New York City commuters voice anger at decay of mass transit system
By
our reporters
12 July 2017
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which operates the buses, subways and three commuter rail lines in the New York metropolitan area, has been plagued by the failure of a century-old signal system, train derailments, and emergency track work this summer, causing significant delays for millions of people. New Jersey Transit and the federal railroad, Amtrak, have also seen significant problems.
With emergency repairs that began on Monday in Manhattan’s Penn Station, which handles 600,000 commuters a day, mass transit is slated to become even slower and more dangerous for the rest of the summer in what the Democratic Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, has called “the summer of hell.”
Delays and accidents on subways and commuter rails have raised social anger to the boiling point among the millions who depend on the system to get to work, to medical appointments, childcare or cultural activities. Trains are late, may be stalled in tunnels, and, particularly on the subway, are crowded to capacity. It is noteworthy that this slow-motion disaster is coming even when schools and universities are on summer break and students are not commuting to their schools.
There is little confidence among commuters that the political establishment has the will or ability to fix the aging infrastructure or even provide timely and necessary information about the state of the system.
A survey released this week by the City Comptroller’s office on Monday noted that riders have a level of anger that largely follows the patterns of inequality in the city. Sixty-eight percent of riders surveyed from the poorest borough, the Bronx, for example, gave the…