NYC Transit Is Not Vital to the Nation

According to “experts,” saving New York City’s transit is “vital to the U.S. economy,” reports an article in Business Insider. These “experts” include the usual gang of transit advocates, including the chair of New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), an urban planning professor at New York University, and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, all of whom fervently believe that New York financial workers are, if not the masters of the universe, still critical to making the earth successfully rotate around the sun.

New York is “the only place where you have an abundance of face-to-face contact,” says Gelinas, which is supposedly is why its economic productivity was so high. Because Manhattan is so compact, “you can have many, many meetings every day with your potential vendors, your customers, your competitors,” something that supposedly isn’t possible in the suburbs.

I skeptical that maximizing the number of boring meetings per day somehow makes people more productive. Besides, what good are face-to-face meetings when everyone is wearing a mask? If they need to, people can have more meetings per day over Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime without masks and without having to travel from one meeting to the next.

While urban planners may believe that face-to-face meetings are what make the world go around, New York City’s financial firms will tell you that they are crammed into the south part of Manhattan Island to give their computerized trading operations have millisecond advantages over firms that are further away. A whole movie was made about traders in Chicago trying to catch up. This has nothing to do with face-to-face contact, and it is likely that most of the support staff in the city don’t have to be so close to the central computers.

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MTA July’s service, however, was only 4 percent less than the previous July, while the commuter trains were down by 5 percent. Just why is it so vital to keep service up when so few are using it?

The Business Insider article says the MTA is losing $200 million a week. Since, in good times, it was losing $150 million a week, I don’t see much difference that can’t be fixed by reducing service a bit.

The strange thing is that the Manhattan Institute, which was once a free-market advocacy think tank, has now become a frequently quoted apologist for big government. While Gelinas demands more subsidies for transit, the institute’s Steven Malanga enthuses over centrally planned and government-subsidized urban renewal projects. Malanga may not have known that all of the projects he lauded were subsidized; Gelinas doesn’t have that excuse and apparently can’t separate her own self-interest from her principles.