bobtehpanda

Well, at least OMNY gets rid of the possibility of this type of fraud (and whatever skimmers are on the TVMs these days...)

Construction is different from operation. Now I can safely say that the workers driving the buses and operating the trains are not receiving 5x the salary in the last ten years. The operating budget has not exploded like that.

inflation hasn't been that high. $74M in 1990 to 2021 dollars is $152M. $90M in 2010 to 2021 dollars is $108M. Unless you are somehow claiming that transit costs are outpacing inflation 5x for good reasons, the logic still holds.

Does it cost half a billion dollars to run the Franklin Shuttle? The 1994 rehab cost $74 million.

Well, the arguing is that few people use it, and as a percentage of people, nobody uses it. NYC Ferry ridership is 10k. To put this in perspective, 10k riders total across three routes would put it at #60 out of #180 bus routes. And that for half a billion.

That's funny., who did say that? This is all I had to say: If you feel hit by what you're reading between the lines in these statements, that's not my problem. The problem is that, particularly for the ferries, we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars we don't have and cutting service elsewhere. NYC Ferry has cost $637M to date. Those disastrous 2010 service cuts cost $90M.

$$$ This was only a few years after a 1951 bond issue for building the Second Avenue Subway. From Wikipedia:

I'm kind of curious how this actually works, since as far as I know the city owns the entire aqueduct system and that is entirely outside of even the metro area.

Let me fill in the blanks here. "It's an essential service for people far away from the subway" "Rich people deserve services too, they pay taxes" "It gets people out of cars, can't we just leave it at that?" "It's doing something" Whew, saved us all a few pages of the same old same old. Just so we don't get it twisted, fast buses linking regional centers with limited stops, is a fine service proposition on its own. (This is basically what the express bus is, although entirely focused on Manhattan.) I just have a problem with the needless exclusivity of the fare, and express buses can't do heavy lifting the way rail can.

Unless you want to spin welfare for people who are on average wealthier than the rest of the city to begin with, express bus and ferries have higher subsidy per person than the subways and local buses and that's just a fact. The money would go farther stretching it on local services. <takes out chair and waits for popcorn>

Also, I would hardly call WMATA a good example of a transit agency, given that the horse trading in the DMV makes NYC look like a festive brunch. NYC maintenance was slipping in the 2000s and 2010s, but it's like WMATA where someone died from smoke inhalation, and where the feds found rot so bad they literally asked Congress for jurisdiction to try and fix it.

at least in the case of Long Island you got a whole lot of mileage of Queens to get through before you're even close to the county line. Practically speaking, you would be looking at roughly an hour of journey time from the county line to Midtown, an even longer subway ride would probably not be well utilized. As far as Westchester is concerned, the lines that are already close to the county line are those that are directly parallel to Metro North service.

This plan existed but was chucked out of earlier capital plans because they didn't have money to build both LIRR to WTC and East Side Access.

Not much of a reason to. Atlantic and Nassau were by all accounts more or less falling apart. The A train stations are not anywhere near that bad.

Wally keeps trying to make downtown services more important because Cuomo needs the bankers or something.

Huh. But yeah, the PA is from the 1920s, and WTC didn't exist back then,

No, the PA has 25 miles within the statue of Liberty. The Tappan Zee is just outside that range at 27.

Humans have personal biases. And it's not that hard to find incidents where they let their true colors show. A bad apple spoils the bunch.

Not much use asking people their opinions if they don't represent their community accurately.

Also, the subtext with "ignoring communities" here is that certain people feel some type of way but in no means is this actually necessarily representative. Community Boards are appointed by Borough Presidents at their discretion and you have to apply, and no term limits. In practice, this usually results in community boards that are whiter than the neighborhood at large more male than the neighborhood at large older than the neighborhood at large and, where this data is available, more representative of homeowners than the neighborhood at large. This problem is particularly acute in neighborhoods that have seen major demographic shifts over the years. White people are overrepresented on every single community board in the borough.

Not really relevant to the topic at hand, but if this would interest you one of the local bus operators here is a regular media contributor who writes about his experiences. He also has a book. https://www.theurbanist.org/author/nathan-vass/

https://media.amtrak.com/2021/04/amtrak-announces-siemens-as-preferred-bidder-for-new-equipment/ --- Sounds like MUs are on the menu?

mostly a whole lotta nothin which is pretty par for the course, unless it's the Buffalo Billion and some of the governor's advisors get arrested for corruption

Both Westchester and Nassau are in the MTA's jurisdiction. Or rather they're not outside of it. The Tappan Zee's thing is to avoid the rule of Hudson river crossings and to avoid the Port Authority's jurisdiction.

If the MTA could build a new tolled crossing they'd jump at the chance. The Sound Crossing was a Moses project originally, and Bridge and Tunnels is just the TBTA.