City Hall

You must be this tall to ride this ride.

You could feel it building for months. Long delays and drastic service changes were becoming not a rare inconvenience but a near daily frustration on the subways. The platforms seemed to be getting more crowded. People appeared just that much more on edge. Then the high-profile events started to occur: derailments, service suspensions and other signs that New York’s transit infrastructure was slipping from frustrating to failing. You knew it had become a full-blown issue when Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo began sniping at one another through the press over whose fault it all was.

In the podcast below, Gotham Gazette’s Ben Max and I discuss the mayor’s week in the Bronx, the mass transit issues (from hizoner’s subway habits to his placard policies) that came up during his tour of New York’s greatest borough and where the conversation about our city’s transit future goes now.

(We also weigh in on whether the mysterious “dispatch” or the faceless “sick passenger” is really to blame for all those times we were late for dinner.)

Intro and outro tune is “MCM” by D. Merritt/Fort Indy