Save our subways, stop the suffering
It occurred to me Tuesday morning, somewhere past the one-hour mark into my 35-minute commute, that my relationship to the MTA had fundamentally changed. My fellow riders and I were no longer passengers, paying customers — we were trapped.
For the five years I’ve lived in New York and traveled each day on the F train, I have been one of the subway’s most vehement defenders. When friends from other cities would visit and bemoan the MTA, I’d spring to its defense — it moves millions of people around each day, and together those millions of people, swashbuckling their way to work across the New York metro area, produce nearly a tenth of the country’s GDP.
Even after multiple fare increases, I resent the New York City premium I pay on my rent and food, but not when it comes to transit. I have always felt that I get 100% of my money’s worth out of my monthly MetroCard, and I’m proud to live in a city where car ownership is considered laughable. Never mind the sweltering platforms in deep summer or the rats who seem to be evolving ever closer to having opposable thumbs — in the time I’ve lived in New York, there has always been at least a decent chance that a train would arrive, and deliver you to your destination.
Those days, it seems, are firmly behind us. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported a sad but hardly surprising uptick in violence against MTA employees. I was reading that very article on my phone when the deeply frustrated conductor came on the public-address system to offer us the number of our train, so that passengers’ bosses could call the MTA to confirm the reason we were late for work. At one point, her voice actually choked up, and I wanted to cry for both of us.
And yet I also found myself fascinated that anyone could actually find an MTA employee to abuse.
I couldn’t find an MTA employee or a cop last summer, when I watched a man slam his girlfriend’s head into a steel girder on a crowded platform. I couldn’t find anyone to alert about the disoriented, violent man traveling alone with an infant in a stroller.
I’ve never seen anyone in a uniform challenge the increasing number of panhandlers who grow verbally abusive when riders don’t cough up the donations they’re soliciting.
Customers like me have the least to lose when subways fail to function. Able-bodied and financially stable, I don’t have children to get to school in the morning or any other factors that complicate my routine. I also don’t have an hourly wage job or a supervisor who particularly cares what moment I arrive at the office (though showing up hours after I’d planned certainly hasn’t helped my output).
But for the many riders for whom this current state of catastrophe can mean missed wages, lost jobs or lapsed child care, the stakes are more than just deep inconvenience; they may actually be suffering life consequences.
Like other riders, I’m tired — literally, because I keep doing things like rising at dawn thinking that beating peak rush hour will somehow improve my chances (it doesn’t) — but primarily I’m tired of excuses.
I’m weary of hearing about the damage that Hurricane Sandy — which swept through New York nearly five years ago — did to a system that had already begun to deteriorate beyond repair long before Mother Nature tested its mettle. I’m tired of watching the mayor and the governor play hot potato with a failing system they’re both privileged not to rely on.
Who’ll lose their job as a result of this catastrophic failure by multiple public agencies? I’m loath to reference the political landscape in the city where I was born, Chicago, but at least there, mayors know that if you don’t clear the streets after a blizzard, if you fail your citizens in the most fundamental of ways, you may very well lose your job.
We don’t need subterranean Wi-Fi, we don’t need the Library Train, and I’d even sacrifice the new electronic update boards if the MTA could guarantee us a train that arrives sort of on time, most of the time. That would be the absolute, rock-bottom, bare minimum — and far more than what we’ve come to expect.
Stuck on a train, it dawned on me: MTA riders are no longer customers. We’re trapped.