I don\u2019t often feel sorry for government agencies. But, in the aftermath of yesterday\u2019s shutdown of parts of the New York City subway system after a major rainstorm flooded subway tunnels right before rush hour, I\u2019m sharing the pain of the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA).<\/p>\n
We have very little tolerance for failure in the United States whether it be personal failures, the failures of corporations or\u2014what is most intolerable\u2014the failure of public agencies to do their jobs. Most of the time, we should have high standards. People should do their jobs and businesses and governments should provide the goods and services they are supposed to. I\u2019m not here to make excuses for a Philadelphia Police Department that can\u2019t get a handle on violent crime or a Department of Human Services that regularly loses tracks of children at risk.<\/p>\n
But accidents happen. And when those accidents are due to circumstances that are difficult to predict or impossible to control\u2014like the weather\u2014can\u2019t we cut people and organizations a little slack?<\/p>\n
Of course, if you look closely enough at any accident, you can find things someone could have done to prevent it. Take yesterday\u2019s subway system collapse. Shouldn\u2019t the MTA been prepared for such a storm? After, all something very similar happened in September 2004. And in the report issued after that storm, the \u201ccauses\u201d of that day of subway dysfunction were identified. The MTA had not been putting enough resources into making sure that the drains under subway lines were clean. They were not checking to make sure all their sump pumps were in operable conditions. They did not have enough sump pumps. They were slow to get extra sump pumps or their pumping cars to the locations that needed them. They did not know where the storm was creating problems and so could not provide information to people about where the system was shut down.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure all the problems, and the others identified in the report on the troubles of September 2004, were real. Given the failures yesterday, it is likely that the MTA did not put enough resources into solving those problems and other like it.<\/p>\n
But there is the rub. I have no doubt that if the MTA spent enough money and dedicated enough person power to insuring that subways would never be shut down in the kind of storm that happens in New York once every three or four years, they could meet that goal. The question, however, is at what cost? I imagine that it would be enormously expensive to buy enough pumps, add enough drains, and make sure that none of them are never clogged, and create an emergency system that can give people real time information about every train slowdown and shut down. And since resources at the MTA are limited, if it spent put enormous resources into attaining those goals, it would have to less of something else.<\/p>\n
Where should the MTA take resources to storm-proof the subway system? Should it cut back on its efforts to eliminate the graffiti that once so afflicted the New York subways? Stop the track upgrading project that has reduced derailments? Stop buying the new cars that make the system more pleasant and efficient on a daily basis?<\/p>\n
\u00a0I would think that any rational assessment of the overall satisfaction people get from the subway system in New York would lead one to spend more money on daily operations than on preparing for events that occur once every three or four years. Some of those preparations probably are rational, especially when they have uses beyond the once every three year storm. Transit agencies need to give people real time information about their trains and they need ways to collect that information when disasters of any kind strike\u2014whether they are due to the weather or fire or, God forbid, a terrorist attack. But it strikes me that other preparations\u2014such as adding expensive drains to subway lines prone to flooding only during the worst of storms\u2014would, all things considered, be a waste of money.<\/p>\n
\u00a0And all this is especially true since I suspect that we will soon find out that part of the failure of the subway system was due to the limitations of the New York storm sewers, which backed up and made the MTA\u2019s pumping system ineffective in some places.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Again, my point is not to say we should excuse the failures of transit or other public agencies\u2014or anyone else. But we really might be a little more realistic about our expectations of people and agencies in extreme conditions. And we should focus more on the daily problems those agencies create or ignore, rather than on the extraordinary problems that pop up once in a while, especially when those problems merely inconvenience people. (Of course, extraordinary problems that lead to death and destruction\u2014like the collapse of a major bridge\u2014are an entirely different matter.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0To bring this back to Philadelphia for a moment: Looking back now, I\u2019m willing to forgive SEPTA\u2019s inability to get people home from the Live 8 concert in a timely way. That event put an extraordinary load on SEPTA. But I\u2019m less willing to forgive the everyday inconveniences that SEPTA creates: the buses that don\u2019t run at time or, just as bad, run early; the inconvenient schedules; the difficulty of buying tokens; and the lack of information from SEPTA about almost everything.<\/p>\n
\u00a0(It would be nice, however if, in the aftermath of the Live 8 concert, SEPTA had been willing to admit that it was overwhelmed instead of trotting out the apparently shameless Richard Maloney to tell us that everything was hunky-dory.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t often feel sorry for government agencies. But, in the aftermath of yesterday\u2019s shutdown of parts of the New York City subway system after a major rainstorm flooded subway tunnels right before rush hour, I\u2019m sharing the pain of the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA). We have very little tolerance for failure in the United States whether it be personal failures, the failures of corporations or\u2014what is most intolerable\u2014the failure of public agencies to do their jobs. Most of the time, we should have high standards. People should do their jobs and businesses and governments should provide the goods and services they are supposed to. I\u2019m not here to make excuses for a Philadelphia Police Department that can\u2019t get a handle on violent crime or a Department of Human Services that regularly loses tracks of children at risk. But accidents happen. And when those accidents are due to circumstances that\u2026 Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philadelphia","category-transportation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p35YuU-rg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1690"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6564,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690\/revisions\/6564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}