Seven years ago, after a series of subway failures so severe that a stretch of 2017 came to be known as the Summer of Hell, New York officials came up with a plan to make sure a crisis like that would never happen again.
Through a tolling program known as congestion pricing, they would raise enough money to restore the system to competency. This would ward off the kind of meltdowns that had left passengers stranded without service, trapped them in dark, hot cars and injured them in derailments.
Now, with congestion pricing on hold, experts warn that a return to hell is inevitable.
The tolling program would have generated $15 billion to fund critical infrastructure upgrades such as fixing century-old tunnels and crumbling tracks. Just weeks before officials were to begin collecting tolls in June, Gov. Kathy Hochul canceled the plan. In doing so, climate change and engineering experts say that she left the continent’s biggest transportation network teetering on the brink of another crisis.
“Concrete and steel, you poke holes in it, subject it to water and chemicals and salt for 100 years, it’s going to give out,” Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said during a board meeting last week. “That is what’s happening, and we must do something about it.”
But the congestion pricing plan was politically unpopular, perhaps in part because the benefits to the system were harder to picture than the cost to motorists. A Siena College survey in April found that 63 percent of New York City residents were opposed to congestion pricing. It was even less popular among suburban respondents.
In other cities that have adopted congestion pricing, residents have initially reacted negatively, until the plans went into effect and their positive effects were realized.
Ms. Hochul has said that she halted the tolling plan because of New York City’s unstable economic recovery from the pandemic, though economists, business owners and civic leaders have refuted her logic.
In a statement, a spokesman for the governor, John Lindsay, said that Ms. Hochul was committed to funding the M.T.A.’s capital plan after finding the money last year to save the authority from billions of dollars in deficits to its operating budget.
He said that Ms. Hochul oversaw “the largest investment” in the agency’s repair plan in its history and added that she was “working with partners in government on funding mechanisms while congestion pricing is paused.”
An M.T.A. spokesman, Tim Minton, said in a statement that the authority has made strides in improving subway reliability in the past seven years by prioritizing infrastructure upgrades. An average of 84 percent of trains are on time this summer, he noted, compared with only 65 percent during the summer of 2017.
But, he added, “We need to maintain this high level of capital investment in order to confront new challenges, including those presented by global climate change.”
The disasters that happened during the Summer of Hell were not tied to a single malfunction, but a string of engineering emergencies that resulted from decades of deferred repairs to the subway network, said Mona Hemmati, a scientist at Columbia University’s Climate School.
Some repairs and renovations are in the works. But many critical improvements have not been carried out, and the system remains highly vulnerable. In recent board meetings, M.T.A. staff have listed $16.5 billion in sweeping cuts to projects that would have made long-deferred improvements, such as upgrading 1930s-era signals that often cause delays.
As the system has aged, the planet has become hotter and more humid, creating more intense weather patterns that take a toll on its infrastructure. The system is especially prone to failure during the summer, when high temperatures can warp tracks and storms can flood tunnels.
The subway’s limits were tested as recently as last month, when power outages and signal problems created lengthy delays for passengers who had to wait inside sweltering stations, where temperatures can surpass 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Riders were unnerved in January when two separate and unrelated train derailments occurred within the course of a week. A storm last fall shut down half the subway and brought much of the city to a standstill, underscoring the transit system’s difficulties dealing with bad weather intensified by climate change.
Ms. Hemmati said that during this time of year, rail operators often impose speed restrictions to reduce the risk of accidents caused by track deformations, which leads to delays.
“Imagine how people will suffer in this heat in these stations where there is no fan, no air-conditioning,” Ms. Hemmati said, adding that she nearly fainted from exposure while waiting for a train last month. “It’s a silent killer, and usually will result in more fatalities compared to storms and large-scale events like hurricanes.”
Ridership in the city has not rebounded to prepandemic levels, but is now at about 70 percent of where it once was. When school begins in the fall, passenger counts are expected to reach their highest level in four years, and transit observers believe that the added strain on the system could further test its resiliency.
Before Ms. Hochul’s reversal, the M.T.A., which runs the subway and bus system, had been enjoying a rare moment of prosperity. For the first time in decades, politicians in Albany, led by Ms. Hochul, had planned to provide as much money as it needed to make up for the shortfalls.
The authority’s operating budget had been balanced in October through the next five years, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax paid by the city’s big businesses as well as an allocation of future revenues from casinos. The money raised by congestion pricing had been a key part of the authority’s robust spending plan, making up roughly 29 percent of its $51.5 billion capital program.
“The M.T.A. has gone from a stable financial footing to a precarious position,” the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said in a statement. “The consequences of the capital funding shortfall run the gamut from possible service interruptions and reductions to a failure to improve the system’s resiliency against the next inevitable extreme weather event.”
Congestion pricing would have charged most drivers $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street during peak periods. It was designed to tamp down traffic and pollution while raising $1 billion annually for mass transit.
The M.T.A. last month predicted deficits totaling nearly $900 million in 2027 and 2028 in its operating budget because of lower-than-expected revenues from passenger fares and real-estate-related taxes. Without the proceeds from congestion pricing tolls, it expects additional operating budget losses of at least $640 million.
Unable to afford new fleets of buses and train cars, it might have to pay more for emergency repairs and maintenance for older vehicles. The tolls were expected to nudge drivers out of their cars and into subways, buses and commuter rail lines, but now the system cannot count on what had been a projected ridership increase of 1.25 percent.
Now, it will most likely have to borrow money earlier than previously planned and pay off the resulting debt sooner.
“The governor triggered a turbulent moment for transit,” said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group.
Ms. Hochul has vowed to find a way to plug the hole left by her decision to delay the program.
Mr. Lindsay noted that Ms. Hochul announced last week that she had found $54 million to to revive work on a long-awaited extension of the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan, a project that was deferred after her decision to pause congestion pricing. But transit advocates have scoffed at what they described as a paltry sum for a single project.
The governor has also suggested other ideas to fund the authority’s capital plan, as have lawmakers, opponents of congestion pricing and some transit observers. They include raising taxes on the ultrawealthy, issuing a so-called “I.O.U.” for $1 billion to the authority and selling the naming rights for subway stations.
But some transit advocates are skeptical of those solutions. They say that some of the ideas fail to provide a reliable source of funding that can be leveraged to finance up to $15 billion by borrowing money in the form of bonds. And unlike congestion pricing, they would not rein in traffic or reduce air and noise pollution.
“You can’t bond an I.O.U.,” said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the authority’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, a watchdog group that issued a report which studied the viability of the proposals. “They’re not terrible ideas. Just not the right idea for right now.”