Midtown’s Hammerstein Ballroom used to be an opera house. Thursday, Gov. Cuomo showed up there to act out his favorite part, the hero. He declared New York’s subway system to be in “a state of emergency.” Cuomo promised to rescue New Yorkers from the MTA’s “deplorable,” “tortured” system. It’s still too early to tell whether this opera will be a comedy or a tragedy — with the 5.6 million people who ride the subways every day starring as the victims.
Yes, we know already — New York has grown and the subway system hasn’t kept up, blah blah.
But here are a couple of newer statistics. For the first five months of this year, only 65 percent of trains were on time, a decline from last year’s 69 percent, and a huge drop from the 86 percent that was normal five years ago.
Trains are failing more often — every 115,527 miles, down from 170,206, or 32 percent, from half a decade ago. In April 2012, 21,944 trains suffered delays. By April 2017, the figure was 58,651.
It makes a huge difference in people’s lives if their train to Ocean Parkway or Dyckman Street is supposed to get there in 40 minutes, and it regularly takes more than an hour — but you don’t know when it’s going to be running or not.
As Cuomo said Thursday....
Read the entire piece here at 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