2017–2021 New York City transit crisis
In 2017, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority due to ongoing reliability and crowding problems with mass transit in New York City. This order applied particularly to the New York City Subway, which was the most severely affected by dilapidated infrastructure, causing overcrowding and delays. With many parts of the system approaching or exceeding 100 years of age, general deterioration could be seen in many subway stations. By 2017, only 65% of weekday trains reached their destinations on time, the lowest rate since a transit crisis in the 1970s. To a lesser extent, New York City buses operated by the MTA were also affected. Both the subway and the buses are run by the New York City Transit Authority, a subsidiary of the MTA. A separate crisis at Penn Station affected the routes of the three railroad agencies that provided service into the station. Media outlets deemed these crises "the summer of hell".
There have been myriad causes attributed to inciting the transit crisis. The subway was affected by a lack of funds, signal slowdowns, and degrading infrastructure. The buses were also affected by a lack of funds, but individual routes had additional problems including low frequencies, slow speeds, and winding routes. Money from the MTA in general was withheld due to actions from politicians at both the city and state levels, from both the Democratic Party and Republican Party. These issues caused delays for passengers for both systems, ranging from moderate to severe, and also resulted in thousands of hours of lost time for passengers. Additionally, ridership on the subway began declining for the first time in several years, and ridership on buses continued a gradual decline that had started before the crisis.
Several solutions were proposed. In July 2017, MTA chairman Joe Lhota created a multifaceted "Subway Action Plan" that consisted of short- and long-term solutions. A corresponding "Bus Action Plan" was released in April 2018. Later that year, the Regional Plan Association released a report that advocated for large investments to the subway system. The MTA hired Andy Byford as the new NYCTA chief in 2018; Byford presented a report to tackle the issues plaguing the transit system before his resignation two years later. Service improved through 2019, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City in early 2020 further depleted the MTA's finances. Cuomo also proposed implementing congestion pricing in New York City to fund the MTA, which was approved in 2021 and took effect in 2025.
Declaration of crisis
On June 27, 2017, thirty-nine people were injured when an A train derailed at 125th Street because the train's emergency brakes were activated as it hit an improperly secured piece of replacement rail. The next day, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency for the subway system. This state of emergency had also arisen after several track fires and overcrowding incidents. As part of the order, he ordered MTA Chairman Joe Lhota to come up with a reorganization plan within 30 days. A day later, the MTA officially announced the Genius Transit Challenge, where contestants could submit ideas to improve signals, communications infrastructure, or rolling stock. At Pennsylvania Station in Midtown Manhattan, a separate transit crisis developed due to deferred maintenance. In early 2017, this culminated in numerous power outages, derailments, and delays due to track maintenance.During July 2017, Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio disagreed over whether the city or state controlled the subway system. Cuomo claimed that the city was responsible, while de Blasio argued that he had contributed enough to the system. On July 21, the second set of wheels on a southbound Q train jumped the track near Brighton Beach, constituting the system's second derailment within a month. Nine people suffered injuries due to improper maintenance of the car in question.
Causes
Lack of funds
On November 18, 2017, The New York Times published its investigation into the crisis, with over 1,000 readers having submitted stories about the effects of the past year's subway delays. It found that politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, at the mayoral and gubernatorial levels, had gradually removed $1.5 billion of MTA funding. The Times stressed that no single event directly caused the crisis; rather, it was an accumulation of small cutbacks and maintenance deferments. The New York Times described MTA funds as a "piggy bank" for the state, with the issuance of MTA bonds benefiting the state at the MTA's expense. By 2017, a sixth of the MTA's budget was allocated to paying off debt, a threefold proportional increase from 1997. The city's $250 million annual contribution to the MTA budget in 2017 was a quarter of the contribution in 1990.File:East_Side_Access-_January_13,_2014_.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|alt=A tunnel cavern for the MTA's East Side Access railroad expansion project|The MTA's East Side Access, became the most expensive underground railway project in the world due to politicians' monetary mismanagement of the MTA, as well as costly, inefficient union rules.
The lack of funding was not only due to the gradual reduction of direct support. Other actions by city and state politicians, according to the Times, included overspending; overpaying unions and interest groups; advertising superficial improvement projects while ignoring more important infrastructure issues; and agreeing to high-interest loans in order to make up the deficit from the governmental reductions in funding. In December of the same year, the Times reported that the $12 billion East Side Access project, which would extend the MTA's Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal upon its completion, was the most expensive project of its kind in the world. The predicted cost of $3.5 billion per mile was attributed to various unnecessary expenditures, including hiring additional workers for little reason, as well as uncompetitive bidding processes.
Signal and work-zone slowdowns
The transit crisis was influenced partly by modifications to New York City Subway signals and work-zone policies that required trains to reduce their speeds. After a collision between two trains on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1995, in which a train operator was killed after speeding his train into the back of another, the MTA modified both signals and trains to lower their average speeds. Since some of the signals were malfunctioning, operators slowed trains further in case a defective signal forced trains to wait for longer than was indicated, resulting in lower frequencies and overcrowded trains. By 2012, over 1,200 signals had been modified, and by 2018, that number had grown to 1,800. Exacerbating the signal problems, some of the oldest block signals in the system were as much as 80 years old, and they also broke down frequently.Subway trains were also forced to slow down due to work-zone rules. These rules were created by a task force, and implemented in 2007 after a series of worker deaths. Prior to 2007, if one track was out of service, trains on adjacent tracks could operate at normal speeds; the rule changes forced trains on adjacent tracks to travel at 10 miles per hour or less. As a result, the proportion of delays caused by track work increased by 10% between 2013 and 2014, while the amount of track work remained constant.
Bus problems
A corresponding bus crisis existed simultaneously, however, it did not receive nearly as much media attention. In November 2017, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer identified several causes for the bus system's unreliability. In the report, he stated that almost half of all bus routes ran at low frequencies during rush hours. He also reported that many bus routes were vulnerable to "bus bunching", where several buses travel the same route in quick succession. The average speeds of New York City buses were found to be, the slowest of any major bus system nationwide. Additionally, Stringer wrote that long, winding bus routes caused bus speeds to slow down.Effects
Even before the crisis, every non-shuttle subway route's on-time performance had declined: in 2007, all of these routes had over 70% on-time performance, arriving at the last station within five minutes of the timetable, but in 2017, only three routes could claim that distinction. The least reliable route, the 2 train, reached its terminus on-schedule only 32% of the time, and the New York City Subway's 65% average on-time performance was the lowest among all major cities' transit systems. David L. Gunn, who helped end the 1980s transit crisis when he led the NYCTA in the mid-1980s, described the 2017 crisis as "heartbreaking".In August 2017, The New York Times released an article about how the routes that serve the Lexington Avenue Line failed to meet its schedule count during weekday rush hours when demand is at its highest. Officials have often cited overcrowding as the reason for trains being cancelled. Chairman Lhota has stated that maintaining space between trains was more of a priority for him than meeting the schedules was. The overcrowding was really an effect, rather than a cause, of delays. Although average weekday ridership stayed largely constant from 2012 to 2018, the number of delays attributed to overcrowding increased, even as the number of other types of delays did not change by much.
In October 2017, Comptroller Stringer released an analysis of the effect of subway delays on the economy and on commuters, finding that "worst-case" subway delays of more than 20 minutes could cost up to $389 million annually in lost productivity. By comparison, "mid-case" delays of between 10 and 20 minutes could cost $243.1 million per year, and "best-case" delays of between 5 and 10 minutes could cost $170.2 million per year. As a result of the maintenance crisis, weekday subway ridership began declining for the first time in several years in 2017. With 5.712 million average weekday riders in September 2017, this translated to about 105,000 fewer riders per weekday compared to 2016. Bus ridership also maintained a continuing decrease, as one hundred million fewer riders rode MTA buses in 2017 than in 2008. Rider complaints on social media intensified during the crisis: by mid-2018, there were 2,500 daily complaints to the MTA's and subway's Twitter accounts.
In January 2018, average weekday on-time performance had dropped from 65% to 58.1%, and there were more than 76,000 delayed trains, which reached their terminus at least five minutes later than what was listed on the timetable. Over 10,000 trains, or 14%, had been delayed for "unknown causes"; exacerbating the situation, the MTA incorrectly classified causes of the unknown delays. It was so common for subway trains to be delayed that many commuters traveled earlier than usual to factor in any potential subway delays.