Over the last few decades, the population of cities has steadily increased as our economies become centered in urban areas. New York City’s population has risen 17% since 1990, with a near 7% rise just in the last twenty years.
All these people need to travel efficiently around the City. Cars, delivery, and taxis congest roadways resulting in excess traffic, noise, and pollution; better mass transit is the only logical solution.
This increase in demand, however, strains our City’s aging mass transit system. Similar to cities like Boston, whose infrastructure is one of the oldest in the country, New York’s subway system is over one hundred years old. The last two decades have seen a seemingly endless loop of upgrades and repair. Now with Covid, and an extremely rapid drop in mass transit users, budgets for mass transit systems are in trouble. Recently the MTA said it expects to face a $15.9 billion deficit through to 2024.
Before Covid, those who study mass transit were investigating ways to improve upon current systems and wondering how to supplement these systems with new innovations. But what now?
Many experts see opportunity for mass transit in a post-Covid world, such as re-imagining what people will use public transportation for and how that might affect traditional rush hour or overall usage. Others offer a variety of perspectives on how public transit will change post Covid.
But many of the problems that the New York Metropolitan Transportation Agency faces did not arrive with Covid-19 and won’t be fixed when the city re-emerges. This paper from an organization seeking to drive climate action provides clear straightforward suggestions for how to mitigate and overcome some of the challenges a modern urban transportation system faces.
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Evelyn Hafferty
