Urban Life

Once upon a time in the Great City, Hugh L. Carey, one of New York’s best modern governors, and certainly its most underrated, pledged not to raise the 50 cent fare on the subways and buses. Swiftly, the man Carey had picked to chair the system, Richard Ravitch, contradicted him.

The fare, Ravitch explained, was the difference between how much money was needed to properly maintain and operate the system and how much the state, the city and others put in. Math, in other words, not politics.

Afterward, Carey, raised in the gentle arts of Brooklyn politics, summoned Ravitch to dinner at one of the Governor’s favorite midtown watering holes. In the hardball of New York, the menu would be expected to include a dressing down. Which is why to this day Ravitch loves to repeat what the governor actually said next: “Dick, thanks for getting me off the hook. Don’t pay any attention to what I say.”

That was then.

This is now. “Train Daddy” Andy Byford came and went faster than a speeding A train, the casualty of Governor Cuomo’s penchant to “micro-manage” a system he is bound by state law to keep his hands off of.