The MTA Capital Plan Falsifies Subway History
The 2025-29 capital plan is out, and it is not good. There’s an outline of an ETA report to be released soon going over issues like accessibility, rolling stock costs, and the new faregates. But for now, I’d like to just focus on a high-level issue and how it relates to the subway’s history: State of Good Repair. The capital plan has a summary history of past capital plans on PDF-page 8, and it calls the 1990s and 2000s an era of underinvestment and deferred maintenance, the exact opposite of reality. It treats 2017 as a keystone year for system renewal, which it was not; it was, however, the year current MTA chair Janno Lieber was hired as the head of MTA Construction and Development (formerly Capital Construction). In effect, the plan falsifies the history of the system in order to treat the current leadership as saviors, in service of a plan to spend more money than in 2020-24 while having less to show for it, washing it all with the nebulous promise of State of Good Repair.
The history of State of Good Repair
Traditionally, capital investment is conceived as going to expansion. In New York in the first two thirds of the 20th century, this meant new subway and elevated lines, new connections between subway lines, station upgrades to lengthen the platforms, and new transfers between stations that had previously belonged to different operators. Maintenance was treated as an ongoing expense.
The finances of the subway after WW1 were shaky, and from the Depression onward, it never made money again. Of the two private operators, one, the IRT, was in bankruptcy protection during the Depression, while the public operator, the IND, was debt-ridden due to exceptionally high construction costs for that era and overbuilding. This made it attractive to defer maintenance, on the subway as on mainline rail everywhere in the United States. In 1951, bond money was designated for Second Avenue Subway, but then the money was raided for other priorities, including smaller extensions but also capital renewal, such as replacing the almost 50-year-old IRT rolling stock fleet.
In the 1970s, the city’s poor finances meant it couldn’t subsidize operations and maintenance as much as before, and the maintenance deferral led to a systemwide collapse. NYCSubway.org goes over the various elements of it: chunks of equipment and material were falling onto the street from the elevated lines, and onto the tracks from the retaining walls of open cuts; trains had flat wheels and no lubrication, leading to such squeal that the noise was worse than that of Concorde; train doors and lights malfunctioned; derailments and fires were common. By 1981, the mean distance between failures (MDBF) dropped to its lowest ever, 6,640 miles (10,690 km). One third of the system was under emergency 10 mph speed restrictions, and a quarter of the rolling stock had to be kept in reserve to substitute for equipment failures and could not be run in maximum revenue service. The new trains bought for the system, the R44 and R46, used new technology, for example higher top speed for the use on long express sections, but were defective to the point that the lawsuits against the vendors, St. Louis and Pullman respectively, bankrupted them. The origin of the conservatism of rolling stock orders and the pattern that all American rolling stock manufacture is done at transplant factories owned by European, Japanese, or formerly Canadian firms, are both the result of this history.
The State of Good Repair program as we know it dates to the 1980s, when the MTA, starting with the leadership of Richard Ravitch, began to prioritize maintenance and renewal over expansion. This meant five-year capital programs, to reduce the incentives to defer maintenance in a single year, and a lot of openly crying poverty, where leaders both before and after Ravitch would prefer to extoll the system and downplay its shortcomings. There was large spending on capital as a result, but no Second Avenue Subway. Instead, money went to renewal. Rolling stock was more conservative; the R62 was also imported from Japan, since Reagan cut federal aid to mass transit and so the MTA was free from Buy America’s strictures (in contrast, today states prefer to preemptively obey even when they’re not sure they will get federal funding, and even demand in-state plants). Its mean distance between failures was far higher than that of all other rolling stock, and this greater reliability continued into the R62A, R68, and R68A orders; the systemwide mean distance between failures kept climbing throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, to a peak of around 180,000 miles, or around 280,000 km, in 2005 and again in 2010-11. The slow restrictions that characterized the system in the 1970s were lifted, and rolling stock availability for maximum service rose.
The construction of Second Avenue Subway beginning in 2007 was not viewed as a rebuke to the SOGR program, but rather as the legacy of its success. Leaders like Lee Sander spoke of growth and new lines, setting the stage for what is now known as IBX and was known in then as Triboro RX. The political discourse in the United States at the time was one of transit revival, due to the then-new decoupling of car driving and oil use from economic growth, and the high fuel prices; this was also around the time American discourse discovered European and Japanese high-speed rail, setting the stage for Proposition 1A approving the construction of California High-Speed Rail in 2008.
The present of State of Good Repair
I’ve repeatedly criticized SOGR as a scheme allowing agency heads to demand money with nothing to show for it. The behavior of current MTA leadership is one such example; it is not the only one – Amtrak did the same under Joe Boardman in the 2000s. But it needs to be made clear that the SOGR program of the 1980s and 90s was an unmitigated success. There was visible improvement in the system due to better maintenance of fixed plant and more prudent capital investments, such as the trainsets bought in the era from the R62 to the R160. The present problems of the SOGR concept come essentially because its success in the 1980s and 90s led agencies to talk about it as the next hot thing, even while going in a rather different direction.
In the 2010s, the subway started facing new problems – but these were not problems of undermaintenance. The MDBF crept down to a little less than 120,000 miles at the bottom, in 2017, and was 125,000 miles in 2023. The oldest trains are the worst, but much of the problem comes from other issues than slow replacement of fixed plant. For example, the ongoing slowdowns on the subway – even in the 2000s it was slower than before the 1970s collapse, and speeds are noticeably lower when I visit than when I lived in the city in 2006-11 – come not from insufficient maintenance, but from tighter flagging rules, which are designed to protect workers on adjacent track, but in fact have coincided with more worker injuries than in 1999, with a particular deterioration in worker safety in the 2010s. Andy Byford’s Save Safe Seconds campaign was the right response to the slowdowns, and helped stop the bleeding.
And yet, the idea of SOGR persists, even though the problem it purported to solve has been solved. The worst offender is Amtrak: in the Obama stimulus, it asked for $10 billion for SOGR on the Northeast Corridor, promising trivial reductions in travel times; Amtrak’s chair at the time, Joe Boardman, was the very one who deferred maintenance in order to make Amtrak look more profitable on paper in the service of the Bush administration’s goal of eventual privatization, replacing David Gunn, who was fired because he refused to do so.
In effect, SOGR is now a byword for “investments that aren’t sexy.” Some of those investments are still solid, like those done in the 1990s. Others are wastes of money; their lack of sexiness makes them ideal for managers who rate themselves by the input of how much money their agencies get rather than by outputs like ridership or service quality, since the lack of visible output disempowers civil society and good government watchdogs.
MTA Construction and Development head Jamie Torres-Springer essentially uses this definition in his defense of the capital plan, saying “We looked very closely at a couple of asset types that haven’t been focused on in the past. And to some people, they’re not the most exciting assets. They’re the ones that ensure that we can provide service. It’s structures and power and station components.”
The MTA’s capital plan is likewise denigrating the agency’s own past, saying, of the era in which MDBF rose by a factor of about nine in the span of 15 years, “Investment lagged again in the 1990s and early 2000s” and “After years of progress in the 1980s, investment fell off, culminating in a ‘Summer of Hell’ in 2017. That year, New York’s subway had one of the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit systems in the world, with only 65% of weekday trains reaching their destinations on-time.”
The problems of train delays are not about investment or about maintenance. Rather, the train delays were about overly ambitious schedules, compounding with the problems of excessive interlining. Of course, interlining had always been present in the system, but the combination of new trains with better braking and signal timers installed based on the performance of older trains meant that the schedules could not be met without slowdowns; managers, in turn, changed how they measured punctuality from on-time performance to wait assessment, the latter more appropriate for subway lines with high frequency (like New York) and little complexity (unlike New York). MTA President Ronnie Hakim, coming from a legal rather than technical background, also denigrated the idea of speed, viewing it not as an essential feature of public transit but as a source of legal liability.
Non-sexy investment can target this; Byford alleviated some of the slowdowns with Save Safe Seconds. In the future, deinterlining the system, starting from DeKalb Avenue’s scrambling of the B, D, N, and Q, where trains lose two minutes due to schedule padding entirely to protect from cascading delays, is necessary. But this is not SOGR – in fact zero dollars are required in capital spending to deinterline DeKalb. Nor is it invisible – this is a visible change on the subway map, which passengers and good government watchdogs can judge for themselves, trading off fewer one-seat rides for higher speed and reliability.
But neither Lieber nor Torres-Springer seems interested in inexpensive fixes. No: both rate themselves by how much money they get rather than by whether it does any good, hence the denigration of the era in which SOGR was a success. As political appointees, they also have no loyalty to the system and its permanent staff, or even to well-regarded leaders (Byford, again) who do not come from the same political milieu. They fail because they exist to allow incompetent governors like Cuomo and Hochul to control a system they have no business running.
Pedestrian Observations 
Passenger railroads exist to move passengers. If I remember correctly obsessive railfan moving moar trains means people on the Fourth Ave lines have to use the Broadway local to get to Sixth Ave trains and people on the Brighton line have to use the Broadway local to get to Broadway. The Broadway local sucks. Or it involves long hikes at Atlantic/Barclays.
I’m not sure what kind of supply they were high on 100 years ago. They are busy planning subway because the El is dark and noisy. While busily planning elevated highways that are darker, noisy all the time and stink.
How did the construction costs compare to the Robert Moses extravaganzas on the West Side? Sinking the New York Central under Riverside Park and cluttering it the Henry Hudson Parkway.
Building a subway under an elevated is going to cost more than building a subway under a street.
And they took some lessons from the IRT, flying junctions with broad curves are a good thing. They have to be broad to run 75 foot long cars on them.
They didn’t need to build a subway under an el; evidently they didn’t on the West Side, preferring Eighth to Ninth. Nor did they need such complex flying junctions, when the junction at 96th Street on the IRT always permitted conflict-free moves.
They built the subway under the Fulton El. And under the Sixth Avenue El. And around the H&M, today’s PATH. Legend has it that is one of the reasons they tore down the Second Ave El instead of the Third Ave El was so that as soon as the war was over they’d build all six tracks of the Second Ave subway.
If I’m reading the track maps on nycsubway.org there is a huge flying junction north of 96th Street. I don’t know or care how much it’s been reconfigured since the local stopped running from 145th or 137th. THe trains to Van Cortlandt Park/242nd used to be expresses.
You still haven’t explained hIgh construction costs compared to what?
High construction costs compared to contemporary extensions in London and Paris; in PPP terms, New York was about four times as expensive, and these costs kept steadily rising with the 1940s plans for SAS, then the 1950s, then the 1970s.
The 96th Street junction is original, I think. Until the 1950s, the configuration was that 1 trains were a mix of locals and expresses as you say, 2 trains were express, and 3 trains were local; this led to same-direction at-grade conflicts, so the NYCTA changed it to the present pattern, which has no conflicts, without reconfiguring the junction. It’s a bit awkward in that a large volume of passengers taking the 1 southbound change at 96th Street, but it’s a cross-platform interchange with very high frequency and until ATC the dispatchers timed the connection when they could. The old pattern presumaly generated the same mismatch between very high demand on the express and low demand on the local, but people would wait for the express at stations north of 96th.
In the 2025-29 Capital Plan, high construction costs are no longer an issue. It expects to spend $0.00 for the Second Avenue Subway extension.
Yeah, instead there are high rolling stock acquisition costs (about twice as high as the R211 purchase) and an unaccountable black hole of SOGR funds.
The IND is four tracked most places. Twice as much track isn’t going to cost twice as much but it is going to cost almost twice as much. New York City can’t have Parisian subway run up First Avenue. The costs to compare it to are things like the West Side Highway.
There was no 1 train. Or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8. There was 7th Ave. Local between 145th and South Ferry and the Broadway Local between 137th and South Ferry. The local stations where five cars long like 145th still is and South Ferry was.
You obviously don’t understand the concepts of local and express.If the EXPRESS train doesn’t stop at local stations in the peak direction you have no choice but to get on a local. It’s the point of EXPRESS trains that they don’t inexorably stop at every friggin platform they pass.
My understanding is that in the 1918-1950 period that London (and presumably also Paris?) were largely opening suburban extensions – whereas the eighth avenue subway is fully urban and also has local and express tracks throughout.
Don’t forget Britain appears to only really start seeing inexcusable cost blowouts in the post ~2005-2015 period with the Chiltern projects being reasonable a little later than other projects.
In terms of trams if you look at https://www.britainremade.co.uk/backontrack?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email its only after the first phase of the Nottingham tram that stuff starts getting silly in Britain.
The IND goes out into suburban parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Just like IRT and BMT went out into the suburban areas. Rather rural ones.
@adiron, OK fair. So it’s a mix. Some suburban and some urban – so a little different from the Jubilee line which is fully urban.
Still feels to me like spending 2-3x London/Paris for a 4 track urban/suburban line against the London/Paris interwar suburban extensions would be reasonable.
It wasn’t 2-3x, it was 4x. And with cut-and-cover, under a sufficiently wide street (certainly Queens Boulevard but also Central Park West), the premium for the third and fourth track is pretty degressive. Notably, in the 1900s-10s, New York did not have a premium over Paris – the premium only began when the IND got involved.
Yeah but between 1900 and 1910 Paris was also building city-centre lines.
And city centre lines do need larger stations etc.
Like I do agree 4x is excessive. And if they have wide roads to run under cut and cover perhaps even 2x is excessive. But there is a legitimate premium.
Paris was also building city center lines in the 1930s, including some going under older lines like M11.
(From https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Formation_of_the_Northern_Line_small.png#mw-jump-to-license)
To be fair Embankment to Kennington and the linkup at Euston/Camden town count as “urban” in my book. But they are smaller in scope than the 8th avenue subway for sure.
Most of the non-IND subway was built after the “Contract 2” extension to the LIRR in Brooklyn. Not much construction happened between the completion that, to Atlantic Avenue/LIRR, in 1908 and the signing of the Dual Contracts in 1913.
That Central Park West and Queens Blvd are wide doesn’t change that there was an elevated over Fulton Street and an elevated over Sixth Ave and they had to build around an existing subway. And carve Sixth Ave out south of the West 4th Station or widen Church Street. Does make me wonder how much that cost compared to carving out Seventh Ave. South.
Wasn’t there a city law which kept the subway fare at $0.05 for 44 years (1904 – 1948) which meant that there wasn’t money to maintain the system(s)?
That was certainly a big issue.
“Both rate themselves by how much money they get rather than by whether it does any good.” Exactly. Public organizations in the US have no reason to consider ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity.’ They have powerful reasons to be LESS efficient and productive. If you want efficiency in the US, you must involve private capital. It’s how the US works, like it or not.
The head of NYCT in the late 2010s literally did consider efficiency and productivity; “Cuomo and Hochul are terrible governors” is a much more specific issue than “government is bad.”
I do fully support the position that some political leaders are bad and that that is something that needs to be tackled.
I do think there is a mix and that at least some political leaders are pretty strong. Biden, Schumer and Pelosi got a lot through the US congress in 2021-23 and that has benefitted the US with stronger economic growth than elsewhere.
I do not mean “private involvement” in publicly owned and/or run projects by “private capital.” I mean private ownership of some aspect of the project. I mean indefinite long-term private interests. It’s all about control, not just the profit motive. Privately owned vehicles operate on publicly owned roads. Privately owned and operated airplanes operate at publicly owned airports in the US.
Political leaders may care about efficiency but those who run public transit organizations don’t. THEY have the power, not political leaders. They are too big to fail. Privately owned trains operating on publicly owned rails WOULD care about the efficiency of the system.
Those who run public transit systems care about what their poss – the politicians care about. What politicians care about and what they say they care about are often very different. Voters listen to what politicians say, but rarely hold them accountable for those words when transit is the subject. Often there are competing concerns, and the most important ones are what get priority. So transit leadership is a job you give someone who supported your campaign – it doesn’t matter how qualified you are, the job is a reward and odds are you won’t screw up so bad that your mistakes get the politician voted out and so have fun with your new government paycheck. Similarly, while there is interest in saving money, at the end of the day large oversized stations make for both more union labor and a nice big ribbon cutting plus is something to point out to a neighborhood as something “I got you” and so cheap transit projects are not actually important.
I would point out that a some of the most successful “public” operators like TfL do extensively use franchising.
@henry. I would say that the British politicians do in general get held to account about their actual performance.
Probably local politicians get a bit too much national flak. But that is it.
If that isnt happening in the US it will be because the Republican Party has become more and more unhinged and because there are no viable third parties at any level which is actually super weird.
Aren’t these Public Private Partnership more successful in theory than in practice?
There are lots of different public private partnerships with different rules. Some are more successful than others. Vancouver’s Canada line is a PPP and successful – the problems it has come down to because of the limited contract the private side isn’t willing to make investments in more capacity and so it is over crowded. (the city is waiting for the contract to expire and thing bring the line in house and do needed capacity expansion – we can argue if that is the right call) However a lot of PPPs are failures.
The thing most fail to realize when proposing a PPP is that someone needs to accept risk and private sector doesn’t want to lose money so if they accept risk they are going to ensure the contract pays them well for taking that risk – and some of the risk won’t turn up so they make a lot of money overall.
PPP and other things work very well when what is being done is something the private industry does all the time and so they know all the details better than you. If you need an standard office building you can hire someone who knows how to do everything and they know all the costs and variations and they can give you a final price that is within a few thousand of the final price (on a multi million dollar project 10k is not a big deal) However if you want different building (ie a state capital building, that tourists will flock to) you are adding so many unknowns that nobody can estimate the full cost and so either they over estimate to ensure they don’t run over or you pay actual costs and hope nobody cheats you.
We don’t have public/private partnerships in passenger rail in the US. Rail freight is entirely private in the US, though some rail yards and ports are either publicly owned or have some element of public support for their construction or operation. So, we can’t know how having Brightline, Amtrak, and possibly other rail operators operate on the northeast corridor in competition with each other would work in practice. The interstate highway system is a public/private/federal/state partnership. Interstates are publicly owned and funded but privately owned vehicles use interstates while states pay for their maintenance. The air travel system is public/private, with a public FAA and airports owned by state or local governments being served by non-public airlines. It’s the pattern of all other forms of transportation in the US, why not passenger rail?
I’m describing the US. There are vast differences in these matters, even among the English speaking countries. Vancouver and London have vastly different taxes, institutions, and funding structures than anywhere in the US. My comments are about the US alone. I guarantee that whatever funding structure exists in Vancouver would be political, and quite possibly constitutionally, impossible in the US.
It is not so simple. These projects are indeed political choices, i.e. not necessarily based on cost-effectiveness as private enterprises would be. However, note that in many countries, once the decision is taken through various democratic or authoritarian processes, the design is often done by government employees who will also monitor the work done by private construction companies. The US are characterized by higher costs and more extensive private involvement. Expensive consultants will be involved, unions will dictate work rules, private interests will fight in the Courts. Politicians would prefer construction to be short and efficient because they want the opening ceremony to precede the next election but these various private parties want the party to go on.