Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as New York City’s mayor just after the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s. The socialist has decided to take the oath of office during a private ceremony in the old City Hall subway station, which has been abandoned since 1945. The Gilded Age marvel features magnificent arches, colored glass tiling, brass chandeliers and bronze plaques.
It’s an inspired choice, though not in the way he intends.
Mamdani explains that, when the station first opened in 1904, “it was a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives.” He added in a statement that such “ambition need not be a memory confined only to our past.” He forgot to mention that this beautiful monument was a triumph of capitalism, not government.
The Interborough Rapid Transit Company was a private corporation from its founding in 1902until its purchase by the city in 1940. The original IRT line, of which City Hall station was the crown jewel, ran 9.1 miles and included 27 other stations. It was built in four years and seven months at the equivalent cost of $1.2 billion in today’s money.
Compare this with the government’s performance on the Second Avenue subway project. That cost $2.5 billionper mile, and construction of the 1.8-mile first phase took a decade, after decades of fits and starts.
Little of the subway system would exist if not for private enterprises that the city later took over. These entrepreneurs were more concerned with building a railroad that people would want to ride than placating public-sector union bosses and environmental activists. Once all that infrastructure was there, government got involved in managing and operating it, with price-controlled fares that starved the system of funding. It was under city control until the state created a bloated Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1965.
Mamdani’s transportation agenda risks worsening nearly every problem with the system. “Free” buses, which would actually cost New Yorkers about $800 million a year, will make them magnets for crime and vagrancy. That’s also what will happen to the subway if he moves ahead with his plan to repurpose vacant newsstands in the 100 busiest stations for homeless outreach centers, with the goal of providing “triage” for the mentally ill.
The incoming mayor is right that the Big Apple’s subway is a good “monument,” but it’s to what happens when government thinks it knows better than private firms. Those interested in the city’s flourishing should want more things to look like the private skyscrapers above ground than the public transit below it.
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