I wrote recently about ideology in transit advocacy and in advocacy in general. The gist is that New York lacks any ideological politics, and as a result, transit advocacy either is genuinely non-ideological, or sweeps ideology under the rug; dedicated ideological advocates tend to either be subsumed in this sphere or go to places that don’t really connect with transit as it is and propose increasingly unhinged ideas. The ideological mainstream in the city is not bad, but the lack of choice makes it incapable of delivering results, and the governments at both the city and state levels are exceptionally clientelist, due to the lack of political competition. I’m not optimistic about political competition at the level of advocacy, but it would be useful to try introducing some in order to create more surface area for solutions to come through, and to make it harder for lobbyists to buy interest groups.

Political divides in New York

The political mainstream in New York is broadly left-liberal. New York voters consistently vote for federal politicians who promise to avoid tax cuts on high-income earners and corporations and even increase taxes on this group, and in exchange increase spending on health care, with some high-profile area politicians pushing for nationwide universal health care. They vote for more stringent regulations on businesses, for labor-friendlier administrative actions during major strikes, and for more hawkish solutions to climate change.

And none of that is really visible in state or city politics. Moreover, there isn’t really any political faction that voters can pick to support any of these positions, or to oppose them (except the Republicans, who are well to the right of the median state voter). The Working Families Party exists to cross-endorse Democrats via a different line; there is no fear by a Democrat that if they are too centrist for the district voters will replace them with a WFP representative, or that if they are too left-wing they will replace them with a non-WFP representative. There was a primary bloodbath in 2018, but it came from people running for the State Senate as party Democrats opposed to the Cuomo-endorsed Independent Democratic Conference, which broke from the party to caucus with Republicans.

The political divides that do exist, especially at the city level, break down as machine vs. reform candidates. But even that is not always clear, even as Eric Adams is unambiguously machine. The 2013 Democratic mayoral primary did not feature a clear machine candidate facing a clear reform candidate: Bill de Blasio ran on an ideologically progressive agenda, and implemented one small element of it in universal half-day pre-kindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds, but he ingratiated himself with the Brooklyn machine, to the point of steering endorsements in the 2021 primary toward Adams, and against the reform candidate, his own appointee Kathryn Garcia.

Political divides and advocacy

The mainstream of political opinion in New York ranges from center to mainline-left. But within that mainstream, there is no ideological competition, not just in politics, but also in advocacy. Transit advocacy, in particular, is not divided into more centrist and more left-wing groups.

The main transit advocacy groups in New York are instead distinguished by focus and praxis, roughly in the following way:

• The Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA (PCAC) is on the inside track of advocacy, proposing small changes within the range of opinions on the MTA board.
• Riders Alliance (RA) is on the outside track, focusing on public transit, with praxis that includes rallies, joint proposals with large numbers of general or neighborhood-scale advocacy groups, and some support for lawfare (they are part of the lawsuit against Kathy Hochul’s cancellation of congestion pricing).
• Transportation Alternatives (TransAlt) focuses on street-level changes including pedestrian and bike advocacy, using the same tools of praxis as RA.
• Streetsblog is advocacy-oriented media.
• Straphangers Campaign is subway-focused, and uses reports and media outreach as its praxis, like the Pokey Awards for the slowest bus routes.
• Charlie Komanoff (of the Carbon Tax Center) focuses on producing research that other advocacy groups can use, for example about the benefits of congestion pricing.

The group I’m involved in, the Effective Transit Alliance, is distinguished by doing technical analysis that other groups can use, for example on RA’s Six-Minute Service campaign (statement 1, statement 2), or other-city groups pushing rail electrification; it is in the middle between outside and inside strategies.

Of note, none of these is distinguished by ideology. There is no specifically left-wing transit advocacy group, focusing on issues like supporting the TWU and ATU in disputes with management, getting cops off the subway, and investing in environmental justice initiatives like bus depot electrification to reduce local diesel pollution.

Neither is there a specifically neoliberal transit advocacy group. There are plenty of general advocacy groups with that background, like Abundance New York, but they’re never specific to transit, and much of their agenda, like expansion of renewable power, would not offend ideological socialists. YIMBY as a movement has neoliberal roots, going back to the original New York YIMBY publication, but these days is better viewed as a reform movement fighting the reformers of the last quarter of the 20th century, with the machine adjudicating between the two sides (City of Yes is an Adams proposal; the machine was historically pro-developer).

Instead, all advocacy groups end up arguing using a combination of median-New Yorker ideological language and technocratic proposals (again, Six-Minute Service). Taking sides in labor versus management disputes is viewed as the domain of the unions and managers, not outside groups. RA’s statement on cops on the subway is telling: it uses left-wing NGO language like “people experiencing homelessness,” but of its four policy proposals, only the last, investing in supportive housing for the homeless, is ideologically left-wing, and the first and third, respectively six-minute service and means-tested fare reductions for the poor, would find considerable support in the growing neoliberal community.

The consequences to the extremes

If the mainstream in New York ranges from dead center to center-left, both the general right and the radical left end up on the extremes. These have their own general advocacy groups: the Manhattan Institute (MI) on the right, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its allies on the radical left. MI has recently moved to the right on national culture war issues, especially under Reihan Salam as he hired Christopher Rufo, but on local governance issues it’s not at all radical, and highlights center-right concerns with crime and with waste, fraud, and abuse in the public sector. DSA intends to take the most radical left position on issues that is available within the United States.

And both, as organizations, are pretty bad on this issue. MI, in particular, uses SeeThroughNY, the applet for public-sector worker salaries, not for analysis, but for shaming. I’ve had to complain to MI members on Twitter just to get the search function on job titles to work better, and even after they did some UI improvements, it’s harder to find the average salaries and headcounts by position to figure out things like maintenance worker productivity or white-collar overhead rates, than to find the highest-paid workers in a given year and write articles in the New York Post to shame them for racking so much overtime.

Then there is the proposal, I think by Nicole Gelinas, to stop paying subway crew for their commutes. This is not possible under current crew scheduling: train operators and conductors pick their shifts in seniority order, and low-seniority workers have no control over which of the railyards located at the fringes of the city they will have to report to. A business can reasonably expect a worker to relocate if the place the worker reports to will stay the same for the next few years; but if the schedules change every six months and even within this period they send workers to inconsistent railyards, it is not reasonable and the employer must pay for the commute, which in this circumstance is within private-sector norms.

DSA, to the extent it has a dedicated platform on public transit, is for free transit, and failing that, for effectively decriminalizing fare beating. More informed transit advocates, even very left-wing ones, persistently beg DSA to understand that for any given subsidy level, it’s better to increase service than to reduce fares, with exceptions only for places with extremely low ridership, low average rider incomes, and near-zero farebox recovery ratios. In Boston, Michelle Wu was even elected mayor on this agenda; her agenda otherwise is good, but MBTA farebox recovery ratios are sufficient that the revenue loss would bite, and as a result, all the city has been able to fund is some pilot projects on a few bus routes, breaking fare integration in the process since there is no way the subway is going fare-free.

In both cases, what is happening is that the ideological advocacy groups are distinct from the transit advocacy groups, and people are rarely well-respected in both – at most, they can be on the edge in both (like Gelinas). The result is that DSA will come up with ideas that are untethered from the reality of transit, and that every left-wing idea that could work would rapidly be taken up by groups that are not ideologically close to DSA, giving it a neoliberal reputation; symmetrically, this is true of the entire right, including MI.

The limits of the lack of ideology

The lack of ideology is not a good thing. With no ideological competition, voters have no clear way of picking politicians, which results in dynasties and handpicked successors. Lobbyists know who they need to curry favor with, making it cheaper to buy the government than to improve productivity; once it’s cheap to buy the government, the tax system ends up falling on whoever has been worst at buying influence, leading to high levels of distortion even with tax rates that, by Western European standards, are not high.

The quality of government in this situation is not good; corruption parties are not good when they govern entire countries, like the LDP in Japan or Democrazia Cristiana in Cold War Italy, and they’re definitely not good at the subnational level, where there is less media oversight. On education, for example, New York City pays starting teachers with a master’s degree $72,832/year in 2024, which compares with a German range for A13 starting teachers (in most states covering all teachers, in some only academic secondary teachers) of 50,668€/year in Rhineland-Pfalz to 57,288€/year in Bavaria; the PPP rate these days is 1€ = $1.45, so German teachers earn 1-14% more than their New York counterparts, while the average income from work ranges from 5% higher in New York than in Bavaria to 68% higher than Saxony-Anhalt. This stinginess with teacher salaries does not go to a higher teacher-to-student ratios, both New York and Germany averaging about 1:13, or to savings on the education budget, New York spending around twice as much as Germany. The waste is not talked about in the open, and even the concept that teachers deserve a raise, independently of budgetary efficiency, does not exist in city politics; it’s viewed as the sole domain of the unions to demand salary increases, and the idea that people can elect more pro-labor politicians who run on explicit platforms of salary increases is unthinkable.

In transit, I don’t have a good comparison of New York. But I do suspect that the single-party rule of CSU in Bavaria is responsible for the evident corruption levels in the party and the high costs of the urban rail projects that CSU cares about, namely the Munich S-Bahn second trunk line, which is setting Continental European records for its high costs. Likewise, in Italy, the era of DC domination was also called the Tangentopoli, and bribes for contracts were common, raising costs; the destruction of that party system under mani pulite and its replacement with alternation of power between left and right coalitions since has coincided with strong anti-corruption laws and real reductions in costs from the levels of the 1980s.

We haven’t found corruption in New York when researching the Second Avenue Subway case. But we have found extreme levels of intellectual laziness at the top, by political appointees who are under pressure not to innovate rather than to showcase success.

And likewise, at ETA, I’m seeing an advocacy sphere that is constrained by court politics. It’s considered uncouth to say that the governor is a total failure and so are all of her and her predecessor’s political appointees until proven otherwise. There’s no party or faction system that has incentives to find and publicize their failures; as it is, the people trying to replace Adams as mayor are barely even factional, and name recognition is so important that Andrew Cuomo is thinking of making a comeback, perhaps to kill another few tens of thousands of city residents that he missed in 2020. Any advocacy subject to these constraints will fail to break the hierarchy that resists change, and reduce itself to flattering failed leaders in vain hopes that they might one day implement one good idea, take credit for it, and use the credit to legitimize their other failures.

Is there a way out?

I’m pessimistic; there’s a reason I chose not to live in New York despite, effectively, working there. Alternation of parties at the state or even city level is not useful. The Republicans are a permanent minority party in New York, at least in federal votes, and so a Republican who wants to win needs to not just moderate ideologically, which is not enough by itself, but also buy off non-ideological actors, leading to comparable levels of clientelism to those of the Democratic machine.

For example, Mike Bloomberg ran on his own technocratic competence, but lacking a party to work with in City Council, he failed on issues that today are considered core neoliberal priorities, namely housing. Housing permitting in 2002-13, when the city was economically booming, averaged 20,276/year, or around 2.5/1,000 people, rising slightly to 25,222/year, or around 3/1,000, during Bill de Blasio’s eight years; every European country builds more except economic basket cases, and the major cities and metro areas typically build more than the national average. The system of councilmanic privilege, in which City Council defers to the opinions of the member representing the district each proposed development, is a natural outgrowth of the lack of ideological competition, and blocks housing production; the technocrat Bloomberg was less capable of striking deals to build housing than the political hack de Blasio. And Bloomberg is a best-case scenario; George Pataki as governor was not at all a reformer, he just had somewhat different (mostly Long Island) clientelist interests.

David Schleicher proposes state parties as a solution to the system of single-party domination and councilmanic privilege. But in practice, there’s little reason for such parties to thrive. If two New York parties aim for the median state voter, then one will comprise Republicans and the rightmost 20% of Democrats and the other will comprise the remaining Democrats, and Democrats from the former party will be required to defend so many Republican policies for coalitional reasons. There’s no neat separation of state and federal priorities that would permit such Democrats to compartmentalize, and not enough specifically in-state media that would cover them in such a way rather than based on national labels; in practice, then, any such Democrat will be unable to win federal office as a Democrat, and as ambitious Democrats stick with the all-Democratic party, the 62-38 pattern of today will reassert itself.

In the city, two Democratic factions are in theory possible, a centrist one and a leftist one. A left-wing solution is in theory favored by most of the city, which is happy to vote for federal politicians who promise universal health care, free university tuition, universal daycare, or more support for teachers, which more or less exist in Germany with a much less left-wing electorate. In practice, none of these is even semi-seriously attempted city- or statewide, and the machine views its role as, partly, gatekeeping left-wing organizations, which in turn have little competence to implement these, and often get sidetracked with other priorities (like teacher union opposition to phonics, or extracting more money from developers for neighborhood priorities).

Public transit is, in effect, caught in a crossfire of political incompetence. I think advocacy would be better if there were a persistently left-wing advocacy org and a persistently neoliberal one, but in practice, machine domination is such that the socialists and neoliberals often agree on a lot of reforms (for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become fairly YIMBY).

But even then, advocacy organizations should be using their outside voice more and avoiding flattering people who don’t deserve it. People in New York know that they are governed by failures. The lack of ideology means that the Republican nearly 40% of the state thinks they are governed by left-wing failures while the Democratic base thinks they are governed by centrist and Republicratic failures, but there’s widespread understanding that the government is inefficient. Advocates do not need to debase themselves in front of people who cost the region millions of dollars every day that they get up in the morning, go to work, and make bad decisions on transit investment and operations. There’s a long line of people who do flattery better than any advocate and will get listened to first by the hierarchy; the advocates’ advantage is not in flattery but in knowing the system better than the political appointees to the point of being able to make good proposals that the hierarchy is too incompetent to come up with or implement on its own.