The New York City Subway, with its dreary stations without air conditioning, trash on the tracks, homeless people in the passageways, and slow-moving rats everywhere, is something you really want to hide underground, out of sight. It clashes with the above-ground luxury of Manhattan, with the peaks of its proud skyscrapers, with the gilded domes and spires of churches, shiny limousines, and yellow taxis. But it is simply impossible to imagine life in a working metropolis without the subway (or, more precisely, the elevated railway just outside Manhattan, since almost half of the tracks are laid above ground) — the life of an 8-million-strong city would be paralyzed.
The first line of the New York subway was launched in October 1904, and now the total length of all its tracks, including spare and depot tracks, is 1,300 kilometers. Last year, the city’s subway system, which operates around the clock without a night break, carried 1.65 billion passengers. That’s an average of 5.3 million people on a typical working day.
Americans claim that the Big Apple’s subway, with its 468 stations, is the most extensive urban public transport system in the world.
Like the vast majority of successful projects in the US, the underground railway was the result of private initiative.
Starting in 1933, when the first municipal line appeared, two forms of ownership competed until 1953, when all underground and above-ground lines, bridges, and tunnels were purchased by the municipality and transferred to the New York City Transit Authority or MTA, a state corporation that provides ground passenger transportation throughout New York State.
The transfer of public transport to state ownership was explained to city residents as a desire to control ticket prices in the interests of passengers, not owners. In practice, this meant that from 1904 to 1948, the fare was a low 5 cents, and only after 44 years of stability was it doubled to 10 cents. The transfer of the entire enterprise to the state corporation in 1953 was accompanied by an immediate 50% increase in the price of a token to 15 cents. And in the last five years alone, the fare has increased four times. Today, a trip on the New York subway costs $2.50 regardless of distance. However, the same ticket can be used for another bus ride for free.
A monthly pass is a good gift. It was precisely this that the city hall staff gave to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his birthday. And since Bloomberg has reached the official retirement age, he was presented with a discounted ticket.
The New York subway is considered potentially bankrupt and is subsidized by the New York government. Fare revenue covers only about half of its budget, with the rest covered by property taxes. However, after the mortgage bubble burst, neither the market nor tax revenues have recovered to their previous levels.
Ordinary New Yorkers are not enthusiastic about their state-owned transport corporation, and they have good reason to believe that it has grown into a bureaucratic monster, with over 6,000 civil servants on its staff. The corporation’s management consists of 19 board members representing all areas of the city and state, plus five top managers appointed by the governor, four by the mayor of New York, and one each by three New York suburbs. Thus, the number of bosses (each with their own staff) at the MTA exceeds three dozen. The corporation’s budget deficit is over a billion dollars.
The Local 100 subway workers’ union has only resorted to strikes three times in its history. As a result, subway workers were equated with firefighters and police officers in terms of risk, and were granted pension payments after 20 years of service. When, several years ago, in the wake of the financial crisis, the public transport system announced the elimination of 1,000 jobs, it affected the lowest-paid employees. Incidentally, even this low income is well above the national average, amounting to $55,000 per year.
The famous yellow MTA card, actively used in urban design, carnival costume making, and the creation of elaborate hats for the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue, appeared relatively recently, in 1993.
Initially, payment in the subway was made with metal tokens. However, various methods of fraud — from plugging the slots with paper to retrieve the token to using tokens from the subway in neighboring Connecticut, where it was a third cheaper — forced the city authorities to tighten financial security at the facility.
Physical security in the subway was established somewhat earlier, in the 1960s, when New York Mayor Robert Wagner increased the number of transit police from 1,219 to 3,100. However, it was under Rudolph Giuliani, who won the 1993 election, that the city’s underground railways became truly safe.
Public transportation within Manhattan is considered relatively safe.