Huh? How are you going to increase revenue if no one is paying more.

Tourists. We have quite a few of them here.

Right and if they ran that ad today, 10 years later the single ride fare has more than doubled @ $2.75 a ride on a $131 dollar monthly pass.

Twice as much for worse service.

How is this gaslighting? Transportation costs have done a reasonable job of not growing faster than inflation...

> The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic

How does one realistically reform something like this?

>"How does one realistically reform something like this?"

Slowly and methodically.

For starters:

Create legislation that prevents construction firms from making campaign contribution and MTA employees from taking jobs as political consultants. This is probably the largest source of corruption, graft and waste.[1]

The MTA's Board of Directors is predominantly controlled by the Governor of the state. The Board of Directors has long been a political dumping ground. Residents - the people who depend on the train have almost no say. Residents should have representation on the board of directors even if its a only a handful of rotating seats. Having people on the board who actually use and depend on the train would provide an instant feedback loop.

I think you also need to implement a rotating independent oversight committee whom the MTA must be beholden too. One that is democratically elected. The oversight committee should have real teeth though perhaps with veto ability in certain instances.

And yes as someone else mentioned you probably need to fire a whole bunch of people.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

The main issue is that the MTA and its predecessors have always been dependent on one person (now the Governor, formerly the Mayor). The actual board members have no credibility and no accountability, hence why we are here today.

The MTA would be much better off if the appointed representative of the county was replaced with the actual elected executive of said county (so county executives, borough presidents, mayor/council speaker/what have you, etc.)

It's never been "entirely" dependent of one person, although the majority control seems to be the Governor. Either through his direct 5 seat appointments or indirectly through the 7 other non-NYC seats.

I don't believe it was ever under Mayoral control. The current governance structure came under then Gvernor Nelson Rockefeller.

But anyway Nassau, Suffolk, Westcheste, Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Putnam counties each get to appoint a board member. That's nearly a third of the 17 total seats. Beside Wescheter and Nassau counties none of those counties even border any one of the 5 boroughs.

That's 5 votes by people who most assuredly do not ride the subway to work and maybe not at all. As such it's hard to believe they would ever have NYC residents best interests at heart.

I am referring to the state of the subway and buses under the NYC Board of Transportation, which was similarly a giant incompetent mess.

The distinction to make is that the counties and the City get to recommend the appointees for their slots to the Governor. It's a formality most of the time, but the Governor or State Legislature could tell the mayor or county executives to "try again".

As far as that last point, it's important to understand why the MTA was created in the first place; its primary mission is to dole out the goodies from the State and the tolled crossings to its subsidiaries. What they know about the system is at best, secondary to the job, since they are, by and large, not the people who run the system. That's why they appoint chairmen and agency presidents and all that.

The MTA isn't just the subways it's the regional rail and transit system too, including Metro North, LIRR, and so on. It's not obviously irrational for all the constituent counties to be involved.

Yes and that's also a huge structural problem.

The LIRR, the Metro North and NYC Subway system are completely independent lines, with completely separate payment systems, completely separate citizens as their majority riderships and they don't share any tracks. They are completely separate concerns - the LIRR and Metro North serves the commuter belt people that most likely have a car or two in the driveway. The NYC Subway's majority ridership are people that have neither a car or a driveway at home.

They are non-contiguous in every way. The only thing they share is a bloated org chart.

So yes, the idea that someone from Duchess County who drives a car to work and has most likely never ridden the NYC Subway to get to work is making "informed" decision about whether or not to address the problem of overcrowding on say the 456 line is perhaps the height of "irrationality."

This comment doesn't really make sense. There are people that never fly on airplanes but still vote for Federal officials who manage the FAA. There are people in NYC who vote for Federal officials that administer cattle grazing. So what?

If anything the problem with regional transit systems in the US is that they are far too provincial and federated, leading to all sorts of overlapping and wasteful things. For example the fact that the Port Authority and the MTA don't get along means I can't take a fucking train to any airport in the most important and densest city in the country.

Or stuff like how they didn't bother to connect the 4/5/6 line to the PATH system during WTC reconstruction despite the fact that they are compatible, and they apparently had over three billion dollars to light on fire.

Or stuff like how the PATH train runs to Newark and inexplicably stops a mile or two short of the airport despite the fact that NJ Transit/Amtrak right of way runs right there down the exact same line.

The idea that separating LIRR from Metro North from the Subway and creating yet another set of competing bureaucracies is going to somehow help things is delusional, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how NYC area politics works.

>"There are people that never fly on airplanes but still vote for Federal officials who manage the FAA. There are people in NYC who vote for Federal officials that administer cattle grazing. So what?"

Yes exactly those people vote in those instances. The key word being vote - i.e they have a say and can research the candidate before casting a ballot. The context here is positions where people CAN'T vote because those MTA board positions are political appointees. Ir'a apples and oranges. Your comparison makes no sense.

>"Or stuff like how they didn't bother to connect the 4/5/6 line to the PATH system during WTC reconstruction despite the fact that they are compatible"

Except you are wrong those are actually connected via the Dey Street Concourse. See:

https://www.metro.us/new-york/mta-to-open-passage-connecting...

>"The idea that separating LIRR from Metro North from the Subway and creating yet another set of competing bureaucracies is going to somehow help things is delusional, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how NYC area politics works."

No its quite simple, if infrastructure passes through multiple counties its under the purview of a state agency. I its infrastructure that falls within a single county or just the 5 boroughs then it should be a city specific agency.

Lastly I have actually worked in NYC politics so I'm pretty sure I have a firm grasp of how NYC politics works.

It's interesting that you choose to make statements like that without knowing anything about a person's professional background. So an opinion contrary to your own constitutes delusion and indicates that someone misunderstand how things work? Is that correct? That seems like a pretty fool-proof prescription for an echo chamber.

> Yes exactly those people vote in those instances. The key word being vote - i.e they have a say and can research the candidate before casting a ballot. The context here is positions where people CAN'T vote because those MTA board positions are political appointees. Ir'a apples and oranges. Your comparison makes no sense.

That's flatly untrue. People don't vote for FAA administrators or USDA policymakers, they vote for representatives who pick civil service people and so on. The MTA governance isn't strange or unusual, that's my point.

> Except you are wrong those are actually connected via the Dey Street Concourse.

Well yes, the lines are connected if you get out of the train and walk. By that definition all transit lines in the country are connected.

But we could have had a subway that runs from Grand Central to Newark: https://newyorkyimby.com/2014/09/the-port-authoritys-missed-...

I mean in Europe they can figure out how to run fast trains through three countries in an hour or two. But I have to transfer three times to get to the airport. Our way of doing this sucks.

> No its quite simple, if infrastructure passes through multiple counties its under the purview of a state agency. I its infrastructure that falls within a single county or just the 5 boroughs then it should be a city specific agency.

But.... what if you don't want the infrastructure to just fall within a single jurisdiction. That's the entire point I'm making. I want transportation infrastructure to be planned out and integrated on a larger scale. I want to consolidate the various agencies. Having MTA and PA and Amtrak and NYC DOT and NYS DOT and NJ DOT and so on makes for insane schizophrenic policy. Your idea that the subways and regional rails should be split into separate agencies makes that worse not better.

The question is whether or not it has to be this way. Short of politics there is no reason that the LIRR and Metro-North could not also work for intra-city or intra-regional travel; in fact, many umbrella organizations contain merged separate railroads for exactly this purpose (STIF operates the Paris RER, Berlin's BVG operates the S-Bahn, TfL operates the Overground and TfL Rail, etc.)

Without the regional integration, we would probably never get things like the Freedom Ticket; utilizing commuter rail lines as de facto subways, even premium ones, is much preferable to the much more expensive option of duplicating existing corridors.

You fire everyone.

However, if I remember correctly, they're unionized, which is why this hasn't happened yet.

Is management unionized? The article makes it sound like the engineers themselves are frustrated with this system.

You can't just stop the gravy train by removing management. Bad culture is at all levels.

Bad culture is at all levels, but management control the factors that turn culture bad.

If you'd like to see a fine example of how changing the management and the management philosophy can turn a place around, look at NUMMI. There's a This American Life episode with extensive worker interviews: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

They are not.

Fire everyone at Agency A for shitty behavior. Then turn around and realize everyone at Agency B is cooking the books, so fire them. And so on.

Then turn around and realize basically every large institution humans have ever built relies on shady, selfish, behavior and stop caring about reforming individuals since thousands of years of policing have done jack and squat to remove the behavior from the species.

Seriously, this forum is the worst for overlooking relevant variables (human biology and contemporary culture as a whole) for their trite commentary, usually rooted in nothing more than culturally acceptable bullet points.

Hundreds of years of the same sort of thinking. Still happens.

So why does Tokyo’s system work so much better? They’re humans too, but apparently their transit system works much better.

I don't know, but Japanese companies are notorious for never firing people, so it's very unlikely to be because they "fired everyone" as DiabloD3 was suggesting.

They're privatized.

It seems like you're saying "it's impossible to achieve perfection, therefore you should never even try to improve."

Not saying I disagree with you - but assuming what you say is true, what would you propose?

I don't think it's the workers that are the problem, from the article they sound just as frustrated (and indeed seem to be the source of this article). The management is not in a union. How does firing the workers fix anything?

If you fire everyone, wouldn't that stop the trains? I mean, you have to hire new people and get them trained on what to do?

Doesn't a union make that easier? That's the point of unions.

A union makes it easier to fire workers? What?

It makes it easier to collectively fire workers.

Which will never happen. Yet another of China's many advantages: ease of optimization.

As long as you agree with the optimization that the man in charge is implementing.

If you don't, well, in China, sucks to be you.

It depends. You may not enjoy certain micro-optimizations, but to me it seems perfectly possible that even though living in a communist dictatorship has many negatives, the net benefits under a benevolent dictator could easily surpass the drawbacks, especially when compared to a free but largely corrupt Western society where the benefits may not make it outside the top 10%.

And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing.

> And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing.

I wasn't really that worried about China as they are automating extremely quickly and have shown no better ability to utilize the displaced people any better than anybody in the West--see the recent layoffs in steel and coal in China along with the corresponding strikes and protests.

Now with Xi Jinping being President for Life, I'm even less worried. Xi Jingping will regard striking and protesting workers as a threat to his power and he will suppress them. This will break what little feedback there is in China between the working class and the ruling class and the decisions will become increasingly unmoored from external reality.

If I were TSMC, I would start moving fab lines out of Taiwan.

I think I'm missing something - TSMC should move their fabs off the island because of some goings-on in the mainland? The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

> The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

China doesn't see it this way. And the only thing keeping China from steamrolling both Taiwan and Hong Kong are the fact that it would decimate the economies and businesses there.

However, once you have a leader more worried about his power rather than being beholden to the working class, that is no longer an obstacle.

Well, I guess, one could argument than after losing contact with working class and solidifying their rule, China's ruling class will what every non-democratic regime did --- try to expand territoriality. And they have grudges with Taiwan.

How do you know what individuals will do?

> benevolent dictator

First of all, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/nov/19/cra...

Second of all, and this is probably something that was brought up in your high school civics class, the advantage of a democracy is that the overall quality of a government will be the average of all of the people in it. Speaking metaphorically, you can roll N dice and average the results together; doing this repeatedly, you'll notice that as N goes up, the resulting averages will follow a normal distribution more and more closely. If you have enough dice, you can assume that you'll hit the middle of the curve most of the time, instead of having to worry that you might roll a 1.

No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed. It is hard to imagine how it could exist; it seems that corruption is such a natural and apparently reasonable behavior that we will always see it.

Your a theoretical should be discarded.

Do you believe it is possible for outcomes to vary under different forms of government?

It's interesting how many people on HN seem to believe they are fortune tellers and mind readers now. Personally, I am speculating, but it sounds like all you guys know that I'm wrong.

I've continued to be mostly right for the last decade, I think I'm going to stick with my predictions rather than those of people who don't take too kindly to disagreement.

I think that under all forms of government powerful people are going to try to accrete more power to themselves. Difference of outcomes therefore are based in the ability to restrict that.

A benevolent dictatorship cannot exist et alia because a person cannot live for ever and I simply don't know how you could assure that the transition from one benevolent dictator to another when the first one ceases to be competent. For instance, let's presume that Xi Jinping is the perfect president of China. When he dies or retires or becomes too ill to govern, will the PRC be able to select a new perfect president to replace him? or will they choose someone who is inclined to serve their own interests and was able to benefit from Xi's time? This is the ultimate problem of a benevolent dictorship: it cannot assure state continuity and stability beyond the effective lifespan of the dictatorship.

People also tend to become more habitual as they do something for a long time. Politeness and friendships limit them from being able to introduce policies that will benefit the country at the expense of those who have their ears. So it's possible that a governing style which served the state and the country well for many years will need hard revisions. Periodic changes in governor (as democracies have) mean it's more likely the incoming team will be able to retain what is still fresh and discard what is now stale, and they will be connected with different people and therefore not too worried about upsetting some of them. (I think this is a good part of what's wrong at the moment: major parties around the world are connected too much to the same interests, so a change of government doesn't result in as much upset as needs to happen. Votes will gradually transfer from the establishment to the anti-establishment parties. They will be able to upset the entrenchment, but it remains to be seen whether they will do so in the interests of the nation or the interests of an alternative elite.)

As for your last sentence, I think I misunderstand it. I disagreed with you and straightforwardly stated my opinion, and then it seems that you attacked me: it reads like you're accusing me of not being able to handle disagreement. I don't think I attacked you. Perhaps you would clarify it, or highlight the place where you think I "don't take too kindly to disagreement".

> A benevolent dictatorship cannot exist et alia because a person cannot live for ever and I simply don't know how you could assure that the transition from one benevolent dictator to another when the first one ceases to be competent. For instance, let's presume that Xi Jinping is the perfect president of China. When he dies or retires or becomes too ill to govern, will the PRC be able to select a new perfect president to replace him? or will they choose someone who is inclined to serve their own interests and was able to benefit from Xi's time? This is the ultimate problem of a benevolent dictorship: it cannot assure state continuity and stability beyond the effective lifespan of the dictatorship.

Agreed, this is why a dictatorship is generally not a wise idea. I certainly cannot assure a transition to another benevolent dictator, but what's interesting if you peruse the comments here, the overwhelming sentiment of people is that they can assure that a successful transition can not and will not happen, ever, full stop. As you may have noticed, I often have a bit of an issue with self-proclaimed mind-reading, future-telling, and other supernatural capabilities. You would expect this sort of thing among the general public or on Reddit, is it too much to ask for a higher standard on HN? It would seem so.

As for my last sentence, admittedly I'm guilty of taking out my frustrations with HNers in general (for the above stated reasons) on you, in response to your absolutist stance (No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed); perhaps no major nation in recorded history been led by a purely benevolent dictator, but if we had access to a truly omniscient being to settle this disagreement, I'd happily throw down a $100 wager that many truly benevolent (to the best of their abilities) dictators have led smaller, less famous groups of people on many occasions throughout history. Perhaps I have too much faith in humanity at its best.

> No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed.

I can quibble with this just a little. A truly benevolent dictator will recognize how harmful dictatorship is and will immediately remove himself from it.

http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdstatehouse/html/gwresignation....

I think if someone can foresee that they won't be a benevolent dictator and refuses the office, I don't think that's the same as being a benevolent dictator.

Maybe we're playing semantic games, but Americans worship their leaders in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't think it's necessary for me to limit my statement in order to participate in your religion.

> Yet another of China's many advantages

Yes, you can fire everyone in China, throw them in a work camp, take their property for the greater good, etc.

Funny thing happens when you walk all over people that way for the "greater good" ... a few people at the top, who define what the "greater good" is, tend to become extremely wealthy and powerful. The society becomes lopsided. The peasants become frustrated. Then there's violence.

Not that the people at the top are idiots. They understand this.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-spends-more-on-domestic-s...

Incentives work. Figuring out the correct incentives to achieve good results is hard. Keeping ahead of the people who will game them is hard. This requires competent management, which is obviously lacking. Fire the incompetent managers and fire the political leadership who appointed them (term limits might help here).

Since there are credible allegations of crime, is there an inspector general? There should be. If not, bring in the fraud squad and investigate the hell out of them. They'll leave.

IANAL, but keeping double books should land you in prison, as simple as that.