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Is New York over? It’s a question that’s widely debated these days. We will return to this question from time to time in a number of episodes. On this episode, we look at subways. During the pandemic, subway ridership has been down as much as 90%.
While we’re focused on NYC, this topic matters to everyone living or working in megacities around the world. NYC is a Microcosm.
What’s the state of our subways? Will they come back? What do we need to do to save and transform public transportation?
On this episode Dan welcomes:
-Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow for the infrastructure economy at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and a columnist for the NY Post. @nicolegelinas
-Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, bestselling author, and contributing editor at The Atlantic and National Affairs. @Reihan
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Relevant, insightful, logical, listenable … Dan Senor’s an excellent host, superb guests. This should be on everyone’s 2021 podcast playlist.
Eh. New York City: elect another Giuliani, refuse to elect communists for any office. That’s step 1. Step 2 is to get the “grown ups” to not tolerate dirt, crime, raw sewage, bad public schools, stupidity in the outer boroughs, stupidity in Manhattan, littering, cars, those damned bikes, and so forth. Step 3 is to figure out how to address homelessness, grift and graft, rats and cockroaches, and high rents. Then, maybe then the subways will be as “good” as they were in the mid-late 1990s into the 2000s. A time when I could take the N (or was it the R?) late, late at night from Lamours back to the East Village – which was home to me for so long. We’ll always have stupidity and the poor, but we can always do better. Right now, it’s the nadir of nadirs.
They’re probably going to have to do things like install UV lighting systems on all the railcars to better kill viruses (which is not a new idea, since New York experimented with that after the polio outbreak in 1948). But the subway’s fate is dependent not just on convincing people it has a better handle on germ control but on the city’s political leaders convincing people they’re going to be physically safe on the trains and platforms, and in the neighborhoods when they leave the stations (Cuomo and de Blasio are so feckless right now that NYC shut down overnight subway service, ostensibly to clear the trains, but actually so they’d have an excuse to justify kicking the homeless off the trains, since the left side of their coalition hates vagrancy laws).
Going by the current bunch of 2021 mayoral candidates, at best they might get an Ed Koch, running as the most conservative/sane Democrat in the field. They’re unlikely to get anything close to a Giuliani, because it took the city almost three decades between the mid-60s crash under John Lindsay to the six murders per day under David Dinkins for just enough city voters to decide to try something radically different and vote for the Republican on the ballot.
All too true, but moot if anyone who has anything going for them joins the exodus. With working from home becoming the norm, who will remain to demand change? The rats and the profligates?
What’s irritating is anyone intimating that a specific “generation” needs to stand up and do something to save (my word – likely an exaggeration) New York City – which is what I got from this interview. The City has retained, grown, and maintained its vibrance concerning all the arts and sciences for more than a hundred years, through all sorts of crap, with, I believe, the exception of having an incompetent Communist mayor during a pandemic. The grownups in charge -or simply the grownups who lived there and paid taxes there – have always “tolerated” the crime, noise, dirt, drugs. Generation after generation of landlords and business owners, probably all of them left of center, are/were laissez-faire and “as long as it makes money” everything is all right. So we have to step over some needles, junkies, prostitutes on the way to the show… big deal? We’ll live with the traffic congestion, too, we’ll get there eventually.
Yeah, well now the place is closed, isn’t it? The favorite restaurants, the venues (music was gone a while ago, pre-commie mayor), theaters, even the worst schools in the nation! It’s gone. And if it really is gone, and if the big players are really , genuinely picking up and leaving (I won’t believe it until I see it) then it’s time for the Man With the Plan. Will it be Andrew Yang? Will his plans clean up the place or not?
I don’t get it. I think NYC is a miserable place. Overcrowded and overpriced. But I am a big open spaces kind of girl, I guess.
Yang has name recognition, but he strikes me as a John Lindsay type who is liberal, but kind of soft, and is going to get rolled by all the progressive activists and the public sector workers unions if he actually does ride his name recognition into City Hall.
A successful mayor of New York has to be a bit of an a-hole, because he’s going to be dealing with hundreds of a-holes and if you can’t stand up to them, they’ll crush you (which is not to say being an a-hole automatically means you’re going to be a competent mayor — the Times Square dancing machine currently in City Hall is the ultimate example of someone being both a terrible mayor and a terrible human being).