Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Seth Barron, Associate Editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Nicole Jalinas. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Nicole. Good afternoon, Seth. Thanks for having me back. New York City's problems don't seem to be getting better. One indicator of its troubles is the subway system, where the

situation is particularly dire. Nicole, you've been following MTA finances for a long time.

What's the scope and depth of the current problem? Right. The subway and the commuter rails

are feeling the pandemic in the most acute way out of any government entity, just because they've lost so much of their riders. If you think about the MTA, which runs the subways, buses, Long Island Railroad, Metro North, to Westchester, they get basically half of their money from

tax subsidies and half of their money from fares and tolls. And ridership is still down by 70

percent, and it's down consistently by 70 percent. I mean, we saw a little bit of a jump up in

the early summer when the governor said people could

go back to office work and could go back to stores and go back to visiting friends and relatives.

But since then, we've just plateaued.

I mean, the subway ridership has not increased over the last couple of months.

It's basically stuck at 30% of normal ridership,

which means they're missing 70% of half of their revenues. Now, the tax subsidies, you know,

they're down, they're down like, you know, 15, 20%, but they're not down as much as the fares. But

until they get the ridership back, you know, 15, 20%, but they're not down as much as the fares. But until they get the ridership back,

you know, they have very serious budget problems. You know, they want more money from the federal

government. They're likely to get some of it. They do want to make some budget cuts, but there's

no indication that the governor would back up the kind of tough line they would need to take with the unions to get budget cuts that would actually make a difference.

So for the moment, we're looking at big cuts in subway and bus service next year and commuter rail,

you know, up to 40 to 50 percent cuts in service, which would just send us into an even harder recovery.

Because if you don't have the subway service there, people aren't going to want to come back to the city.

I mean, you're not going to want to wait 20 minutes and pack onto an even more crowded train and pay a higher fare.

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