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What would it take to fix the subway? Money of course. Where's it come from? Who cares, just spend it. Transit is necessary. Tax the businesses that benefi
by acranox 9y ago
What would it take to fix the subway? Money of course. Where's it come from? Who cares, just spend it. Transit is necessary. Tax the businesses that benefit from good transit. Raise the gas taxes, because driving is a luxury if you could have taken mass transit. Boston's transit is a mess too. Some of the problems can be fixed just by throwing money at the problem. The Boston subway breaks down all the time because the cars are way past service life. You can just buy new cars, and service will improve a lot. But they waited so long that breakdowns are constant. The new cars won't be here for years, but we don't need any upgrades other than buy the cars and put them on the tracks. It's seriously frustrating that these things are in such a bad state when massive improvements can come by just spending money to fix old broken stuff. Call me naive, but I just want better public services, and I understand it costs money.
- MR4D 9y agoAfter reading your comment twice, I still can't tell if it's sarcasm or not...
- fjsolwmv 9y agoWhy would it be sarcastic? NYC area is one of the wealthiest areas in the world, in large part due to the subway. Pay it its due, like Hong Kong does.
- MR4D 9y agoBecause the parent poster basically is ok with throwing money at it. But that won’t work. Not even close. The NY Times started this earlier this year: “Parts of the system are more than a century old; replacing everything would cost upward of a trillion dollars.” Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/nyregion/subway-service-mta-age.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/nyregion/subway-service-m...
- acranox 9y agoYou don’t need to replace everything. You can fix things. It’s probably billions still, but I still say the money should be spent. Even if it’s hundreds of billions over the new couple decades, spend the money, fix the subways. Start with essentials. Then continue maintenance while doing simultaneous improvements. Let’s be clear, if you don’t spend money you definitely can’t fix the problem. Will only money fix it ? No, but if you need to change management, change expectations, change schedules, do that. All that will cost money as will buying new cars and new signal systems and hiring crews to install the signal systems. What’s needed to fix the system is a lot of changes and they will all cost money. But the reason the changes haven’t happened is due to money. Boston’s system has certainly suffered from lack of money. Sure they have billions, but it isn’t enough. If you don’t have enough maintenance people to do the work, that is still a money problem. If you pay more for that job, more people will want to do that job, and then you can hire people to staff the positions correctly. It might take a few years for the next generation to come into the workforce, but I believe it can be done.
- acranox 9y agoIt’s not sarcasm.
- mitchdoogle 9y agoAll problems are easy to solve if one has unlimited money and makes decisions single-handedly.