There’s a massive tropical storm headed to New York, one that may flood the subway. What most people don’t know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry—some a century old.
In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 13 million gallons of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky.
On a rainy day, it is absolute madness. To the point where the MTA—NYC’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority—lives in permanent panic, fearing events like Nicole, the tropical storm system that is approaching the little town blue right now. “At some point, it would be too much to handle,” said the head of the hydraulics team back in 2006, Peter Velasquez Jr., “you’ve got rain plus wind. It basically would shut down the system. You hope not. You pray that it doesn’t.”
#20, um isn’t the point of large cities that it is more cost effective, per capita to provide services than in more rural regions? That’s why rural utilities end up being subsidized by urban users. Talk about having a clue.
But you’ve missed my point entirely. So let’s say that we pay 30% of our incomes in taxes, 5-10% to the states and the large remainder to the Feds. Well my argument is that since the states are the ones providing most of the services, they’d should be the ones collecting the largest share of the taxes, instead of waiting around with their hands outs.
# 3 Sea Lawyer said, “if NY needs to upgrade its subway, then NY should pay for it.”
A couple of quick googles shows subway fare is $2.25 and the system has 5,086,833 riders each week day. That’s over $11M in revenue PER DAY. Add in some weekend fares and that well over $30 BILLION dollars per year in revenues. The annual operating budget for the subway system is $11 billion.
So, yes. I agree.
Bush’s fault.
Obama’s fault.
If only this were true!