This is one of those posts that could be part of a series called, "Campaign Platforms I'd Have If Anyone Was Ever Stupid Enough to Support My Run for Office." See also my radical theory on having New York City purchase back overdeveloped properties, only to bulldoze and send them back into the wild as one-family homes.
There is no greater sign of the decline and fall of New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg than how our public transportation infrastructure has started to return to its broken down, constantly delayed, overcrowded, unsafe and dirty 1970s roots. Granted, it's not his fault per se -- the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is a quasi-state agency with its own multi-billion dollar budget -- but as the City's visible and nominal leader of course it is difficult to not tie developments that occur under his reign to his legacy, for better or worse.
But this post isn't about Mayor Mike, it's about my own radical idea for getting the MTA back on track.
Two of my recent commutes have proven less than stellar. Last evening, for unknown reasons, many Long Island Railroad lines featured the phenomenon known as "combined service." Of course, there is nothing actually combined about the service -- rather, it's a euphemism for cancelling certain scheduled departures and then "combining" all of the remaining aggravated passengers onto a super-slow, super-crowded local train.
Then, this morning, the train mysteriously pulled into my home station two cars shorter than usual. Where did the other two cars go? Did they call out sick? Were they playing hide and seek? How did they decide to magically uncouple from their train? All humor aside, as a result, again passengers were forced to cram into much less real estate, and I enjoyed a lovely ride to work sandwiched between two rather large and fragrant gentlemen. But at least I had a seat, of course, which is more than I can say for hundreds of folks on the jam-packed line.
These issues are, of course, a failure to provide a service that has been paid for, not only fares but also through taxes and other fees -- and such failures are only acceptable in the unaccountable world of Big Government. In the real world, a private company would offer you your money back for far less. So, to bring back a little bit of that spirit of accountability, I modestly propose the following: when the MTA fails to provide an appropriate paid service, all riders can and should receive an immediate refund for that trip. The time for excuses has passed us by. Only by instituting a reverse-Pavlovian punishment for failure to provide service can we end the vicious cycle of runaway spending with little tangible return.
I know what you are thinking: already facing hundreds of millions of dollars in deficit spending, how can the MTA possibly afford to start returning collected/counted revenues? The answer is simple. The refunds come out of the pay of every single MTA employee -- from the Chairman and CEO Jay Walder to the lowest-wage members of the Transportation Workers of America union. The deductions will be taken on a percentage basis, not by dollar amount, to ensure the "fairness" of the incentive (meaning, the CEO and a motorman both lose a theoretical 0.1% of their salary, two possibly very different numbers based on what they make but still an "equal" burden...call it a bizarro flat tax!).
Simultaneously, you could also reward good service. Crews and maintenance yards with the highest percentage of on-time trains, or with trains that require the least time out of revenue service at the end of the year, would receive bonuses at the end of the year for a job well done. Incentivizing productivity in a government/union endeavor! What a concept!
The policy wouldn't even be that difficult to implement with current technology. We all swipe or show passes to gain access to the transit system, those records imported into a database and mashed up with information on the when's and where's of system outages and delays should be more than feasible. And with a robust system of revolutionary accountability in place, do you think perhaps all functions in the agency -- from maintenance to cleanliness to timeliness -- might become a bigger priority?
This concludes today's pipe dream.
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Friday, September 17, 2010 at 7:08PM 
Passengers emerge into the night with nowhere to go. Even the #7 Subway above refused to leave the station for hours.
Imagine this sort of downed foliage evenly distributed across every inch of hundreds of miles of track, and you understand why the LIRR ground to a halt.
Based on the surroundings, these branches would have to have been carried for the equivalent of several city blocks to wind up here on the platform.