Throwing More Money at the MTA Won't Solve Anything

This week, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joe Lhota unveiled a “how to fix the subways” strategy that is sound enough, but is mostly made of measures the MTA should have taken months ago – and, indeed, started to take before Lhota even arrived on the scene.

And despite Lhota’s professed commitment to turning things around, the MTA continues to confront bad news, as its board committee meeting Monday revealed.

First, subway delays continued to worsen before Lhota arrived. In May, only 61.7 percent of weekday trains ran on time, down from 68.8 percent last May. That’s a big 7.1 percent decline.

Second, the MTA continues to experience a different sort of delay: difficulty starting and finishing capital projects.

The MTA’s major problems right now stem from old signals and poor maintenance. The $600 million project to modernize the signals on the No. 7 line, now a decade into planning and construction, is supposed to be finished later this year.

Read the entire piece here at City & State's New York Slant

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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 City & State's NY Slant