Submitted by Will, Sep 26, 2007 11:05

I fear that some comments in this editorial can be all too easily misunderstood and even misinterpreted.

While I have no hard and fast opinion to offer regarding whether or not the subway and mass transit system might (or might not) be operated more efficiently by a private sector entity, I feel that an oft-repeated misconception truly needs to be corrected, as I have seen it appear all too often in various publications (including the New York Sun) without a clear explanation of the actual history.

You state that the subway system was "run by private enterprise instead of a government monopoly bureaucracy" and that "Belmont opened his Interborough Rapid Transit Company". However, these comments are somewhat misleading at best and purposefully disingenuous at worst. Although the subway was indeed operated by the IRT, it could not have been built without municipal funding in the form of bonds backed with the full faith and credit of the City. The subway never fully belonged to Belmont, and to suggest otherwise (as this editorial does) is to engage in an exercise in nostalgia for an urban legend that never existed - the fully private sector subway. In fact, the subway should be recognized for what it truly was: a late 19th century version of an innovative public-private partnership.

As to the comment that The Bronx was "awash with privately owned and operated trolley cars" - this is also only part of the whole story, and can be somewhat misleading without some clarification. While the Third Avenue Railway - and other trolleycar systems throughout the nation - were indeed private sector entities, they enjoyed very substantial protections granted to them by the public sector in the form of the franchises that allowed them to be the sole operators of transit service in their respective service areas, so as to protect them from "ruinous competition" (to use the language of the day) and allow the public to enjoy a reliable, stable and ubiquitous transit service which utilized a public asset (i.e., the street itself). In order to retain the franchises certain minimum service criteria had to be met (thus leading to middle-of-the-night service to be referred to as "franchise runs") and this allowed the public to know that service wouldn't just disappear overnight on the whim of some executive who never used the trolley system himself.

I hope that future editorials recognize these important nuances in our history, because when it comes to issues as important as these I truly believe that the "devil is in the details" and to pretend that the "good old days" were free of any public sector involvement in the provision of transit service is just plain silly.

As always, thank you for the oppotunity to comment.

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