Progress Derailed: The Cause & Effect Of NYC's Transit Funding Crisis

If one day's events can illustrate the spectacular low point of disrepair that the New York City subway system reached in the 1980s, that day might well be January 8, 1981, when 1,000 passengers crowded into a broken train at Hoyt-Schermerhorn station collectively refused to leave for it to be taken out of service. Many said they had already been ordered off of other broken trains, and besides, the platform was too crowded to hold many more people.

The impasse finally eased, after police had arrived, when Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers handed out tokens for free transfers. The history of the city's public transit in the 80s, though, is full of similar breaking points, the inevitable outcome of decades of deferred maintenance and under-funding.

The authority's current fiscal crisis, which has led to higher fares and frustrating service cuts with no relief in sight, has transit advocates worried that, if the current situation persists, service will continue to slide – maybe not to the conditions of the early 80s, but to something worse than New Yorkers have seen in years.

"The danger here is that the economy stays bad and the state funding of transit stays fickle, and death by a thousand cuts," says Gene Russianoff, staff attorney and spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign. "I would say that if we continue with this string of bad years we've been having, we could be teetering on the brink."

And there's more at stake than just the comfort and convenience of passengers. "The whole region would be choked in traffic were it not for the additional capacity that trains and buses bring," said John Petro, a policy analyst at the Drum Major Institute. Petro called improved public transportation one of the major causes in the city's re-emergence from its lean years in the 70s and 80s.

By constantly under-funding the MTA, local governments are missing valuable opportunities to help the system expand, he adds. Cities like Shanghai and Barcelona, he says, are in the midst of transit expansions that could one day threaten New York's global competitiveness.

While the current debate drags on, "we're not talking about, how can we use the tool of mass transit expansion to create jobs, to create wealth, to create much-needed housing," Petro says. With the region's roads at the limits of their capacity, he added, "It really comes down at this point to whether we're going to be a city that continues to grow."

The MTA's fiscal crisis has an array of causes, many of which boil down to this: It takes a lot of money to run a transit system, and the MTA doesn't have enough. Part of that is a result of the bad economy and decreased tax revenue. A large part comes from state lawmakers' unwillingness to provide the necessary funding.

Progress has a pricetag

The January 1981 straphanger revolt was the product of an epidemic of poor service underground. Trains in 1981 broke down four times as often as in 1970. In 1980, 30 trains derailed. And the train that broke down at Hoyt-Schermerhorn that fateful January 8 was one of 500 cancelled every day for the first two weeks of the year.

The early years of the 80s, though, were also when the MTA began to turn itself around, launching a $7.6 billion capital plan to begin long-overdue facilities and equipment repairs.

The five-year program was the first in a series of capital plans that have continued to this day, growing ever more expensive. But even as the cost of capital improvements has risen, monetary contributions from New York State's government have dwindled, forcing the MTA into a spiral of costlier and costlier borrowing.