Transport for New York?

[londonbuses2018]

Is it possible for New York to do what London did all those years ago this would incorporate New York Subway Services and Buses meaning the end of MTA and will bring in Bus Compaines instead of it being under MTA. I believe it’s been discussed in the past.

[snoggle]

Apr 26, 2019 17:26:39 GMT londonbuses2018 said:

Is it possible for New York to do what London did all those years ago this would incorporate New York Subway Services and Buses meaning the end of MTA and will bring in Bus Compaines instead of it being under MTA. I believe it’s been discussed in the past.

I can't see it. Transit services are very heavily unionised in New York. Any sort of industrial action would cripple the city. A move to privatise / contract out services would almost certainly cause that. There has been no move, for example, to remove guards from the subway despite lots of new modern rolling stock being bought.

In the last few years the reverse of London's contracted regime has actually happened. Many of the rush hour express lines from the Boroughs into Manhatten were run by private companies but the returns were so poor that many could not renew their fleets and were on the point of collapse. In that instance I understand the MTA took over the operations directly and incorporated them into the wider MTA network. It's worth considering that if you can't make money in a transit orientated city like New York then imagine how dire it is everywhere else in the States. It's a minor miracle that some places still have bus services (many, of course, do not). The basic issue is where would the private bus companies come from in order to take over the MTA's work? They aren't there. It's not the UK where we have publicly listed bus companies. It's worth noting that Stagecoach have sold up in the States and First would probably love to be shot of Greyhound. Most of the UK bus firms involvement in the US has been long distance coaching, sightseeing and contracted school bus services. No move into running normal bus services at all. That must tell you everything you need to know about the prospects of making money running bus services in the States.

The bigger problem in the States is how you counteract the grip that the likes of Uber and Lyft have in (some) urban transport markets. They have eroded public transit's market share and worsened congestion. They have also indulged in some extremely underhand tactics to try to undermine the legislative and regulatory bodies tasked with trying to control them. While I accept the "technology genie" is out of the bottle I would very heavily regulate these new businesses to ensure passenger safety, to control unbridled competition and to prevent the destruction of public transit services. We have seen what they have done to London's traffic and to our night bus network. New York doesn't deserve the same fate. It has a lot to do to make transit a more attractive, faster and more reliable service but it MUST have the money to do that and the egotistical politicians and appalling governance structures all need removing / changing. The latter won't happen of course because it's New York but New Yorkers will only have themselves to blame for not using the votes to force change.