MAY 31, 2017
It was 8:30 a.m. on
a Tuesday during the height of the morning rush on the nation’s busiest subway.
Suddenly, power went out at one station in Brooklyn, but that lone failure
triggered a meltdown that crippled service across New York City, stranding countless
commuters whose plans for the day were derailed.
One woman never
made it to housing court and now faces eviction. Another missed a doctor
appointment made months earlier. A graphic designer lost $100 in wages. A
computer technician paid more than $50 for an Uber car to make a meeting. A
lawyer was late for a sentencing. A pastry chef who needs every hour of work he
can scrounge lost an hour and a half of pay. A psychoanalyst never made it to
her session with a patient. Neither did her patient.
These are the very
real human costs, financial and otherwise, of a single subway disruption — just
one painful delay in what has become a season of transit misery. On this day, like so
many others, New Yorkers missed job interviews, medical appointments and other
basic responsibilities of daily life. They waited endlessly on platforms for
trains that never came. They crammed into overstuffed buses. They emailed
apologies to bosses and clients.
For many riders,
the subway is failing at its fundamental task — getting people where they need
to be when they need to be there.
It is difficult to calculate with precision the
economic fallout of a single awful day on the subway. But these episodes have
inarguably cost New Yorkers and their employers millions of dollars each year
in lost productivity, forfeited wages and extra expenses, like unplanned taxi
rides and extended child care.
The maddening subway
delays that Tuesday — May 9 — provide a window into the cascading economic
consequences of a single incident. A power loss that affected the signal system
at the DeKalb Avenue station wreaked havoc on at least seven lines stretching
from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
Hundreds of subway riders
ensnared by the disruption responded to a request by The New York Times to share their tales of
woe. The delays were an inconvenience for many, something more
serious for others, but cumulatively they take a debilitating toll, changing
lives in ways big and small.
For hourly wage workers
like Jonathan Yung, a pastry chef, the chaos meant losing badly needed income.
It took Mr. Yung three hours to travel from Brooklyn to a kitchen in Queens. He
missed an hour and a half of work, or about $27 in wages.
“If you’re going to lose
time based on the train, that’s money out of your pocket,” said Mr. Yung, who
often struggles to secure 40 hours of work each week.
Spencer Viator, a
professional opera singer, gave himself two hours to travel to an important
rehearsal on the Upper West Side. After taking four different trains, he
arrived 45 minutes late, harried and angry.
“When I got there, I had
to take a minute — I was so stressed from this entire ordeal,” said Mr. Viator,
who lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and was preparing for a performance of Mozart’s “Secret Gardener.”
“I needed a minute to calm down and become a human being again.”
With subway delays
surging, Mr. Viator has considered moving, but his work as an opera singer
keeps him here. “I would love to leave New York if I could,” he said.
Others faced more serious
repercussions. Alicia Sciascia had a 9:30 a.m. hearing in housing court in
Downtown Brooklyn. Her landlord had taken legal action against her, and she was
asking for more time to respond. She was turned away from a subway station in
Brooklyn. Buses were crammed with people. She did not arrive at court until 1
p.m.
“I was completely
flustered, but I imagined since it was such a big citywide emergency that I
would be able to be heard that day regardless,” Ms. Sciascia said.
Instead, she was cited
for failing to appear in court. Now, she is worried that a city marshal will
visit her home to start an eviction process.
The New York City metropolitan region
contributes $1.6 trillion a year to the national economy, or nearly 9 percent
of the gross domestic product in 2015, according to the Partnership for New
York City, an influential business group. Even a small dent in the city’s
economic output has ripple effects as conferences are canceled and offices sit empty,
and the constant upheaval undermines the quality of life, leading some to
consider moving.
The subway — New York’s
lifeblood, carrying nearly six million riders each day — has become so
unreliable that business leaders are worried the increasingly frail system will
damage the city’s recent growth and prosperity. Subway delays rose to more than
78,500 in March, up 14 percent from a year earlier, and some lines have an
on-time rate of under 40 percent.
Many riders direct their
fury at Mayor Bill de Blasio, when it is in fact Gov. Andrew
M. Cuomo who controls the subways. Subway officials
recently released a six-point plan to confront short-term problems, while Mr.
Cuomo announced a global competition aimed at long-term solutions.
“The combination of
breakdowns, delays and accidents, and the condition of the overall
transportation system serving the region, are very discouraging to employers
who saw the conditions deteriorate to a point in the 1980s that was
intolerable,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New
York City.
After the DeKalb Avenue
episode, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, called on the city’s
Independent Budget Office to study the economic impact of subway delays. In
1981, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York studied the economic costs of declining subway service. The
report found that a five-minute increase in the average length of each ride to
work could cost residents and employers more than $166 million annually. The
study examined lost hours (400,000 hours per week) multiplied by the average
wage ($8 an hour).
Based on that formula,
the cost would be far higher now that the average wage is about $30 an hour and
subway ridership has nearly doubled. Using the same formula, a rough estimate
for a five-minute increase in the length of a ride would be about $1.1 billion
annually.
On a personal level, it
means riders have to build in plenty of extra time to ensure they arrive on
time and be prepared to dig deeper into their pockets when the inevitable
subway upheaval forces a plan B.
On May 9, Shea Donato, a
lawyer who lives in Queens, was late for a 9:30 a.m. sentencing in Manhattan.
So was everyone else who was supposed to be at the hearing. After sitting on a
stalled train for at least 30 minutes, Ms. Donato walked to another line only
to find it was also delayed.
“This wasn’t an isolated
thing — it’s been building up,” she said of the delays. “This one was really
bad. I was frustrated and thought, ‘Of course this is happening again.’”
Pamela Schultz missed a
doctor’s appointment in Manhattan she had scheduled six months earlier. When
she arrived at her subway station in Ditmas Park in Brooklyn about 9 a.m.,
there were large crowds outside. She waited on the platform for a while, but
eventually gave up and went back home.
“This
is the second time in two months that this has happened, both to appointments
in Midtown,” she said.
Power problems were blamed for two other
major subway delays, on May 7 and April 21, and Con Edison took responsibility
for the disruptions. But the company would not accept fault for May 9. “We went
to the scene, we checked our equipment, and there were no abnormalities,” said
Mike Clendenin, a spokesman for Con Edison. Officials at the transportation
authority insist that the incident was caused by a Con Edison power failure.
While
several major disruptions have recently crippled large sections of the city,
the less tumultuous but persistent subway delays have led to a growing sense of
fatigue.
“There
is no alternative,” said Pavel Shreyder, a computer technician who paid for an
Uber on May 9 so he would not miss a work meeting. “We can only use the hashtag
#M.T.A.Sucks. What else can we do? Can we overthrow the management of the M.T.A.?”
Karen
Nelson, a psychoanalyst, missed her 9 a.m. therapy session with a patient
during the delays on May 9. The patient was caught up in the same disruption
and rescheduled. Ms. Nelson said she loses about $600 a year to canceled
appointments because of train delays.
“I
have my own business,” she said. “If I don’t have an appointment, I don’t make
any money.”
Patti
Lui, a graphic designer, lost $100 in wages when she was two hours late to work
after the same incident.
“Something I expect to run on
time,” she said, “is really disappointing me.”
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