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What a corrupt money pit. The MTA received $15 billion over the past 2 years in Federal aid. The MTAs annual operating budget is around $17 billion. The MTA essentially received a 50% subsidy over the past 2 years yet now they still need more money.
The MTA is nothing but a very low productivity jobs program where billions in taxpayer money go into the pockets of MTA labor and management. Fire half of them. Let them go and flip burgers at McDonalds.the service would be the same.
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The MTA needs a huge infusion of cash to close the massive budget gap created by a nearly 40% decline in ridership since the COVID-19 pandemic, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said Thursday.
“The MTA’s large budget gaps are coming into greater focus as ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels and federal relief runs out,” DiNapoli said in a statement accompanying a new nine-page analysis of the $18 billion-per-year agency’s budget.
“Unless there is an additional influx of city, state or federal aid, the MTA is facing stark options for closing its budget gaps that will impact riders,” DiNapoli said.
Some 5 million-plus people rode the MTA’s subways, buses and commuter railroads before COVID-19 hit in early 2020, and their fares accounted for 51.1% of the authority’s operating costs.
But with many New Yorkers opting not to return to transit, that figure stood at just 31.9% as of May 2022, DiNapoli’s analysis found.
It is time to let it go. These subway systems attract criminals and poor people. If it would cause too much traffic than just have 50% of the workforce work at home.
Raise the subway/bus fair to $5. Raise the suburban rail fairs a similar amount. Stop undercharging for transportation as a form of welfare.
The MTA is literally a money pit. They have are more than adequately funded. Don't buy the MTA narrative that they're "underfunded".
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. Molinaro has it right, however: the MTA is, if anything, overfunded. It spends far more than other large transit agencies and wastes several times the amount that congestion pricing would raise. The MTA’s budget has soared over the last decade, though it has scarcely expanded service. In 2007, the MTA spent $12.8 billion in operating expenses and an additional $1.7 billion in debt service. In 2017, it spent $19.1 billion in operating costs—a 58 percent increase, far outstripping the same period’s 18 percent inflation—and $2.5 billion in debt service. By 2022, according to the MTA’s July 2018 financial plan, operating costs will reach $22.2 billion. The increase stems largely from labor costs, which swelled from $7.3 billion in 2007 to $11.2 billion in 2017, and which will reach $12.9 billion by 2022.
Other large cities’ transit systems operate far more efficiently. The London Underground, for example, outspans the New York subway—at 250 miles to New York’s 234—and offers more frequent service, with most lines running a train every three or four minutes, even during midday. Transport for London, the agency that runs the Underground, also operates bus service, with 9,549 buses—twice as many as the 4,451 vehicles owned by the MTA’s New York City Transit division. In fiscal year 2017–18, Transport for London spent £4.75 billion, or roughly $6.2 billion, to operate its subways and buses; New York City Transit spent $9.5 billion in 2017. Transportation writer Alon Levy calculates that New York spends $15.10 to move a subway car one mile, compared with London’s $9.30 and Paris’s $9.60.
The MTA’s inefficiency stems mainly from poor use of labor. In 2017, for example, the agency paid $1.2 billion in overtime, over one-tenth of its total labor expenses. Overtime payments have almost doubled since 2010, when the state comptroller warned that, during the previous year, the MTA’s “culture of acceptance” of excessive overtime had let 3,269 employees rack up overtime payments amounting to at least half their salary.
More significantly, the MTA is overstaffed. Few subway systems other than New York City’s, for example, employ both drivers and conductors. Most subways manage with just one worker on board, or even none—Paris and Copenhagen, among other cities, have fully automated some subway lines. And New York has made few attempts to reduce subway labor expenses. In 2005, the MTA tried to remove conductors from the L train after technology upgrades enabled one-person train operation, but the state Supreme Court ruled that the agency had violated its labor contract and ordered the obsolete conductors reinstated.
New York’s commuter railroads are as a result several times more expensive than those of their counterparts in other cities. In 2017, fares on the LIRR and Metro North covered, respectively, 32.1 percent and 39.5 percent of their operating expenses. Paris’s mass-transit agencies logged a comparable 37.7 percent. But fares in New York are much higher: a monthly LIRR ticket from Penn Station to Hicksville, for instance, costs $297, and a monthly Metro-North ticket from Grand Central to White Plains $268, while an unlimited monthly pass for almost every bus, subway, and railroad in the Paris region costs only 73.20 euros, about $86.
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