The Man Who Made New York City Subways Great Again
You may think you know the names of the people who resuscitated New York from its ’70s and ’80s collapse: Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly on crime, Dick Ravitch and Felix Rohatyn on finances.
“When Gov. Mario Cuomo appointed Kiley to chair the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1983, the subways were in a state of "advanced decline," he told state officials upon taking his post.”
Add Robert Kiley, who headed the MTA in the ’80s, to the list.
Kiley, who died last Tuesday at 80, helped rescue our subways — and thus our city — from decay.
When Gov. Mario Cuomo appointed Kiley to chair the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1983, the subways were in a state of “advanced decline,” he told state officials upon taking his post. Kiley, a CIA veteran who had also headed up Boston’s public-transit system, would now head a New York system whose customers were still deserting it. Annual ridership had fallen below 1 billion in 1982, for the first time since World War I.
Riders were leaving because subways were not only graffiti-covered, but unsafe. Train operators had to go slowly around 500 “red tags” that inspectors had put up to warn of deteriorated tracks.
People who had no choice but to take their chances on the trains complained about “doors that do not open and trains that are abruptly removed from service” because of mechanical failure, The New York Times reported back then.
Kiley had an advantage: His predecessor, Ravitch, had secured $8.5 billion from state taxpayers to rebuild the system. But Kiley had to make sure the MTA spent it wisely. He also needed to get results, so that he could secure even more funds — he estimated at least another $10 billion (it has ended up being more than $100 billion).
Kiley grasped something critical: If he sent brand-new train cars out only to be covered with graffiti, people wouldn’t support more investments.
In his second month in charge, Mayor Ed Koch begged riders on one new train to “keep the subway cars clean. We’ve got to stop the graffiti mongers.”
But Koch had been saying this for four years without much effect. And riders weren’t the people spraying trains.
Kiley and his managers decided to start scrubbing subway cars — and when cleaned cars came back dirty, they wouldn’t send them out again until they were cleaned.
Cleaners of the first such train called it “snow white.” Commuters were shocked that weeks later, it was still clean. It took five years to finish the rest — but it worked.
Kiley also pushed to cut crime on the subways. “People have a perception of rising disorder and a sense of a loss of control,” he said in 1989. “I believe there ought to be order in the station. We’re not proposing jackboots, whips and clubs. We’re asking our police officers to enforce the rules” against panhandling underground and the like.
The police balked. A union official said maintaining order was “not our job” and “can’t work.”
A year later, Bill Bratton came to New York, also from Boston, to head the transit police, and showed that it was, and it could.
In the ’80s, it wasn’t unusual for the subways to see 20 murders a year. Now, the figure is one or two. When Kiley quit the MTA in 1990, the subways were in better shape: Breakdowns were down by three-fourths, and trains were clean.
Riders were gingerly coming back — as was the city’s population. Indeed, without first fixing the subways in the ’80s, New York wouldn’t have had the tax base to cut crime citywide in the ’90s.
Kiley suffered great personal tragedy. In 1974, he lost his wife and two children in a car crash on I-95 in The Bronx. But he carried on — and helped save other lives.
In looking at a disaster of a subway system in the ’80s, he said that a simple problem had a simple solution. “They are either not using the subways because they think service is bad or because they are afraid . . . We should be able to do something about that . . . the rest will take care of itself.”
It did. Last year, the city’s subways carried nearly 1.8 billion riders — including a few people who, had they been forced into cars by a still-broken transit system, would’ve died in car wrecks.
New Yorkers are still benefiting from the work that Kiley and others did three decades ago.
Will New Yorkers in 2050 be able to say the same about transit improvements made under the current Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio — or are today’s leaders content to keep relying on infrastructure that their predecessors built?
This piece originally appeared the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post