New York's overly political approach to mass transit
As a political scientist I know that everything government does has a political dimension to it, but New York's governor, mayor and legislature have done a very good job of letting their petty political ambitions and competition destroy New York's subway system. In the 1960s and 1970s the subway was subjected to the city's financial neglect, but was rebuilt by Hugh Carey, Ed Koch and Richard Ravitch starting in the late 1970s and ending in the 1980s. After the creation of the MTA and the ascendance of competent management, the system did well for a while, but then was capital starved by the state and city until it once again fell apart in the past decade. The hope when the MTA was created was that it might be able to avoid some degree of political manipulation, but de Blasio and Cuomo's battle over subway funding has demonstrated that the MTA...