For New York City subway riders, each trip is its own odyssey. Especially in the pandemic, there’s the rush to the station, the tense wait on the platform. The quest for a seat, always a delicate matter, is made more so by the need to socially distance. Straphangers must endure panhandlers and the fear of being confined underground if there’s a delay. Upon arriving at their appointed station, is it any wonder they dash for the street?
The last thing riders want to encounter is someone standing in their path, seeking their attention. So the eyes of travelers who’ve just stepped off trains widen with apprehension when they come upon Sarah Feinberg standing in the middle of a dank corridor in downtown Brooklyn’s busy Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station. The interim president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s subway and bus division waves at them. “Hi,” she shouts. “Anybody want a mask?”
Most riders on this January afternoon are already obeying the MTA’s rule to cover their face. Some race by Feinberg, pointing indignantly at their mask as if to say, “Can’t you see I’m already wearing one?” A good number, however, cluster around the subway chief, seeking as many extras as they can get on the MTA’s monthly mask distribution day. Only occasionally does she encounter a shirker—the gentleman who swaggers past her and rifles through a nearby trash can, the teenager who snatches a mask and sprints upstairs to the train platform without donning it. “You need to wear it!” Feinberg calls after her.
The MTA says 98% of its subway riders are masked. It’s an impressive achievement, one Feinberg often cites in her campaign to convince people that the largest public transit system in North America is safe. She says it’s rarely been cleaner, thanks to the MTA’s decision last April to close the 24-hour-a-day system, initially for four hours nightly and then just two, so it can disinfect its 6,455 cars. She boasts that the subway’s ventilation system replenishes the air on trains more than the six times an hour that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls for in many health-care facilities. “We’re three times better than that,” she says.
It’s still not enough for many longtime passengers. Subway ridership in March was 30% of its pre-pandemic level, when the MTA transported 5.5 million straphangers daily. The most recent agency survey showed that 71% of its lapsed customers were very concerned about being able to socially distance on trains.
Ridership losses during the pandemic have had catastrophic effects for public-transit agencies around the country, and none has lost more people in total than the MTA. In addition to the subways and buses, the agency operates two commuter railroads. Customer fares cover 38% of its annual $17 billion budget, and Covid-19 eliminated most of that revenue. The MTA threatened to slash subway service by as much as 40% last fall, but it’s been able to stave off cuts, thanks to $14.5 billion in federal stimulus it’s received in the past year—including, most recently, $6.5 billion in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. It also borrowed $3.4 billion from the Federal Reserve.
Change in Transit Ridership
The MTA says it should have enough money now to survive until 2023 without major changes. But even then, the agency will be ailing. Many customers have gotten comfortable doing their job at their kitchen table in their athleisure wear. “The habit of going to work has been broken,” says Mitchell Moss, director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.
The agency has no illusions. It predicts that by the close of 2024 its passenger head count may still be only 86% of what it was before the pandemic. That means an annual recurring structural deficit of $1 billion, says Feinberg’s boss, MTA Chairman Patrick Foye. This doesn’t bode well for the perennially underfunded subway, which has lurched from crisis to crisis since its inception in 1904.
It also threatens the ability of Biden, who established his transit bona fides as a champion of Amtrak, to lay the groundwork for the U.S. to meet his ambitious goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. “Now is the time to improve the air we breathe and tackle the climate crisis by moving the U.S. to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, building a national electric-vehicle charging network, and investing in transit-oriented development, sustainable aviation, and resilient infrastructure,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told a House committee on March 25. Six days later, the president announced a $2.5 trillion infrastructure proposal with $85 billion for mass transit, saying it would reduce pollution.
For decades, New York has been a shining example of the difference trains and buses can make. New Yorkers are fond of noting that their city’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are a third of the national average. Part of the reason is because so many live within walking distance of the 665-mile-long subway system, making it possible to forgo automobile ownership altogether. Indeed, Feinberg says its raison d’être is removing people from cars.
The pandemic disrupted that balance. As subway ridership fell last year during the pandemic, there was an increase in bike sales, but car registrations in the city rose by 9% in December compared with the final month of 2019, according to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. If such a shift could happen in New York, what hope does Biden have of preventing larger numbers of Americans from abandoning public transportation, no matter how much money he throws at it? “That just makes the challenge immensely harder,” says Andrew Salzberg, creator of the Decarbonizing Transportation newsletter.
In other words, one could argue that much more than New York’s survival depends on Feinberg wooing back subway riders. Her campaign is complicated by a homelessness crisis, a spate of lurid subway crimes, and personal animosity between her political patron, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (now being investigated for alleged sexual harassment), and the lame-duck politician who runs the city, Mayor Bill de Blasio. As if that weren’t enough, there’s her fundamental challenge of having to persuade New Yorkers to once again embrace a system that even in the best of times can be difficult to love.
Feinberg, 43, grew up in Charleston, W.Va., and didn’t set foot on a subway until she moved to Washington, D.C., when she was 22 years old. “I thought the most grown-up thing I did was getting on a subway train,” she says.
She was there to pursue a career in government that led to a post as a senior adviser in the Obama White House in 2009. She departed after a year and a half to do a stint in the private sector—first as global communications director at Bloomberg LP, publisher of Bloomberg Green, and later as a policy director at Facebook Inc. She returned to the political sphere in 2013 to be the Federal Railroad Administration’s chief of staff. Two years later, Feinberg was running the primary safety regulator for the country’s public and private railroads.