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The Coming War Over the Subways
Over the last week or so, Florida resident John Ekdahl has noticed the mainstream media come out gunning for his state. This weekend, the beaches reopened, and the New York Times is on it. Ekdahl tweeted screenshots of the Times headlines and noted, “[I] Called this [stuff] two days ago. Anything to take attention away from how New York City has completely [screwed] the nation with their cavalier [bull] response to this while the rest of the country locks down and loses their jobs.”
As we face yet another week of lockdowns looming, with more jobs lost every day, Americans are getting angry. There is no question that New York authorities bungled this crisis; no-one more so than Mayor Bill DeBlasio. They were among the last to close bars, restaurants, and schools, and the New York City subway is still operating with no restrictions on who is allowed to ride. While Los Angeles is destroying skateboarding parks for fun, New York City parks remain open. And increasingly, this is the sentiment:
We’re under virtual house arrest in Chattanooga bcuz NYC is a pandemic hotspot. We’ve had only 6 positive tests in the past week and we’re on lockdown while the NYC subways are still spreading the virus. This is the Punish-The-Innocent phase, and we’re done. @JohnEkdahl
— Buck Throckmorton (@BuckThrockmort) April 19, 2020
While the media’s attention is focused on places like Florida and Michigan, which hosted an anti-lockdown rally over the weekend, there has been radio silence about a new MIT study pointing to the New York City subway as responsible for the nation’s largest and most deadly outbreak. They write,
New York City’s multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator – if not the principal
transmission vehicle – of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic
that became evident throughout the city during March 2020.
We are watching a narrative forming in real-time. The New York-based media prefers to point fingers at those idiot (Trump) voters in places with quiet hospitals and ravaged economies. That’s a better story than the real one: that New York City’s response endangered the entire country, and now we’re all paying the price. Yes, New Yorkers are locked down in tiny, overpriced apartments, but they are also more likely to be able to work from home, and if they’re not, they have the subways to get them there and open parks to “keep them sane” on weekends.
I’m a New Yorker by birth, I am truly sympathetic to the horrifying situation unfolding there. But that doesn’t mean that Americans have to accept the character assassination being plotted by those unwilling to accept responsibility for how we got here, either.
Published in General
With the NY-based media driving the narrative and marquee politicians in the spotlight, the baby despots-in-waiting in the red states are taking cues and playing a ridiculous game of “Simon Says” following the trends, but with no evidence-based reasons to do so. My county judge put a “stay-at-home” order in place three weeks ago. We have over 100 cases in our country, with, sadly, >40 at a local prison unit (the epitome of shelter-in-place). There is a curfew. I am convinced the baby politicians just want to be in on the drama and are content to follow others and are too spineless to come out and say “CItizens, you are responsible for your own health and safety – as it ever was. I recommend only going out for necessities, keep your distance and wash your hands. Don’t be stupid. Otherwise, carry on.”
I stopped taking the subway and started taking long walks to where I was going instead a few weeks before the lockdown orders, because it was obvious as hell to me that was going to be the main vector of spread.
As for the lockdowns in other states, I’ll just give the helpful reminder that Cuomo and De Blahhhsio and the NYTimes have no authority over the operations of any state outside of New York. If you feel your governor or legislature can’t make it’s own decisions without knuckling under to the pressure of those “authorities,” I think the fault lies more with your leaders, not everyday New Yorkers (We don’t ALL work for the Times, or city govt.). Maybe you should vote for better ones.
There is a point of diminishing returns for politicians. Imagine a list of 50 actions one could take. The first 5 will have a major mitigating effect, the other 45 minimal or merely symbolic. Guaranteed the pol will go for all 50 almost all of the time. Every day they wake up and think, “What can I do today?” They must have the illusion of action.
God forbid there be anyone who recognizes that once you get beyond the first 5 there’s a lot of theatre. The supporters of the full list approach then seek to make political hay out it. “J’accuse! There’s blood on your hands!” And if they have members of their own party that screwed up the gut reaction is yell at the guy on the other side that only made it to number 10 on the list.
There’s going to be a lot of bloody shirt waving between now and November and it ain’t gonna be very pretty.
When are people going to realize that passenger trains and light rail are very hard to manage? NYC built theirs when everyone was poor. There is no reason to do that anymore. We keep building them in Minneapolis and it’s obviously a bad idea.
This is “The Story That Must Not Be Told”. Mass transit is a liberal goal – get people out of their cars and into buses and subways. While the solution of mass transit has some advantages (cities with limited parking), its disadvantages continue to grow (high cost, massive tax subsidies, low ridership, crime, filth).
Now we throw mass transit the ultimate curve ball – it drastically accelerates the spread of contagion.
Buses aren’t a big deal. They aren’t that hard to manage and you have to have a bus system in big cities. It’s probably decent welfare for poor people in a sense.
They keep shoving light rail down our throats in Minneapolis and it’s obviously a bad idea. Democrats lie about it all of the time. Every train system has terrible metrics including ours. Crime and financials. Stuff you can’t live with and is hard to fix. The only way this is going to “work” is if they force development around the trains.
It doesn’t get in the news a lot, but the BART system is really going south. When I go out to the bay area people are really angry about it.
One of the things China did do which made counterintiutive sense was when the outbreak got bad was to run more trains than would be normally needed under essential personnel/lockdown conditions, in order to have fewer people per train and lower the risk of infection. New York’s subways have lost 90 percent of their riders, but trains per hour have dropped from as many as 25-30 to as few as 2-3 on some lines, so the MTA’s maintaining the same load ratios for the supposed essential personnel using the trains as they had during normal times. They’re also AFAIK still only disinfecting the cars every 72 hours, when they really should have been working to find a way, with such limited service in effect, to be spraying down the trains with disinfectant after every round trip, or even at every terminal (if you’re only running 2-3 trains per hour, than means if you have a two-track terminal, a train in service is going to hold in the terminal for 35-55 minutes after the end of its run. That’s not fixing the crowding problem, but it would somewhat mitigate the surface contact problem).
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
What nonsense happens in New York gets slopped all over everywhere.
Let’s call it an anti-fascism rally. The idea of preventing people of traveling between secluded shelters, banning the sale of seeds and baby seats, prohibiting the use of power boats in a state with 12,000+ lakes, … is inconsistent, arbitrary, and simply fascist.
The idea of cutting back subway cars is asking for trouble. As for the Florida beaches, science has shown that heat/humidity/sunshine stop the spread of viruses.
That narrative may change. The bad economy is starting to effect media jobs. Layoffs are happening. Perhaps they’ll start writing pieces on “this shutdown can’t continue.”
I think the tipping point will be when they start laying off pundits and editorial writers.
Boy, it’s a good thing for Maggie Haberman that she won that Pulitzer for her coverage on Russian collusion.
There’s already a lot of development along the University Avenue corridor, and I think you can chalk that up to the light rail. OTOH, light rail construction completely changed the character of University – gentrified it, drove out the small merchants who relied on street parking, eliminated the low-rent business incubator stretches close to St. Paul. The urbanists always want diverse neighborhoods with little independent businesses, but give them a chance to ruin those neighborhoods with light rail and they’ll do it every time.
The problem with the light rail is the lack of enforcement of unsavory and uncivil behavior – fare jumping, smoking, general jackassery. Again, the urbanists think they’re getting Copenhagen streetcars, clang-clanging along as everyone minds their manners. Alas.
I appreciate the post, Bethany. I do no agree that the actions of Cuomo and DeBlasio were so obviously incorrect. I’ve looked at the data, and the outbreak in NYC was extraordinarily sudden. I think that it is unfair to blame them for not acting sooner. It’s also not clear how much they could have improved things, if they had acted a bit sooner.
The subway policy may have been a bad one, but I’m not sure if there’s a viable alternative. There were “essential” workers who needed to get to work, and NYC is set up for public transportation, especially subways. The cost of closing the subways might have been worse than the cost of keeping them open. I’m not saying that it is so. I’m saying that I don’t know, and I don’t think that the answer is obvious.
As evidence of my sincerity, I point out that I’m actually defending frickin’ Cuomo and DeBlasio here, two politicians who I dislike quite intensely. Not for personal reasons, but for extremely serious policy differences. Nevertheless, I’m not convinced that they are to blame for the tragedy that has occurred in NYC.
If there is one lesson that I can gather from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the history of plagues, it is that cities are plague factories. I don’t object to cities for this reason. As usual, we must remember the great Dr. Sowell’s teaching about trade-offs.
I’m less tough on Cuomo here than on deBlaiso. Even though Cuomo controls the mass transit system, the mayor controls other actions in the city, and he refused to action from late February through the second week of March — you’d think that would be right in his authoritarian wheelhouse, but for whatever reasons (selfishness to alter his own gym routine, distance from China, desire to do the opposite of whatever Trump said to do by late February) his inaction lagged the West Coast metro areas and fed the incubation period.
I’m willing to give everyone a break who isn’t employed by the CCP. Human systems are slow and complex and stuffed top-to-bottom with inoperative turnstiles that hinder swift movement. What irritates many is A) the one-way politicization of the errors, and B) the coastal media’s inability to see the rest of the country through any lens beyond their local perspective. The subways have to run, because it’s New York, but if some wings restaurant in Bismarck ND doesn’t shut his doors it’s rube-state MAGA dolts taking orders from Faux News. Central Park is a necessary amenity to preserve sanity and mental health, but if a vast coastline is opened up to permit . . . walking, it’s a guarantee of sorrow.
New York, at its most irritating, seems ever insistent that it is the epitome of America, while simultaneously parading its disdain and ignorance for the thing it purports to embody.
And as long as we’re on the subject: for a great world-class city, New York, your subway sucks. Compared to the London and Paris systems, you ought to be ashamed. The last time I ventured down into a station, it was 104 degrees, there was water pouring from the ceiling, some talent-free busker was hollering out a tuneless screed, half the ticket machines were FUBAR, and the general mood was Spiky Murder. We left and walked 40 blocks.
Shh! That info is in the sensitive but not classified presentation the CDC doesn’t want to share with us yet.
It’s an interesting subject. It’s clear to me that they have already totally lied about people wanting to get back-and-forth from the suburbs. So I suppose the question is if developers are going to put up enough cool stuff on more places on the line. Is this really going to be increasingly disbursed prosperity emanating from this project? I’m still skeptical our local GOSPLAN will actually net out.
This whole story is outrageous. I’m sure a bunch of people are very bitter about it, still. I hope everybody got compensated properly.
It’s very clear to me with the BART system it jacked up real estate prices so much by the light rail that you couldn’t possibly say it netted out economically. You just can’t build these systems after a country gets wealthy.
Every criminal and sociological problem, and the budget to mitigate them, has to be completely off projections by multiples. My favorite one is they have to hire Somali transit cops so they don’t look xenophobic when they check tickets. They couldn’t afford turnstiles and it shows. (after 40 years the BART system is increasing the size of their turnstiles. It’s insanely expensive to do that. Crime and sociological problems have just skyrocketed for those guys.) Security is a much simpler issue on buses. The other thing is, the cops can’t access light rail until it hits an access point. Busses can just stop anywhere on a dime.
Then throw in the accidents. The accident rate seems really high to me. Minneapolis light rail kills two people every year.
I’m also skeptical that they are covering all of their depreciation for that thing.
I really think forcing geographic centralization at this point is a bad idea. We are trying very hard in Minneapolis and I am very skeptical.
I was saddened to hear the Metro in DC had gone downhill too. My first few trips to DC involved a lot of Metro travel, and I marveled at how clean and efficient it was. Too bad you have to maintain these things, because they can go downhill quickly.
Oh, one other disadvantage of mass transit I forgot to mention: riders are at the mercy of (or lack thereof) the transit unions. If they decidee to go on strike, you don’t go to work.
People — especially today’s urban planners — forget that the original subway and elevated lines were built in the U.S. to decentralize overcrowded core areas, because the original lines were built into undeveloped areas. They were to the last quarter of the 19th Century and the first quarter of 20th what highways have been from the 1930s onward; a way to try and lower the number of people in the inner areas by giving them quicker access to the outer areas. The modern planners see them more as ways to coerce people into living in crowded areas (this shot of the Flushing Line, which would later take people to the two World’s Fairs, Shea Stadium and Citi Field, is indicative of the different approach to mass transit 100 years ago. It’s from 1917, a year prior to the Spanish Flu epidemic and just after a section of the line opened on Queens Boulevard. From behind the camera view, it’s a little over a mile to the Manhattan end of the Queensborough Bridge at 59th Street. Plenty of good seats available….)
I’m pretty sure they are keeping up with the depreciation with the line in Minnesota.
Recently they switched from cloth seats to hard plastic so people could “identify liquids” on the seats. I am not making that up.
Over pay. Underfunded pensions. Strike leverage. etc. BART is a total disaster. People are really mad about it.
I remember a few years ago there was someone running for the board that controls BART and she had this really brutally honest poster about her platform. She had 10 points. Five of them pointed to the fact that the thing never should’ve been built.
New York switched from padded cloth and wicker seats to hard plastic on their trains and buses starting way back in 1957 due to vandalism. In hindsight, it was an early hint that the city’s crime problem was headed on an upward trajectory, but like the COVID outbreak being confined to Wuhan six months ago and taking time to infect the rest of the world, the little ‘broken windows’ type of crime problems didn’t explode out into the major 25-year orgy of crime and vandalism the city suffered until the mid-1960s (and since the same type of people with the same progressive mindset were running other cities in the U.S., the problems of NYC eventually metastasized elsewhere).
Um, ew.
I tend to agree. There are too many people in NY that depend on the subway to get around. I’m aware that there are people who live there who never get a driver’s license and who never drive their whole lives. It’s probably the only city in the United States where you can totally not depend on owning your own car your whole life, or at least have so many people that do. I remember my father training my mother how to drive (I guess she was in her early thirties) because she grew up in New York and then ended up in Germany as a young adult where the cities had an equivalent transit system that New York does.
The mistake they probably made was reducing the number of runs. If they had kept the runs the same and allowed for almost empty trains as a result, that would have allowed for the required social distancing.
My travel itinerary for the NR Cruise that was on board the Queen Mary had me going to Frankfurt (because there’s a once a week direct flight from Fairbanks to Frankfurt during the summer) to taking the Chunnel to London and then the Queen Mary to New York.
In all three cities I sampled the mass transit system, including the commuter rail that they have in those cities. In the case of New York, I stayed in Stamford, CT and used the commuter rail to get to New York.
No comparison. The trip from Stamford had slowdowns with the train rocking back and forth because of poorly maintained track. I did not experience anything close in either the London metropolitan area (including a trip to Southampton) or Frankfurt’s metropolitan area (which included a trip to Darmstadt).
Probably the subway is a prime example of the government corruption they suffer from.
We have street musicians. We really need street music critics.
Girlfriend: Is he [the guy sawing away on an accordion] any good? [She had a tin ear]
Me: No. He couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow.