The transit authority juggles paying its bills with the need to upgrade an aging infrastructure.
New York City’s public transit system carries two formidable debts. The first is the traditional kind of financial liability that shows up on a balance sheet—some $47 billion, or more than what most US states owe. The second has nothing to do with accounting but can be measured in aging subway cars, creaky old train sheds, outdated signal systems and stations vulnerable to flooding as climate change delivers more hazardous weather. The city’s rail network is more than 100 years old and needs to be modernized to attract more riders and keep revenue flowing into the system. Just like with a financial debt, this obligation to riders only gets more expensive when investing in infrastructure is put off.
“The older something gets, the more it gets used, the more it gets worn out, and that creates more of an issue to keep it in a state of good repair,” says Maria Lehman, director of US infrastructure at GHD, a global engineering company, and a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. New York’s transit infrastructure, she says, isn’t just having a midlife crisis: “It’s in an old-age crisis.”
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