Everything that one needs to understand in order to explain why NYC subway is such a shitshow can be learned by any software engineer that attempted to change a

Everything that one needs to understand in order to explain why NYC subway is such a shitshow can be learned by any software engineer that attempted to change a gigantic legacy barely functioning code base of an organization with a single product that relies on this codebase which happened to still have "founders" running a show 12-13 years later: When the company adds "new blood", everything that the new blood proposes gets tossed out for "legacy reasons". Periodically, someone floats a plan for a gigantic multi-year "keep X service but rewrite everything inside it from scratch" software engineering project. Those future "rewrite from scratch" projects are used to justify not making any incremental improvements.