My name is Jonathan Mahler, I'm a staff writer for the New York Times magazine and no, I haven't used it in a few years. I have a license to walk the tracks of the New York City, subway system. I've even got a laminated card that I carry in my wallet that says, I'm allowed to go in the hole at the subway tunnels are known to get that license. I had to take a day long course that ended with the class actually walking the tracks and as part of walking the tracks, you have to prepare for the arrival of a train. You do that by tucking, your body into a tiny little hole in the wall to clear up spot, you wait for the train to come. You see the light. You feel it here

and it flies by your face and as it comes by you're, just thinking don't move, don't move, don't even scratch your nose. I got my license to walk the tracks in two thousand. Seventeen, when I was researching the story on the New York City Subway system, how it works, how it doesn't work, and what it would take to fix it. When I wrote the story, I was basically sounding in alarm when the subways in desperate shaped the cities and desperate shape and the subway badly needed help and badly needed money that hasn't changed. If anything, the subway is in much worse shape. Now, right or ship plummeted during the pandemic, of course, and without those fares, the subway system makes even less money when I think about New York City starting to reopen- and I hope it happen soon. I think about all the places people are gonna wanna go again to museums to concerts to Broadway,

two Yankee Stadium and you're gonna need the subway to do it. The subway is almost ass physical piece of democracy in action. It takes you anywhere, you want to go, any one can ride it at any hour is truly a marvel, but that's only if it isn't so badly neglected that its falling apart and can take you anywhere. So here's my story from two thousand eighteen, the case for the Subway read by Robert Fass. This was recorded by autumn automation. Up you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers. Such is the New York Times the New Yorker Vanity, Fair and the Atlantic. Long before it became an archaic, filthy, profligate symbol. Everything wrong with our broken cities: New York, subway was a marvel, a mad for

of engineering and an audacious gamble on a preposterously, ambitious vision. The effect it is to have the city of New York is something more. You're than any mine can realise said. William gainer New York mayor who set in motion the primary phase of its construction of public works project of this scale. Had never before been undertaken in the United States. And even now more than a century later. It is hard to fully appreciate what it did for the city and really the nation before the subway. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that New York would become the greatest city on earth. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants being poverty and persecution were arriving on its doorstep every year, but most of them were actively maroon herded into dark squalid.

Elements in disease written slums. The five boroughs had recently been joined as one city, but the arms and villages of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens might as well have been on the other side of the planet, from manhattans teeming streets bound up in the fatal The city were even larger questions would American, be able to manage the transition from the individualism and insularity that defined its nineteenth century frontiers to the creative collaboration and competition of its fast growth urban centres, good it adapt index. In this rapidly changing world were cities the past nor the future of civilization and then came the subway hundreds of miles track, shooting out in every direction, carrying millions of immigrants out of the ghettos and into newly built combs tying to

either the modern city and enabling it to become a place where anything was possible It was the arrival of the subway that transformed seedy neighbourhood called long acre square into times square that help turn single square mile surrounding the Wall Street Station into the centre of global finance. That made Coney Island and amusement park for the masses. It was the subway that fuelled the astonishing economic growth that built the city's iconic skyscrapers. Other cities heads ways, but none threaded through nearly as many neighborhoods ass New York's, enabled to move large numbers of workers between Manhattan and the Middle class boroughs, a cycle that repeated itself every day, generating ever more wealth and drawing

never more people as New York evolved over the decades. The subway was the one constant, the very thing that made it possible to purpose, nineteenth century factories and warehouses as offices or condominiums, or to reimburse in the two miles spit of land between Manhattan and queens that one's how's the smallpox hospital as a high tech university hope when the city is in crisis, natural or emotional. The subway is always a crucial part of the solution. The subway led the city's recovery from the fiscal calamity of the nineteen seventies. The subway was at the centre of the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. After the September eleventh attacks, the subway got New York back to work after the most devastating storm in the cities. History just five years ago.

The questions we are facing today are not so different from the ones our predecessors phased one hundred years ago. Can the gap between rich and poor be closed, or is it than to continue to wide? Can we put the few her needs of a city under nation above the narrow, present day interests of a few Can we use a portion of the monumental sums of wealth that we are generating too best in an inclusive and competitive future, answer to all of these questions is still rumbling beneath New York City. For all the chain judges in transportation technology, since the first tunnels were dug the rise of the, from a bill, the proliferation of bike lanes and ferries, our growing addiction, to ride. Hailing apps and dreams of a future filled with autonomous vehicles,

The subway remains the only way to move large numbers of people around the city. Today in New York, Subway carries close to six million people every day, more than twice the entire population of cargo. The subway may no longer be a technological marvel, but it continues to provide I'm a daily magic trick. It brings people together, but it also spreads people out. It is this paradox, these constant expansions and contractions like a beating heart. Let's keep the human capital flowing and the city growing New York, Subway no zones and no hours of operation, it connect rich and poor neighborhoods alike. The subway it has never been segregated, it is always open.

And the fair is always the same, no matter how far you need to go in New York Movement anywhere. Any time is a right. Most countries treat subway systems as national assets. They understand that their cities are their great wealth creators and equality enablers and that cities don't work without subways public private cooperation that runs Hong Kong's subway expect ninety nine point, nine percent of its trains to run on time, and they do. If you are travelling to the airport, you can also check your luggage at a central downtown trains asian and not see it again until you ve landed at your destination. Imagine China has been. Variously building new Metro systems in cities across the country. A recognition that subway

so the only way to keep pace with the nations, rapid urbanization and the needs of its citizens and its not just new cities that seeing major investments in their subways two decades ago, Klein of London Underground became a national crisis now its move. Toward running driverless trains for that matter. Los Angeles LOS Angeles recently Amber On a forty year, one hundred twenty billion dollar project to build out its mass transit system. New York City Subway, meanwhile, is falling apart. If you are a regular rider, you know this first hand, but even if you are- and it has probably become difficult to ignore all the stories about the system's failure- the F train that was trapped between stations for close to an hour without we're all air conditioning acute train that derailed in Brooklyn

fire on the airline in Harlem that sent nine passengers to the hospital. The cumulative impressed, of all these miserable underground experiences, and all these stories about miserable underground experiences is that the situation is hopeless, that the subway cannot be next. The subway has been wreck tend in. Zira short term thinking and government mistrust. Public works projects with benefits large, than any single mind can realise are no longer possible, but it is possible to fix the subway, and we must our failure to do so would be a collective and historic ACT of self destruction, one who wrecked the subway, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the government agency that operates the subway use

the catch all word incident to describe all the various events that impede the system's healthy functioning. Every one of these incidents triggers and investigation, resulting in an incident report a minute by minute account of what went wrong and the steps taken to resolve the issue. Thousands of these ports are produced every month. A random sampling of incidents from a single reason day include signal, trouble, switch trouble, unruly persons track circuit failure, delayed by track, slash work, gangs, water condition fires, slash smoke, conditions, debris on road bed, breaks, fail to charge and sparks issuing, among the most common were excess dwell time and insufficient capacity? Slash crowding translation too many passengers, not enough trains

all these problems led to one really big problem. The trains are terminally late, obstructed daily by a cascade of system failures during the first three months of two thousand, seventeen three quarters of the subways lines were chronically behind schedule: the worst offenders the to train was late. Now least seventy percent of the time for a delayed rider wondering whom to blame its tempting to begin with the people. You can see the seven thousand or so men and women track cleaners. Inspectors flag Is another orange vested emptier employees charged with preventing these incidents and keeping the trains moving Honesty morning in August, I sat among the small group of them in a dingy defunct public elementary school in graves in Brooklyn that serves as the empty as transit

learning Santer taped to the classroom wall were yellowing. Tabloid clips of a different kind of subway horror story Man under rail horror hit third track and lived a tab blow that lent the one day say Of course, a requirement for all emptier employees and contractors, some of the flavour of those grisly low budget drivers, Ed videos designed to scare teenagers straight. If you should do something silly today, like get hit by a train, you cannot sue New York City transit. My instructor Jim Fortune said, as he distributed, release forms to the class. It's a common occurrence. A passenger is killed on the tracks, pretty much. Every week. The course would end with a walk on alive track. If I survived the day, I would receive a laminated licence qualifying

to work in the tunnels of the New York City Subway system in the whole as it is known. Fourteen walked us through the potential hazards that awaited us. He taught us the proper arm, motions to use. If we ever found ourselves needing to signal to an oncoming train to stop. After a short, multiple choice test stand a break for lunch. We were issued orange vests, flashlights, helmets and safety goggles. Our group walked to a nearby end station. Road a few stops transferred to the r and got off at fifty third street, where we walked to the end of the platform and climb down the ladder onto the tracks. Fourteen soon directed us to what he called clear up spots: small shallow opening

is built into the walls of the narrow tunnels that we had been taught that morning to identify a train was coming. I stuffed my flashlight into my back pocket and tucked myself into the tiny space. Remembering fortunes instructions get in get centred, don't move. I could hear the train approaching and see its headlight out of the corner of my eye. In about thirty, Secondly, a string of forty five tonnes steel cars was thundering by just eighteen inches from my frozen body. It was terrifying, but also thrilling. The entire industrial revolution was speeding past my face at point. Blank range, subway cars seem invincible.

In fact, they can be laid low by something as insignificant as a broken, bold or a can of soda which, when resting against the third rail, might heat up and ignited scrap of newspaper causing a track fire the source of hundreds of delays every month, every inch of the system's rails is supposed to be checked twice a week for imperfections. Much His work happens overnight when the frequency of trains on this twenty four hour system decreases and workers are able to move. More freely on the tracks, while the rest of the city is sleeping, there's a whole industrial ballet, going on underground that most people have no idea about John Samuelson, attract inspector who now runs the Transport Workers Union of America told me it's like frigate rigour doing down there. And yet a recent study

that only three percent of the tracks and stations meet the empty Ays own standards for cleanliness workers face and more insidious challenge, then trash in the form of water, many parts of the system below the water table and its lines course through neighbour. That were once lush farmland on a dry day, the empty, a pumps thirteen million gallons of water from the system. Overtime the water corrodes the system. Sting and rotting its infrastructure and yet ceiling and grouting. These leaks often requires rerouting service on lines further frustrating riders. Next year, the all train will begin to shut down that will last at least fifteen months for repairs to its EAST River tunnel, which flooded during Hurricane Sandy, some two hundred twenty five thousand people will have to find a new way to get in and out of Manhattan every day, no matter how legend. They may be seven thousand

Orange vested maintenance workers are simply not enough to keep the deteriorating system with its six hundred sixty five miles of passenger carrying track to reach all the way to India, Annapolis on schedule. All the real problems must begin elsewhere. Further up the chain of command, pretty much. Every decision that destroys your commute happens below ground, but above and in an unmarked building on the West side of Manhattan, called the rail control centre. Here, men and women said at computer consoles behind large wall mounted Schematic crack and station displays in the house

I see, link windowless command space, directing the changes moving, a local train to an express track, taking a train out of service that determine the daily transportation fate of thousands, sometimes millions of passengers. When I visited the facility several months ago, I was greeted by the official who, over seize all these disruptions very green black, a tall slender man in a gray suit, with two big pens in his shirt pocket and a silver tie clip so tarnished that you barely make out the letters on it empty. A green blood is the authorities vice president and chief officer for Service Delivery Department of subways. It's his joy. To run the trained green bladder thirty one year, veteran of the empty, I grew up in forest hills, queens without a car. I stop

writing trains and buses by myself pretty much from the time I was five years old. He told me after we settled into conference room overlooking the command setter, he became a bus driver, he graduated from college fulfilling the childhood dream has been an employee of the empty. I ever since gradually Moving up the ladder to his current position, we operate the trains he said we try to run them on time. Five point six million. Average daily riders. One point: seven an annual riders right. Now there are Five hundred eighty five trains out there. We will run eight thousand four hundred seventy seven one way trips over the course of the day. We hope to have eight thousand four hundred seventy seven on time, trains we're not going to do it today. Ringlets morning began, with a two thirty m phone call, an opera

moving a train out of storage at a yard in EAST New York, Brooklyn had driven through a stop signal, damaging the switch beneath him. The first question we would ask is whether it is going to have any impact on service. Green Glad said. A few hours later, at five hundred and ten a dot m. He received a text message about another incident. A passenger had called from the Park Place Station near City Hall to report that there was smoke on the

six seven minutes later. The New York City Police Department reported via an internal communications line, known as the six wire that transformer may have exploded in the station. Green black managed the response service on the two and three lines was rerouted, and several teams were deployed to park place, to figure out what was going on. They soon discovered that a chunk of metal about eighteen inches long had fallen onto the tracks, breaking through the third Rail Protection Board and sorting out the power he few bridge. The third rail which has six hundred votes of electricity to the signal rail, which has twelve votes of electricity, Green glad, said it's going to blow things the rail control centres. Chief officer.

Call Mcphee showed me a picture on his phone of the charred board, which looked as though it could have been pulled from the fire pit at a campsite. It took about two and one slash two hours for the temporary repairs to be completed and full power to be restored. The trains could now start running again, but we're required to move at reduced speeds in the vicinity of this We are operating in a degraded mode right now, Green Glad said system, while the biggest source of subway delays is simple overcrowding in the nineteen nineties, after a derailment killed, five passengers and a collision killed a train operator the empty. I started actively slowing down its trains. This has reduced through put the number of trains that move through the system at any given time which has increased crowding and when the subway because

more crowded. It grows slower still with trains stuck in stations, while knots of passengers fight their way in and out of cars, as readership grew from two thousand and twelve to two thousand. Sixteen. The end to end running time during peak hours, on the numbered lines increased by more than six minutes. Average train speeds are now slower than they were in nineteen. Fifty, the subway could be both faster and safer if all of it were controlled by a computer based signal system which would automatically ensure the trains are always operating at the maximum safe speed with the narrowest possible distance between instead much of the subway uses a signal system that dates to the nineteen twenties and greetings. What that means didn't really hit home for me until I visited the signal repair shop, the two hundred fifteen street,

yard in Manhattan technicians were hunched over cast iron gadgets, stop motors compressors track real is it looked as if they belonged in the workshop of an eccentric antique collector in the machine shop downstairs I saw. Workers making mounting brackets and ball bearings, even the system's most basic parts are so obsolete that they have to be manufactured in house, a lot of the equipment. We really can purchase the emptying his assistant chief of signals, Salvatore Racine O told me as we want a technician: assemble a tiny motor our only option is to rebuild what would rebuilding the subway actually look, one replacing The signal system is just one in a long list of needs, some of which were recently compiled by the Regional Plan Association, a civic group that has

and studying New York infrastructure for decades. Most of the system's four hundred. Seventy two stations need some kind of major repair or wholesale renovation. L matters need to be added fewer than one in five stations are even partially accessible to people with physical disabilities. Crack tiles and rusty columns need to be replaced, Stairwells and entry ways need to be enlarged. Flood prone openings need to be waterproof. Ventilation plants need to be rebuilt. All the platforms need to be sealed off. The tracks, with automatic sliding doors to prevent passengers from throwing trash

on the rail bed and block them from falling, jumping or being pushed under retrain sharp turns in tunnels throughout the system need to be reconstructed so that they are less severe allowing for higher speeds and thus more trains. The regional Plan Association stopped there, but you could go further. The road bed beneath much of the track needs to be shipped out and replaced with fresh, concrete and new drains about three thousand of the system. Six thousand four hundred cars date to the nineteen sixty seventies and eighties, about half of those need to be rebuilt with modern motors wheels and breaks, as well as gangways between the cars to increase capacity. The other half need to be replaced altogether. In the meantime, green blood and his staff take it day by day managing incident,

Says, though, they are an inevitable force of nature. When I asked him about the so called F train meltdown, That became a media sensation. In June, hundreds of passengers were stuck in the tunnel for more than forty That's him a forty year old trained lost power me he was surprised. The incident received so much attention when he left work that night, it had not felt a different from many other day on the job. And in a sense it wasn't the F crane. Well down was just one of the eight thousand one hundred twenty two incidents reported during the month of June. I don't

No, if I like the word melt down so much Green Glad said things happen, Verizon designed five g to make the things we do every day better. With the coverage of five g nationwide, millions of people can now work, listen and stream and Verizon five g quality and in parts of many cities Verizon has alter white band the fastest five g in the world. This is the five g that spelt for you. This is five g built right. Only from Verizon five g alter wide bend available only in parts of select cities. Fifteen nation wide available in twenty seven hundred plus cities and towns global claimed, based on open single, independent analysis.

It is governor, Andrew Cuomo, who, by a strange quirk of New York, history, is ultimately responsible for the subway as governor. He appointed the chairman of the empty air, a sprawling and bureaucracy with seventy thousand plus employees, overseeing nine bridges and tunnels to commuter railroads. The New York City bus system and the subway as well as up morality of its directors more to the point. He effectively controls the state budget that funds the authority. It was Cuomo who pressed the empty aid to complete its endlessly delayed construction on the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway three new stations to new miles of back before the end of two thousand sixteen and who presided over its opening in January, two thousand seventeen like a proud parent. In the months that followed, though the sun

raise many underlying problems burst open, like a broken water main and angry Iders made a point of fixing the hashtag Cuomo DE aid to their proliferating, complaints on social media. After initially trying to shift the blame to the cities air build the Plaza Cuomo, As of late, been trying to recast himself as the subways can do Savior he can in an advisory panel called Fix N Y, see to study the idea of implementing a congestion pricing plan to help subsidize mass transit. He created an open competition called the genius challenge, come up with a viable I am to fix the subway and win one million dollars and honoured Nay wind swept night. In early September, his press office invited a small group of reporters and local camera

rose to assemble in a soggy grime caked ventilation, room beneath the Union Square Station to watch him roll out. His latest plan spotlights hung from rusty columns a dozen or so chairs were arrayed before electorate and a video monitor a little before midnight. Cuomo made his dramatic entrance through a large vented manhole climbing down a metal ladder, impressed Chee, knows tasseled boots and a window grew bearing the New York State Seal and announced that he was doubling the file nine for littering in the subway to one hundred dollars and buying some new jumbo size vacuum cleaners to clean the tracks. The moves were part, of course, Those eight hundred thirty six million dollar N Y see Subway action plan which was unveiled last saw, or by the newly installed emptier chairman, Joe Loader, who had

so run the authority several years earlier. The matter of who is going to cover that eight hundred thirty six million dollars remains a matter of some controversy. Cuomo offered to pay for half and said the city should cover the rest. The plaza refuse noting that the city had already given the empty a which it did not control billion, of dollars in taxes, the plan remains only partially funded. This is a familiar. Your quandary for the subway when the empty a first took control of the system and ninety six, he ate, the idea was to use tall money from bridges and tunnels to subsidize the subway, but this scheme supplied only a small part of what was needed for years. The state and federal government's picked up the shore all but beginning in the nineteen nineties, Governor George Pataky and the Republican controlled Congress refused to cover the empty is rising costs.

It has been scrambling for a new streams of income ever since Cuomo all his homilies about american greatness being the product of what we build has also rejected some efforts to add new revenue sources to the subway in two thousand fifteen state assemblymen from Brooklyn Jim Brennan, wrote a bill that would have steered a small but escalating percentage of state personal income tax to the authority. Cuomo staff dismissed the idea They said the empty. I wouldn't be able to spend the money, the construction and He was already at capacity. Brennan told me, of course, when I would talk to Tom Pendergast the chairman of the empty at the time and his top people they would go. Yes, as we can spend the money, give us the money. In fact, the emptier has often proved all too capable of spending money

with construction costs well, beyond what other cities spend on similar projects, its fair, too the whole New York political establishment, Cuomo the plaza and their counterparts stretching back decades or presiding over the subways decline. But the real political problem is at root: a structural one, the subway subsists on an ad hoc patchwork of taxes implemented and overseen by a governor who represents millions of voters well beyond the greater metropolitan area. Brennan estimates that New York City is responsible for fifty five percent of the state revenues, but that doesn't Change of fundamental political reality for its governors, people who don't ride this, we don't want to pay for the subway. You might say the sub ways of it

of the same rural urban divide that has come to define american politics today. A more parochial version of this divide exist in the city itself, where representatives of car Centric outer Barone neighborhoods continue to fight congestion. Pricing plans that good liver, hundreds of millions of dollars every year to the empty air. How much money does this a way really need. The regional Plan Association has on some preliminary estimates based on the current cost of empty aid projects. They calculated that renovating the thirty stations most desperately in need would run fourteen billion dollars. Dealing with those sharp turns to increase speeds and capacity would cost five billion dollars adding sixty one track miles with new stations, mainly in neighborhoods, without subway access and with large,

and generally low income populations that are heavily dependent on mass transit would run another sixty two billion dollars. Replacing the signal system would cause twenty seven billion dollars. Didn't look at replacing or overhauling cars, but a recent empty, a contract price at about two million dollars, each buying all of the new cars that are needed would cost nearly three billion dollars. Just this partial list I haven't included. The platform doors, for instance, brings the total to about one hundred and eleven billion dollars. It's a big number, but not when you put it in context, New York's

he and its environs generated one point: seven trillion dollars in gross metropolitan product in two thousand. Sixteen, that's roughly nine per cent of the nation's overall GDP. How much of that activity is dependent on the subway about a year before Hurricane Sandy, a state funded group of scientists and engineers produced a comprehensive and, as it happens, preshent report on the damage that a hundred years, storm surge, could caused the system. One of the Studies- authors, Klaus, Jacob a GEO physicist at Columbia University told me that losing the subway for a month would cost the city about sex de billion dollars in lost economic output. The reality of this apocalyptic scenario, hasn't sunk in absence, sufficient resources. The subway has been left with diminished ambitions and empty spectacles.

Inside the ventilation room at Union Square Cuomo delivered some remarks about the scourge of garbage in the subway and Led the group out onto the water logged tracks a few industrial strength, vacuum cleaners stood waiting, the governor posed for a picture with a Starbucks cup he had picked up off the a bed and then took a turn on the whole of the eighty three horse power vat tron sucking up watery gunk. That would no doubt be back with the next heavy rain to why we must save the subway the subway has been saved before, and the man who saved it was Richard ravage, stocky, white, haired and gruff ravage. Now

before is the type of civic mockery. You don't see much anymore, an urban idealist who has spent his career moving back and forth between the public and private sectors. His grandfather fled the pogroms and Russia and Classic New York story created a successful construction business from nothing. He lost everything in the depression and then his son ravages Father made his name building apartment buildings on central park. Wet ravage, followed his father into the real estate business in the nineteen sixties. He said on President Lyndon Johnson, National Commission on urban problems and in nineteen seventy three. After twelve years of trying he completed waters, the seventy eight million dollar, one thousand four hundred seventy unit development for low and middle income, families on the EAST River, just south of the United Nations, a couple of years later

which played a critical role in rescuing New York City, from its fiscal crisis, helping to persuade the teachers union too best, one hundred fifty million dollars of its pension fund in a new series of city bonds and nineteen. Seventy nine. He was named chairman of the empty, a rat it didn't need the job or even really want it. He waved his salary and took to wearing a bullet proof vest in public after someone threatening to kill him shot an empty, a police officer at his this, but he was a child of the new deal and a passionate believer in the subway which at the time was in even worse shape than it is today. During the fiscal crisis, drastic funding cuts had spun the subway into a downward spiral of deteriorate.

In tracks, malfunctioning cars, increasing crime and falling rider ship, a steep decline that tracked the city's own post industrial collapse to reverse the trend, ravage prepared a detailed breakdown of the costs of repairing and replacing all of the system's outdated equipment and proposed a sweeping plan to help fund the work, He argued at the time the transit situation, though lacking the drama of imminent bankruptcy, represents an equally grave threat to our economy, the social equilibrium and the survival of the greatest city in the world. The subways importance to the city begins with a single, durable economic principle. Cities create density.

And density creates growth. Economists call the phenomenon agglomeration. Not only does geographical proximity reduce costs, but it also facilitates the exchange of knowledge and spurs innovation. It Principle that holds true for better and worse and regardless of the industry, the free market economies, Edward Glaser, has pointed out that the junk bonds and leverage buy outs of seventies and Eighties Wall Street whereas much the product of human collaboration, as they were, of corporate greet the urban planning. Professor Elizabeth Career, Helga coined the phrase the Warhol economy, to describe how this same sort of cross

fertilisation and idea, sharing works in New York's art fashion and music war as industries grow, they attract and create new connected ones. Book publishers, beget book agents, tech, start, ups, beget, venture capital firms and so on. It all begins with the ability to pack large numbers of people into small spaces and then unpack them at the end of the day. Without the subway, this process breaks down and the city dissipates It took his case to editorial boards and legislative leaders, but there was a problem. No one wanted new taxes, so ravage Cold, called David Rockefeller, the long time head of Chase Manhattan Bank. I said Mister Rockefeller. This is an audacious request. But would you get up at five in the morning and let me show you the subway system. He told me

afternoon in his office had waterside, and he said yes. Ravage then suggested that rock I'll bring along the chairmen of met life and the President of eighteen tee. All three went and saw the dirty graffiti scarred system first hand has ravaged, tells the story that was all it took Rockefeller called the majority leader of the state Senate and told him to give ravage what he needs the tax package past and ravaged ultimately raised seven point: seven billion dollars more than seventeen billion in today's dollars, much of which was spent replacing cars, refurbishing stations and increasing maintenance. The turnaround was not immediate a year after ravages tax plan was enacted, and you will see

a rider ship dropped below one billion, but before long as the system gradually became safer, more reliable and less unsavory, it started to trend up by two thousand. Fifteen readership had hit one point: seven billion a level not seen since the late nineteenth forties rejuvenation of the subway has been intertwined with a protracted period of staggering economic prosperity, agglomeration that work, New York rebuilt. The subway and the subway rebuild the city. It was one of the great bourbon renaissance stories of our modern era, but now that the city is driving, it faces another challenge, perhaps an even greater one. How to spread this, staggering wealth more evenly. The subway,

I would again be a central part of the solution. If the story of the subway is the story of density, it is also the story of Lamb and more to the point. The story of land vow, you before the first tracks had even been laid real estate. Speculators were gobbling up arm land and empty lots along the proposed route and then quickly flipping their parcels at huge premiums to builders. When the subway recovered. From its last major, crisis. It again began throwing off enormous returns for the owners of the land above it from ninety. Ninety three to two thousand thirteen, the average price for a co up or condo in Dr Becker, rose from one hundred eighty two dollars per square foot to one thousand five hundred sixty Nine in the process, prime real estate in Manhattan was transformed from a place where people lived and build businesses.

Into a high yield investment in which absentee owners parked their money and watched it grow. As Manhattans business district setters became denser handed scarce, real estate, more expensive. The growth started to spill following the subway snaking lines across the river into Brooklyn and Queens developers build things where the subway works and we build far fewer things where it doesn't Jed while enters the forty three year old principle of the real estate development company to trees management, told me recently over lunch at a cafe and DUMBO Brooklands answer to Soho weep density, where there's transit relentless, who was wearing the familiar Brooklyn uniform of genes, new balanced sneakers and a blue hoodie, and his father David own, a good chunk of DUMBO, an investment that has made them rich house in the Hamptons vacation.

Hellas skiing beyond the wildest dreams of most new Yorkers I've known one under since the early two. Thousands. When I rented a debt, SK in one of his many buildings in the neighbourhood, a turn of the century factory that has since been convoy, did into multi million dollar condominiums. This is pretty representative of Ambrose overall trajectory over the last two decades. It's a stark transformation that would have been impossible to predict when his father first started buying the neighborhoods under utilised properties in the early nineties eighties, before it was idly known as DUMBO. What enabled happen, wasn't just the neighborhoods excellent subway access it sandwiched between f line and the airline or the city's economic recovery, or even the exodus of rich people

used out of Manhattan by even richer people. The transformation of DUMBO required something much simpler, a change in the zoning law for you, Here's the neighbourhood had been restricted to only manufacturing, uses a legacy of the city's losing battle to retain and Real jobs in the nineteen. Sixty eight in the late nineties will enter his father were able to persuade the city to jettison these old rules and allow them to completely remake the neighbourhood, filling old factories with laugh departments, design and text, centric offices, retail stores, artist, studios and new condo. Hours? In the subsequent twenty years? As the neighbourhood changed, average condo prices rose from two hundred dollars per square foot. Two more than one thousand five hundred dollars more recently. Well, let us has pushed north into Williamsburg live

Ding similar reasonings there to turn a former textile factory into the trendy, wide hotel near the EL train and a nineteenth century domino sugar Refinery, J M and Z into three million square feet of office, space, retail stores, parks and departments. Like most good government too, zoning sounds boring, but it is in fact a secret means by which cities are shaped and fortunes are made if the subway delivers density. Zoning determines where that density goes. By doing things, placing limits on how tall buildings can rise or how dwellings they can contain. New York's zoning codes are byzantine. The product of years of pushing and pulling between the desire to allow the city to evolve and grow and the impulse to keep development in check. These codes have help preserve the city's historic buildings and neighbourhoods, while preventing its streets from being

river cast into darkness by endless rows of skyscrapers, but they have also had the effect of restricting the supply of housing, which has driven approach, especially in neighborhoods with desirable buildings and good subway access. I rent studio apartments for three thousand. Four hundred dollars a month well and has told me it doesn't make any sense. New York is facing an affordable housing crisis in Russia, arms the city is incentivize in developers to build below market rate housing with property tax exemptions, while also adding regulations that require them to incorporate more affordable housing into their higher end projects. But securing one of these affordable units is not easy of the roughly tooth and three hundred apartments in will emphasis domino project about seven hundred

be reserved for lower income tenants the first one hundred five affordable units were recently made available at Monthly Rand's, ranging from five hundred ninety dollars to nine hundred sixty four dollars. Eighty seven thousand people entered the lottery for them will enters is a developed. If you want housing to be more affordable, he says build more houses. The way to put Downward pressure on rents is not to have fear of making things better. He told me it's to make things so pervasively better that people have more choices. In his words, it's insane that so little of the wealth that the subway generates flows back in The system in Hong Kong, the company that runs the subway, also controls the property around it earning huge amounts, it, can then reinvest in service enhancements the empty

by contrast, is largely cut out of the land profiteering that it enables of the authorities. Roughly thirteen billion dollar budget in two thousand seventeen about four hundred sixty million dollars came from attacks on residential real estate transactions. An additional five hundred twenty million dollars came from attacks on commercial sales to put those numbers in perspective. Several years ago, a group of economists calculated that the land in New York City, just the land, not the buildings on it, was worth about two point: five trillion dollars One thing New York City has plenty of his money and much of it is by up in real estate, a kind of blank canvas with unlimited economic promise

towards the end of our lunch. I asked one enters a hypothetical question: what, if the empty a good offer the real estate community development rights as a kind of bargaining chip? Would it under rights a boy upgrades and expansions into underserved areas in exchange, oh yeah, he said without hesitating it's just math. Who can make the money come right out of the air with a pencil. The subway has made a lot of people very rich and without carefully directed zoning laws that foster inclusive growth. It can create the kind of gentrification that contributes to America's growing income. Divide that divide has been especially acute in New York City, the fiscal Policy institute, an economic think, tank reports that between nineteen eighty and two thousand fifteen. The share of the country's income.

Going to the wealthiest one percent increased from ten percent to twenty two percent in New York City. It went from twelve point two percent to forty point: nine percent The subway can help narrow that divide by doing what subways do best increasing density for all the way growth in neighborhoods like DUMBO and Williamsburg large pockets of the city remain underpopulated and under developed many of the neighborhoods already have good subway access. One of them is in a section of Brooklyn called EAST New York. East New York is predominantly black and hispanic with a small south asian unity. Its median household income is about thirty five thousand dollars and some thirty five percent of its thirty five thousand or so residents live below the federal poverty level

New York was gradually hollowed out by the same cycle of disinvestment that aid away at a lot of formerly middle class neighborhoods in New York and other american cities over the course of the nineteen Sixtys and Seventys, the city's manufacturing jobs had disappeared, and the White middle class flight from the neighborhood was under way, the long by avaricious real estate brokers, who issued alarmist warnings about each New York's future in the process, EAST New York became a victim of what he economists call spatial or geographic inequality as its population shrank and its demographics changed, stores, closed and city services, declined, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and so for the most part it remain and until recently, when the gentrification that had been pushing east across Brooklyn along the EL train began to creep into EAST New York, a neighbour that had long been starved of resources was now

the danger of being hit by a wave of development that could push out long time residents what was to be done. The answer be a kind of grand experiment in urban planning made possible, of course, by the Subway EAST new was recently reason to invite both resin angel and commercial development to revive the neighbourhood, but with a combination of reg nations and incentives that will ensure that half of the nearly six thousand units of new housing would be affordable. This time as the subway New residents to a neighborhood. The city will take us longer hand in shaping its demographics and trying to ensure that its existing population is price down the hall, is that the whole neighborhood will become more dense and the resulting prosperity he will be widely shared all with just the stroke of a pencil and the subway.

The concept dates to Mayor Michael Bloomberg era, when the Obama, administration awarded New York, a grand for cities looking to build more affordable housing near Mass Transit De Plaza, has now turned it into an early cornerstone of his promise to build or preserve three hundred thousand affordable apartments around the city. In addition to the subsidies it will provide to developers, the city has pledged tribute, two hundred fifty million dollars to building schools parks and a new community centre in the neighborhood. This sort of targeted and man has never been done before in any community. The local city council, Morocco S Banal, told me as we toward the neighbourhood on a recent afternoon, Esben the Son of dominican immigrants grew up in

adjoining Neighbourhood of Cyprus Hills and was an important advocate for the rezoning over the objections of some who argued that the increased development would only accelerate gentrification in EAST New York. If we and move forward with this plan. The reality is that people here would have been displaced. He said ass. We passed the construction side for one of the neighborhoods first new developments, chest not comments. It's a mixed use development built around an apartment complex with two hundred seventy four units of affordable housing more than eighty units will be set aside for households earning up to twenty five thousand seven hundred seventy dollars, some of them specifically reserved for formerly homeless families. We ended up back at the Broadway Junction Subway station. The inspiration for the rezoning plan and the home to five different lines and stop on the long island. Railroad Broadway Junction is dark.

Dingy and overcrowded. Some one hundred thousand people pass through this station every day, and yet the block surrounding it are largely back the rezoning plan and visions are rebuilt, Broadway Junction as the commercial anchor for the whole project. It takes some imagination, but if you squint hard enough, you can see it. A brightly lit newly renovated transit of providing the density needed for retail stores, office, space and government and Academic Institute Bringing new economic energy to the neighbourhood, and while we're imagining things, are much better subway for the people who live in these New York the revitalized blocks around Broadway Junction, desirable to pee, with more money affordable to people with less, would reduce spatial inequality and provide current residents. New jobs,

and with a faster, more reliable subway. Those same residents could also commute more quickly, not just to Manhattan, but hospitals, nursing homes, healthcare clinics and community colleges in the outer boroughs, the source of a lot of the city's more recent job growth in New York Transit dictates opportunities. The case for the subway is case for mobility, physical mobility, economic mobility, social mobility, the business leaders, petitions and engineers who made the subway all those years ago understood that promise, and it remains the most profound message of the system. Even in its decline, the city can be built and the people can come and they can thrice millions of them, then millions more that

relation has sustained us for more than a century and some among us still see within our broken subway. The stubborn glimmers of genius when MAX Diamond was a preschooler in park slope. In the late nineteenth nineties, he turned his wooden train, said into an exact replica of his local line, complete with all four track, send the accurate location of each switch by the time he was eight. He could identify and describe in detail all the different types of cars in the subway system. By the time he was eleven. He knew the track lay out of the entire system, not just the different stops on the different lines, but the hundreds of places where the tracks connect and the precise locations of the multitude of switch

and signals in the eighth grade. He started his own. You tube channel, where his subway videos, which he posts under the handle dj hammers, made him something of a celebrity among subway buffs. In two thousand sixteen diamond was hired by the emptier as a paid in turn and at twenty one he now crunches numbers in its performance analysis unit, while he works toward and economics degree at the City College of New York we met one fall afternoon at the Fulton Street Station in Manhattan. Just a short walk from the empty is headquarters and boarded a Brooklyn bound J train an hour. Forty two he said dating to nineteen, sixty nine. We got on the first car moving quickly to the large picture window at the front of the

train, as has been diamonds customs, since he was a toddler and wended our way through the tunnels beneath lower Manhattan before emerging into the fading sunlight on the elevated tracks across the Williamsburg Bridge, like most you'll writers, I tend to think of the subway as a necessary evil, the least worst way to get where I'm going. Made it a little disorienting to spend time with someone who rides the subway for fun. But in it early years. Hundreds of thousands of people did just that every Sunday, according to the historian Clifton Hood, it was called doing the subway diamond calls it rail, fanning. The subway is a very different sort of Marvel today. What's miraculous set. This point is that it still works at all

The fact that it does that, even after decades of neglect, it is still somehow managing to carry New York's economy on its back may be the best argument for giving it everything it AIDS and then a whole lot more and what is the alternative? Here's one possible scenario: New York won't die, but it will become a different place. It will happen slowly almost imperceptibly for years, obscured by the prosperity of the segment of the population that can consistently avoid mass transit, but gradually an unpleasant and unreliable subway we'll have a cascading effect on new Yorkers relationship with their city increase. DE, we will retreat the infinite possible Ladys of New York will shrink, as the distances between neighbourhood seem to grow into

I'm businesses will choose to move elsewhere to cities where public transit is better and housing is cheaper. This will depress real estate value. Which will make housing more affordable in the short term, but it will also slow growth and development which will curtail job prospects and deplete New York's tax base, limiting its ability to provide for citizens who rely on its public institutions for opportunity. The gap between rich and poor will widen as the city's density dissipates. So too will its economic energy, innovation will happen elsewhere. New York city will be just some city that doesn't have to happen The subway still exists and the people who operated, still bring a kind of subtle genius to their work, as we rode deeper into Brooklyn and told me about something he had seen the night before he had been

monitoring. The Yankees play off game on the internet, not because he cares about baseball, but because the heavy crowds during the post seas, often spur rare service pattern. His instinct was right, trained staff, the Yankee Stadium and went down the de lined the thirty sixth street then switched over to the end line to Coney Island then continued through the code. Island terminal. Before switching to the queue line. Right and being diamond told me this sort of mood wouldn't be possible in most other cities, where subway lines operate independently but in New York they overlap. And intersect, making a single cohesive interchangeable home. It was actually pretty brilliant. He said in a reverend tone, as the blue sky in front of us begin

dark. What makes you morning good morning, no matter what you routine entails. One thing rings true the perfect morning as one that it is your body in mind for the day ahead, so give yourself a good morning. Take a moment just for you release yourself from the worries of yesterday and face today refreshed because good days start with good mornings and good morning start with Yogi T Yogi T tease made to do more than just tastes, good