We’ve been over it and over it again and again, the sad state of our crumbling subways and how one day a delayed train you board just won’t move forward one bit. It’s a bad story, really. So, let’s all revisit it, because the world can never get enough reminders that we could use some spiffed-up subways. Today’s bad news: subway delays were up 40% on weekdays compared to last September, with almost 50,000 service disruptions a couple months ago, almost half of them due to the dread overcrowding.
amNewYork reports that the latest data on subway delay released by the MTA shows that close to 50,000 trains faced disruptions on weekdays, and 13,750 disruptions on weekends. Both of those numbers are huge increases when compared to last September, with 11,683 more delays on weekdays and 9,900 more on weekends reported in September 2014. While there were a litany of problems that caused the delays, overcrowding was responsible for 20,000 of them, which wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been on a train this year or witnessed the MTA have to respond to the issue with a cute Super Nintendo video.
Is there more bad news? Why yes, of course there’s more bad news. Beyond the data that amNewYork shared, you might be wondering if any help is coming down the subway tunnel, so to speak. Well what do you know, Streetsblog shared a report by the Regional Plan Association that looked at the giant backlog of necessary repairs for mass transit system across the country. There’s a combined $103 billion backlog in repairs for a number of systems that include the MTA, and it would take $13 billion per year in funding to fix everything. Only $6 billion per year is being spent to fix those transit systems, despite ridership being up. So, we’d start planning for the day when a train full of you and a thousand other people moves four feet out of the station and then just stops. Hopefully you can get a late pass.