Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

January 25, 2011

According to Forbes.com, New York is the sixth most taxed state.

Since that article was published in 2008 things have only gotten worse. Everyone wonders where the money goes and no one can tell you. Obviously, much of it gets frittered away due to gross mismanagement, as evidenced by the following sign.

Though I didn’t take that particular picture (lucky for me someone else did) I saw it on a bus this morning. It reads:

If it’s broke, fix it.
Instead of waiting to fix everything in a station at once, we’re fixing critical parts as soon as they need fixing. We’re now at over 100 stations and counting.

They are so proud of their common sense policy that they post it all over the transit system. They should be ashamed that they ever did it any other way. How many mothers give their children the same advice? If you break it or it is broken, fix it. It is the correct and responsible thing to do.

What the MTA used to do was not fix anything. How many New Yorkers have put up with broken stairs, out of order elevators, missing signs, burnt out bulbs, and non-working speakers? Instead of replacing or fixing them, the MTA used to wait until so many things went wrong that they had to renovate the station. And in the meantime the riding public was inconvenienced.

And some fool in the MTA’s advertising or public relations department thinks that these signs make the MTA look good. My tax money pays for those signs.

To make matters worse, while New York City has nearly 470 subway stations the sign proudly says that “We’re now at over 100 stations and counting.”  That means they are only fixing a pathetic 21% of the stations. And since the sign points out that they are fixing “critical” parts, I doubt that speakers and bulbs are being fixed at all.

It says nothing about cleaning the stations and trust me, they aren’t doing that either.

Thank you Mr. He-Had-to-Change-the-Law-to-Get-a-Third-Term Mayor Bloomberg.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
A stitch in time saves nine.
And replacing a few light bulbs and fixing some speakers is cheaper than renovating an entire train station.

Tags: bad government, bmj2k, buses, Mayor Bloomberg, money, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, MTA, New York City, stupidity, subway, taxes, trains