A week ago, the MTA held yet another press conference to announce yet another month of improving subway service. Afterwards, reporters did what they do and went to subway stations to ask riders: do you notice?

Here, for example, is AMNY:

But many riders waiting for their trains on Monday said they are still waiting to feel that lift — especially with another fare hike coming at the end of the month.
“I would say definitely not, they’re wrong,” said Kyle McCarthy, 30 who lives upstate and commutes to his job as an elevator mechanic in the city. “And with proposed rate hikes coming up, I would expect them to be a lot better than 75 percent.”

And:

“I haven’t noticed a change,” said Doug Ray, 61, of Fort George in upper Manhattan. “I have lived here for 40 years; it’s par for the course. The city has all kinds of frustrations and you just deal with it.”

At the press conference, Andy Byford had a different take. He said people regularly come up to him and are increasingly saying “you know what? It’s getting better.”

Rather than try to reconcile this discrepancy, I want to focus on a related question. Certainly some people notice things are getting better, but many appear not to. How much does it matter?

Not too long ago, I was on the train and thoroughly engrossed in a David Sedaris essay and guffawing like an idiot (this is not a literary review newsletter, but it was Six to Eight Black Men) so much so that I didn’t even notice, until I arrived late for a meeting, that my subway trip took about 15 minutes longer than normal. Contrast that to last week, reading a book I was not particularly into, when I was filled with angst when the dwell time at Franklin Ave stretched beyond one minute. Objectively, my Sedaris trip was a far worse subway performance. Subjectively, that freaking Franklin Ave dwell still irks me because I really had to pee.

And if we’re talking about meltdowns, or Major Incidents as the MTA calls them, then it comes down to our ability to coalesce anecdotal evidence—how often did my train screw up last month, last year, etc.?—into a narrative about subway service as a whole, a massive system which each individual rider only experiences a tiny fraction of. Every single rider’s perception of this issue, taken on its own, is fatally flawed as an overarching analysis. How many times have you gotten to work just fine only to hear a coworker bemoaning their nightmare commute, or vice versa?

This isn’t a queston people are good at intuiting. When you ask the average New Yorker something along the lines of “Do you think the subway is getting better?” in my experience they don’t think very hard before answering, and they typically will then start telling you stories about their recent subway trips, some of which have nothing to do with the actual service. This is akin to asking a random person, “How’s the economy doing?” They probably haven’t the slightest clue what the latest GDP or CPI figures are, but they know if they have a job or if they can pay their mortgage.

So, OK: MTA stats are giving us a clear picture, and most people don’t know what they’re talking about. Just ignore what the people say, right?

Well, what’s the point of better service if nobody notices?

I don’t pose this question to demoralize my MTA employee readers. But I do think it’s an important consideration: how do you win the trust of riders who are preternaturally predisposed to distrust you? How much improvement is enough to flip the narrative? What is the threshold where people start to notice? Is it a realistic one?

I don’t have the answers to those questions. My guess is riders don’t react positively when presented with these statistics because our rides have not gotten 15, 20, or 25 percent better as the various MTA statistics seemingly imply (they don’t actually say this, but numerical literacy is yet another weak point of the human mind; it would behoove the MTA, for many reasons, to start reporting train run times, which are both easy to understand—it took xx minutes to get from here to there is a metric that needs no explanation—and separate train performance from schedule adjustments). Nor do riders like fare hikes.

I was reminded of this issue later in the week when Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte, who represents a chunk of Flatbush with eight subway stops, ranted against congestion pricing:

Right now, I’m going to go with my constituents. Right now, we’re not in favor of congestion pricing in its form as it is today. But we are certainly for fixing the issue of our roads and streets being overpopulated and fixing the subway. Subways need to be fixed! We need to find ways, alternative funding. The “millionaire’s tax.” That’s one way we can go about funding our broken subway system. You have to understand, everyone, the outer boroughs have been ignored for a very long time. OK? Low-income people of color have been dealing with our public systems for many many years, 30, 40 years. Completely ignored. We on the state level have been funding the MTA with billions and billions of dollars in capital. Fares have been increased. In my district, we had workers’ jobs taken away. Subway station workers have been closed down. My constituents are asking, “If we are increasing the fares, where is it going? How come we’ve been yelling for years — 30, 40 years to fund our MTA — and nothing has been done?” And now, people are looking to tax people who are mostly vulnerable. So there’s a lot of issues. Again, we all want the same thing. We want to move New York City more efficiently and expediently, but not at the cost of our working families.”

Her general contention that her constituents will be harmed by congestion pricing is not supported by the facts. This prompted me to pose this question on Twitter:

Aaron W. Gordon @A_W_Gordon

Question about these downstate politicians opposing congestion pricing: what's their end game? They block CP, the MTA has to seriously consider massive service cuts and/or fare hikes, and...nobody blames them? How do they figure they're not the new IDC?

To which non-voting MTA board member Norman Brown, who represents the Metro-North riders, replied:

Norman Brown @NormanB39802821

@A_W_Gordon They will always have the MTA to blame. It’s the gift to politicians that keeps on giving. The politicians take credit for the good the MTA does and then bravely blame the MTA when it fails.

Brown’s reply prompted me to re-visit Bichotte’s remarks. There’s something deeper going on here. She’s not really talking about congestion pricing. What she’s saying is she believes her constituents harbor deep, long-standing animosity towards the MTA, which is almost certainly true. That is the basis of her opposition.

Indeed, politicians “always have the MTA to blame,” as Brown put it, because their constituents are always more than happy to blame the MTA. Which then gives politicians implicit permission to abdicate their collective responsibility to oversee the transit authority, refuse to fund it in a consistent, predictable manner, and ensure they’re putting it in a position where it can succeed.

This is not to say the MTA is faultless for what ails it—if you’re thinking that’s my point, welcome, you must be new around here—but that any public authority needs oversight, proper governance, and political accountability to succeed. When the conversation begins and ends with some version of “the MTA sucks,” it perpetuates a vicious cycle, one we had the pleasure of witnessing within the span of a few days.

This has shifted my perspective on the issue a bit. I now realize this is far more of a battle for hearts and minds than I previously considered. The MTA’s challenge now, and perhaps its biggest one yet, is to get people to believe in it. In the end, this may prove an even harder task than running the trains on time.

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News You Probably Can't Use, But About Which You Can Certainly Brood

The Automatic Train Supervision system (ATS), which monitors train locations on the numbered lines, went down twice this week, once on Thursday at 11 AM and again on Friday around 9 AM. The cause of both system failures were officially listed as “software events,” which, incidentally, was also the cause of my 2009 HP laptop being a piece of crap. How does NYCT troubleshoot when the computerized monitoring system for all the numbered lines go down?
Yes, that’s right, the good ol’ fashioned power cycle, the reboot, the restart, turning it off and on again, the same thing your insufferable internet company customer service rep tells you when your internet isn’t working. Because at the end of the day, computers are computers, and whether it’s your cat video delivery machine or the one that facilitates getting millions of people around America’s biggest city (equally important tasks, if I do say so myself), it’s still just a computer.
Spotted in the committee materials for this month: 123 new buses going on the M15 and B44 SBS lines are being equipped with automatic bus lane camera enforcement technology! These cameras, installed on the front of buses, can automatically issue tickets to vehicles illegally parked in bus lanes.

This is potentially big news for faster buses, although I’m puzzled by the fact that this is apparently yet another “pilot program,” even though NYCT tested this very technology from the exact same company in 2010 during another pilot program. The MTA doesn’t really explain why this needs to be a pilot program other than to say they have to “evaluate the system’s ability to identify violations and improve bus speeds,” but the 2010 pilot already evaluated whether the technology worked (it does) and even if it doesn’t improve bus speeds (it does) who cares? Ticketing vehicles for violating the law is an important civic function in its own right.

Weekly Anti-Hudson Yards Link

In short, the Vessel is a vessel of its time, and its sheer shittiness as architecture and urbanism, itself a small part of the bigger tyranny of capitalism, at least invites us to dream of something, anything, better than this.

-Kate Wagner in The Baffler

Meanwhile, in the Rest of the World

National Geographic ran a sprawling feature on how to de-car-ify cities and to what extent the Portland Model has caught on in China.
This article about why the DC streetcar is so damn slow (but not as slow as people think) made me wonder why we build streetcars that mix with traffic at all.
You won’t believe this but the Trump administration is back on their transit funding bullshit.
Gwinnett County outside of Atlanta voted once again to not join MARTA, the region’s mass transit system. It has now rejected MARTA three times. Approximately 90,000 votes were cast in the special election out of a total of 544,000 registered voters, or about 16.5 percent turnout.
More bad news in Phoenix, as Republicans are up to their usual funny business to kill mass transit projects, this time a light rail project.
"why is a donut shop in charge of opening a train station?” Buddy! What a ridiculous question. Dunkin Donuts is so much more than a donut shop.

As always, head over to Subway Weekender for all your unofficial weekend and late night service advisory breakdowns

This Time Last Year

One of my favorite newsletters, Oversharing, has a section called This Time Last Year. It’s a great idea. I’m stealing it.

I didn’t plan it this way, but I wrote about another vicious cycle this time last year, specifically about buses:

The idea that buses aren’t “sexy” is so internalized in American culture that even advocates for expanded bus service like Levine recite it. The conventional wisdom that buses aren’t “sexy” is a self-defeating cycle, in which perception begets reality which reinforces the perception. Nobody appears willing to break the vicious circle. The fixes aren’t complicated or expensive, particularly by NYC transit standards, but they require determination, political will, and a holistic vision, all traits NYC’s bus landscape is horribly lacking.

The major news items were:

Cynthia Nixon declared her candidacy for governor
MTA board member and Cuomo aide Larry Schwartz verbally berated a public speaker from a good governance watchdog

Dog in a Bag

MTA Rules of Conduct Section 1050.9 Subsection (h) Paragraph 2: no person may bring any animal on or into any conveyance or facility unless enclosed in a container and carried in a manner which would not annoy other passengers.

Have a dog in a bag photo? Reading this on the subway and see a dog in a bag? Take a picture and send it to signalproblems@substack.com.

Photo credit: Corey Hartmann

This has been another edition of Signal Problems, a weekly newsletter helping you figure out what is going on with the subway, made every week by Aaron Gordon. Read on the web or view the archives at signalproblems.nyc.

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others. It’s the best way you can say thanks.

As always, send any feedback, subway questions, or Dog in a Bag photos to signalproblems@substack.com. I’d love to hear from you. As someone on a stalled Q train once told me, we’re all in this together.

What's the point of better service if people…

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