Left Behind by the Nation’s Largest Subway System - New York Times

Left Behind by the Nation’s Largest Subway System

By SARAH MASLIN NIR DEC. 27, 2017

Enrique Toledo scoffed at the idea that there would ever be any major subway expansion beyond what is already in the works, especially to serve New York City’s poorest residents. “They won’t do it in 1,000 years,” said Mr. Toledo, who lives in Jamaica, Queens. Credit Elias Williams for The New York Times

New York City’s subway system unspools across 665 miles of track, spread over and under the city — threads that reach almost to the Atlantic Ocean in Queens and Brooklyn, and clump together beneath Manhattan. With nearly six million rides each day, it is the largest transportation network in the United States and one of the biggest in the world.

But it does not feel that way to Nazir Zahid.

It takes four buses to ferry Mr. Zahid from his home in the Kingsbridge neighborhood in the Bronx to the women’s clothing boutique he manages in West Farms, another neighborhood in the same borough where the strands of the subway fray to nothing. It is a three-and-a-half-mile commute that takes Mr. Zahid one hour and 45 minutes — and that is only if all four buses show up on time.

Few physical structures embody the divisions in the city as plainly as the subway system, where the haves and have-nots frequently correlate with which neighborhood has or does not have stops. Subway deserts stretch along the easternmost reaches of Queens, the North Bronx and across coastal Brooklyn to name a few places. The dearth of subways disproportionately affects residents of high-density, low-income neighborhoods, but also blue-collar bedroom communities in Queens where the hours and gas money saved on public transportation could make a meaningful difference.

“We’re paying taxes, why don’t we have it?” Mr. Zahid, 67, said of the subway, leaning over a rack of blouses at the shop, Melissa 21 on East Tremont Avenue, on a recent afternoon. “They are neglecting the people over here.”

As the agency that runs the subway, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, oversees an ambitious, $836 million plan to repair and update the antiquated subway system, it has become clear to many New Yorkers that a system considered a miracle of engineering has failed to keep pace with the shifting needs of a city where not every commuter’s final destination is in Manhattan.

As Second Avenue Subway Opens, a Train Delay Ends in (Happy) Tears JAN. 1, 2017

A wide-ranging report released by the Regional Plan Association, an urban research group, that focused on how to improve the region’s transportation and infrastructure network found that less than two-thirds of the population live within walking distance — which it calculated as one-third of a mile or more — of a subway stop. To these residents, the transportation authority is tackling only half of the issue: The problem for many New Yorkers is not just the subway that exists — it is the subway that doesn’t.

“It’s unjust,” said Paul Richardson, an 18-year-old high school student who lives in Hollis, Queens, a borough where, according to the Regional Plan Association, just four out of 10 residents live within walking distance of the subway. To get to his job this past summer helping disabled passengers at Kennedy International Airport, he had to ride several buses over an hour each day. “It’s too much time.”

The need for better public transportation in the far reaches of the city is not solely an issue of equity, but also vital to ensuring the city’s economic future, advocates and transit experts say. A 2013 study by the Pratt Center for Community Development blamed the downturn in job growth in Manhattan between 2000 and 2009 in part for the challenge of simply getting there from neighborhoods in the other boroughs where low-income New Yorkers have increasingly been pushed.

“Most New Yorkers work in the same borough where they live,” the study said, “but the subway system’s radial design makes cross-borough commutes difficult.”

Mr. Zahid also manages another boutique, on Fordham Road in the Bronx, which is near a subway stop. “We have very good business there, why? Because you get off the subway, and you have the store,” he said, as he stood inside the store on East Tremont Avenue. “Here? Look, empty.”

Rectifying the disparity of access would take more than 60 miles of new subway track and over 40 new subway stations, according to the Regional Plan Association. The association did not estimate what such a proposal might cost, but as a measure the roughly one-and-a-half-mile stretch of the Second Avenue subway that opened this year on the Upper East Side of Manhattan cost $4.5 billion, or about $2.7 billion per mile.

The Regional Plan Association says that the added capacity for growth that new subway branches would bring could fund construction with new taxpayer revenues. Things like congestion pricing, charging drivers a fee for traversing parts of the city, or value capture, when real estate development enhanced by new access to transportation chips in could also be sources of funding, according to the association.

While the organization’s proposal may seem unrealistic, it was designed to spur discussion and to look far into the city’s future, said Dani Simons, a spokeswoman for the association. In producing the report, the group sought, she added, to “not be limited to thinking about what is achievable today, what is achievable in one year, but to think about what we really need in the bigger picture to move our city and our region forward.”

Officials with the M.T.A. declined to address the feasibility of the proposal. “We are restoring the subway system to a state of reliability and at the same time taking on vital long-term expansion projects,” Jon Weinstein, a spokesman for the agency, said in an email.

One major project involves extending the Second Avenue subway northward, which the Regional Plan Association says is vital to better serving neighborhoods in Manhattan. The transportation authority has set aside about $1.7 billion to pay for part of the cost of the next leg of the Second Avenue project, which will reach from 96th Street to 125th Street, though no timeline has been established, and the source of funding for the rest has not yet been identified.

Enrique Toledo scoffed at the idea that there would ever be any major subway expansion beyond what is already in the works, especially to serve the city’s poorest residents with the least political clout.

“They won’t do it in 1,000 years,” said Mr. Toledo, 59, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, and cannot work because of health issues. To get to appointments with his doctor, he relies on an ad hoc $2 ride-sharing system offered by livery cabdrivers that has emerged to fill the gaps left by the transit system. “I don’t think I’m going to see it, not in my lifetime,” he said. “But everyone needs it.’’

In many neighborhoods, public buses are the main means of travel and the transportation authority has sought to increase service in places that the subway does not reach. But bus service has also become increasingly unreliable, with average travel speeds declining and the number of riders decreasing.

Two years ago, beaten down by her two-hour commute by bus and subway from East New York, Brooklyn, to her job behind a cash register at a pharmacy in Hollis, Queens, Marlyn Morales and her boyfriend pooled their resources to buy a $26,000 fuel-efficient car, a strategy she says few in her position can afford. “I’m lucky,” she said. “We need more subways.”

Correction: December 29, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of New Yorkers whom a report said live beyond walking distance to a subway. The report said less than two-thirds of the population live within walking distance of a stop, not two-thirds of the population live beyond walking distance of the subway.