drew

its just a tremendous snowball of fucked. in the 70s there was a budget crisis, which forced the MTA to fund everything through debt. that led to deferred maintenance and upgrades, which caused accidents and delays. those accidents led to train speed limits, which worsened waits

and now the backlog of maintenance and upgrades is a multibillion dollar problem. plus the 24-7 schedule means that even if there WAS enough money, which there isnt, there is never enough man-hours for meaningful repair. for ex, the L train is going to shut down for a year 2/

so that they can fix damage from hurricane sandy which happened six years ago. it is impossible to do the maintenance that is needed to fix the delays in the system, which only slow down an already very slow subway.