Megalopolis subway: Where romance and reality meet
In the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we all still rode the subways masked and honed our rusty childhood skills of seeing how long we could balance without touching the pole, the doors or another person, something wonderful happened. One of us, late as always, skidded onto a waiting train. As the doors closed, a mellifluous voice that could have doubled for James Earl Jones came over the loudspeaker. “Good morning, passengers, and welcome to New York City Transit. This is your word of the day. It is a four-syllable word. It is ‘optimistic.’ To be cheerful, hopeful and confident about the future. Let’s all be optimistic. That is my conductor word of the day. Thanks again for riding with New York City Transit.”
The passengers smiled before diving back into their crosswords, books and music. For New Yorkers, the subway, in all its magnificence — some 700 miles, 24/7/365 service — is not simply a mode of transport but a character in our daily lives. For kids, it provides the time to finish those last bits of homework and a place to daydream, watching through the front window as mysterious tunnel life and ghost stations hurtle by. For adults, it is there to pick us up, slightly tipsy, in the small hours of the morning, and whisk us to work in the morning before our eyes are even working properly. Read The New York Times Metropolitan Diary and see how many times the subway figures as a place of chance meeting, kindness and even love. In this issue, a collection of authors, including radio host Brian Lehrer, reveal the subway to us as a place of real and metaphorical connection. Their stories are, like our city, all over the place, at once poignant and funny. As Ted Alcorn points out, the subway is our truest public square.
That moving public square unites a city whose diversity would have been unimaginable even half a century ago, a diversity that Rachel Meltzer and Larisa Ortiz limn in their piece on the 45-minute city. In the 1960s, New York City’s ethnic and racial mix could be summarized in five groups — the Jews, the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the Irish and the Italians — as Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan described in their classic 1960s work “Beyond the Melting Pot.” Today that summary describes only a small fraction of the peoples of the world who crowd the city’s neighborhoods.
In New York City public schools, children used to be taught the proper way to fold The New York Times when standing in a subway car to use the space most efficiently and avoid disturbing the other passengers. New Yorkers’ sense of the city was anchored in the steadfast truth that the price of a slice of pizza and the price of a subway ride were one and the same. The severing of that link a few years ago between two iconic New York institutions somehow signaled that the world had gone slightly awry.
The subway’s great strength is its ability to bring disparate people together. But that same quality is also what gives the subway its sense of danger. The disorder, and even violence, lurking just below the surface are a prominent feature in many New York City movies where the subway plays a central role. This issue features ruminations on two of those films: Jason Bailey’s wonderful history of “The Taking of the Pelham One Two Three” and Harry Siegel’s meditation on “The Warriors.”
In New York City public schools, children used to be taught the proper way to fold the New York Times when standing in a subway car to use the space most efficiently and avoid disturbing the other passengers.
At every turn, the subway’s magnificence seems to be matched by misery. While the city’s subways are demonstrably safer and cleaner than 50 years ago, they are not as safe as they were before the pandemic. Aaron Chalfin, Alex Chohlas-Wood and Morgan Williams Jr. compare safety above and below ground. While they do not find the subway more dangerous than the street, they acknowledge that specific populations may be justified in feeling more unsafe underground. Women particularly feel that risk, a perception that is underscored by the reality that the victims of high-profile cases of subway pushes are often women, as Sarah Kaufman observes.
But it’s not just women — New Yorkers as a whole seem to feel more uneasy about riding the subway, particularly at night, than they did before the pandemic. That prickling sense of uneasiness is stoked by dark, dirty and dingy stations. Wes Skogan urges the City to go beyond the police deployment, placing the physical condition of the subway at the heart of efforts to improve safety.
The need for greater focus on the day-to-day maintenance of the system is a theme that runs through this issue. With a $19.3 billion annual budget and 70,000 employees, the Metropolitan Transit Authority — which includes the subways, buses, commuter rail and more — is a government unto itself. It is essentially running a massive, below-ground city with its own police (supplemented by the NYPD), stores, restaurants and more. Interviews with the current president of the MTA, Janno Lieber, as well as two former heads of the Transit Authority reveal how essential good governance is to the healthy functioning of our incredibly complicated underground arterial system. These conversations also highlight how politics, that great and unruly beast, can sometimes complicate, and even upend, effective administration.
The current map of the subways is the product of a complicated history. It is first and foremost an act of imagination, a vision that has unfolded iteratively, as a variety of government and business decision-makers across the generations dreamed about what the city might become and where its citizens might reside. As ever, the current map is also shaped and constrained by money, with the astonishing expense of building more lines now topping a billion dollars per station.
Our contributors argue that it is possible to improve the design of our stations, platforms and turnstiles, to rethink work rules that inflate the cost of operations, and to test new approaches to dealing with people struggling with mental illness on the trains.
The subways have long been an object of desire for politicians — and a hot potato tossed, along with responsibility, between governors and mayors. Nicole Gelinas takes us through what this means for the city today. And Nolan Hicks describes how the political dynamics have created an almost impossible set of marching orders for the MTA: “You must run service that’s good enough that voters don’t get it in their heads to throw out the incumbent politicians, while keeping the unions happy enough that they don’t support challengers to the incumbent politicians, all while keeping fares low and keeping the agency from going broke.”
You can see all of these factors at work in the latest headline drama: the controversial “pause” that Gov. Kathy Hochul has ordered, halting a congestion pricing plan that would have plugged a hole in the subways’ budget — a deficit that seems to emerge, like Jason in “Friday the 13th,” with renewed terror every few years. The loss of the approximately billion dollars in expected annual revenue has now put many new projects on hold, as well as much needed programs of repair.
Where do we go from here?
While the focus of transit advocates and editorial writers remains fixated on congestion pricing, there are no silver-bullet solutions to the problems that continue to plague our subways. Moving forward, building a better system that is capable of powering us into the next century and beyond will take work on multiple fronts.
Yonah Freemark suggests that we might begin by taking lessons — and inspiration — from other cities with innovative subway systems. Our contributors argue that it is possible to improve the design of our stations, platforms and turnstiles, to rethink work rules that inflate the cost of operations, and to test new approaches to dealing with people struggling with mental illness on the trains.
According to Jay-Z:
“New York has a thousand universes in it that don’t always connect, but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don’t.”
It is easy to take the subways for granted. After all, they are (almost) always there for us. But their omnipresence should not obscure a crucial truth: The subways are the sine qua non of the city. Flawed they may be, but the subways are essential to (almost) everything that is special about New York.
We aren’t going to have the system of our dreams any time soon. It will take time, money and political will to create subways that are truly safe, accessible and reliable. But a good place to start would be to follow the advice of the train conductor who managed to make at least one miserable COVID-19-era subway ride memorable: Let’s all be cheerful, hopeful and confident about the future of the subway system.