My mental models need adjusting

I find this a little unfathomable. From There’s No Such Thing as a Perfectly Fair Transit Fare by John Surico. The article is a deep dive into the minutiae of fare structures in mass transit, attempting to achieve adequate service, universal service, social equity, balanced budgets, etc.

According to preliminary figures from 2018, New York City subways and buses experienced the third consecutive year of ridership decline.

This thinning transit population in America’s biggest public transit town comes at a really bad time: By 2022, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will face a staggering $634 million operating budget gap. As a result, the transit authority is targeting immediate staff reductions, maintenance cuts, and service postponements—which, advocates argue, could worsen the death spiral in which ridership already seems to be caught.

Three years of ridership decline? Woof. Where are people going? From nearly fifty years of occasional visits to NYC of greater or lesser duration and occasional use of mass transit there, I would not have guessed that there was any alternative to mass transit. The roads are that congested.

Well, I would be wrong. Apparently people are abandoning mass transit owing to bad service, expense, and viable alternatives, principally owning cars and rideshares. From Why driving in NYC has somehow gotten even slower by Danielle Furfaro, Elizabeth Rosner and Ruth Brown.

You’re better off hoofing it.

Driving in the heart of Manhattan has somehow gotten even slower, a city report revealed Friday — and the glacial pace has motorists cursing the surge of black cars brought on by Uber and Lyft.

Average travel speeds for the borough south of 60th Street have plummeted from 9.1 mph in 2010 to 7.1 mph in 2017, while those in Midtown alone have sunk even lower, falling from 6.4 mph to a measly 5 mph in the same period, according to the Department of Transportation’s Mobility Report.

And it’s little wonder, with Gothamites fleeing sluggish subways and buses, and for-hire vehicles like those from Uber and Lyft flooding the streets to pick up those peeved passengers.

“Several new trends — including declines in mass-transit ridership and slower travel times, combined with more car ownership and for-hire vehicle trips — are together causes for concern,” Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said as she released the report.

You don’t need to tell that to drivers.

“It’s gotten to the point where it takes two or three more hours to make the same number of deliveries [as a few years ago],” said truck driver Angel Rodriguez, who lives in The Bronx and delivers to Manhattan hardware stores.

“You know it’s bad when you’re sitting in traffic and little old ladies on the sidewalk are going faster than you . . . And you know it’s really bad when they’re using their walkers and they’re moving faster than you.”

There are now more than 110,000 black cars registered with the Taxi and Limousine Commission — nearly triple the number the city had in 2010, before app-based ride-hailing services entered the marketplace, according to city data.

Although yellow-taxi use has dropped 25 percent since 2010, for-hire vehicle trips have more than made up for the shortfall, with 92.5 million trips in those cars recorded in 2016 alone.

My mental model is that public transportation is a losing financial proposition in most wide open prosperous America. For most individuals, it is slow, unreliable, uneconomic and unpleasant. But my mental model is also that in certain older cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Pittsburg, Washington, D.C., Chicago, it can indeed be made to work because there are no practical alternatives.

The collapsing finances of several of these systems (see in particular NYC and Washington, D.C.), often due to increasingly unreliable service owing to lack of maintenance, was, I thought, primarily a matter of incompetence. The inherent need, combined with the absence of alternatives, meant, I thought, that the problems would be eventually addressed by raising fares and replacing incompetent leadership.

But Surico's article suggests that it might not be that straight-forward. If service is sufficiently bad and expensive versus the alternatives, people will use the alternatives. I just didn't think there were viable alternatives.

What is the denouement for mass transit systems with too high cost structures, too low service in cities with fragile balance sheets, and a populace already overtaxed and suffering too high cost-of-living? If the underlying dynamics are such that improved management won't be able to solve the problem, what happens?