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.