MTA plans to decentralize subway management
by Sandy Ikeda
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 at 3:16 AM
When I moved to New York in 1980, people were still using the terms IND, IRT, and BMT to refer respectively to, as I recall, the A, C (in its various incarnations), D, E, F, and G trains; the nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 trains; and the M, N, and R trains. That's how I learned the system.
I miss the old, and I think useful, group designations (or maybe I'm just becoming an old fart). You could say, "Take the IND to 42nd Street," without having to explain this could be the A or C or E trains; or if you wanted to be clearer, you could say the Eighth Avenue IND. Today, I sometimes hear people, mostly newcomers and foreigners, referring to the "blue," "red," and "yellow" lines, which, I'm sorry, just sound too "Euro" for my taste. But mostly these days we just call them the A, 4, R, etc.
As I'm sure many of you already know, the older designations referred to the companies that ran those particular lines: BMT for "Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation," IRT for "Interborough Rapid Transit Company," and IND for "Independent Subway System." The first two were private companies and the last was government owned and operated.
According to the authoritative Encyclopedia of New York City, the competition from the government-run system helped drive the two private lines out of business, and the whole shebang became public property in 1940. (The much less-authoritative but handy Wikipedia covers much the same ground.)
Back last December the MTA announced that it wants to drastically reorganizing its management structure, ultimately giving each of the 24 or so subway lines more managerial autonomy. You can read about it here. They hope this will inject a level of competition among what may eventually become "24 self-contained railroads" with the aim of improving service, cleanliness, on-time performance, and responsiveness to complaints. The experiment will begin with the L and no. 7 lines, chosen because their existing relative self-containment, may allow easier monitoring of performance.
Frankly, because of shared tracks and interdependencies among trains on a given line (e.g., if the A train breaks down because of a fire on the track and that delays the E, who's fault is that?), it's hard to see how this extreme decentralization would be practicable. If it's the benefits of genuine competition the MTA wants, perhaps the answer is to re-privatizing the entire system along the lines of the original IRT and BMT. This time, though, privatize the IND as well and remove the unfairness that helped bankrupt those grand old companies.
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