Bridges, Tunnels, & Crowds
Remember when the Williamsburg bridge was falling down? No, well, you may not have cared; God knows NYC didn’t show much concern until it really was nearly too late. Now, however, after years and years of work, endless paint scraping, concerns over airborn lead particles, well, it’s still not exactly repaired, but at least they’re working on it. Turns out – as if we didn’t already know it – the subways need work, too. Governments hate spending money, don’t they? There are those who will say it’s because too much is spent on foreign aid or on homelessness programs, and the proper role of government is to build roads, if only those damn lefties would let them, but that’s not really the problem, is it? Be honest, now, because you know the problem is inefficiency and inappropriate priorities. Where is the money really being spent, when, and how? Endless dollars are poured into missile-defense systems that don’t work and studies on how to improve financial management within the various levels of government (let alone studies on what we’re going to do about the trains). Plus, like everywhere else, once the money gets down to the grass-roots levels, there’s also considerable waste and corruption. Why don’t the trains run properly in Sydney? Because the government is spending the money elsewhere, on new highway ring-roads and tunnels, for example. Traffic is miserable, but building more roads doesn’t reduce the problem; it exacerbates it. Why are the subways of NYC in such poor shape? Because when the MTA had the money, they gave themselves bonuses and salary increases instead of putting in the time and effort to upgrade their equipment. (Yes, there are other reasons, important ones, but this isn’t an essay on those details.) Businesses used to run on the principle that when times were flush, you put the excess back into the company, improving capacity so that outside forces would have less effect on performance in the future, instead of spending it on executive stock options and lavish holiday parties. Governments ought to do the same thing (although I hate to use the business=government equation: that’s what got George II into office, and it isn’t true anyway, not in anything other than a metaphorical sense). Who pays for all this? The poor and the middle class, of course. What can we do about it? Well, we don’t have to sit there and take it. We can make our displeasure known, demand the quality we ought to be receiving, and withhold our support wherever we can until we get it. Vote your interests, first of all, not just your fear of interest rates, and then start writing and calling and making yourself heard: public services serve the public. CityRail could have kept the Olympics-level service going; and the MTA could have quieter, more reliable trains running through solid tunnels with up-to-date signalling, switching, and tracking equipment, if we’d been making a point of it before it got to be too late.