NEW YORK • After a drumbeat of transit disasters this year, it became impossible to ignore the failures of the New York City subway system.

A rush-hour Q train careened off the rails in southern Brooklyn. A track fire on the A-line in Upper Manhattan sent nine riders to the hospital. A crowded F train stalled in a downtown tunnel, leaving hundreds in the dark without air-conditioning for nearly an hour. As the heat of packed-together bodies fogged the windows, passengers beat on the walls and clawed at the doors in a scene from a real-life horror story. In June, after another derailment injured 34 people, Governor Andrew Cuomo declared that the system was in a "state of emergency".

But the problems plaguing the subway did not suddenly sweep over the city. They were years in the making, and they might have been avoided if decision-makers had put the interests of train riders and daily operations ahead of flashy projects and financial gimmicks.

An examination by The New York Times reveals in stark terms how the needs of the ageing, overburdened system have grown while city and state politicians have consistently steered money away from addressing them. Century-old tunnels and track routes are crumbling, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's (MTA) budget for subway maintenance has barely changed, when adjusted for inflation, from 25 years ago.

Signal problems and car equipment failures occur twice as frequently as a decade ago, but hundreds of mechanic positions have been cut because there is not enough money to pay them - even though the average total compensation for subway managers has grown to nearly US$300,000 (S$407,000) a year.

Daily ridership has nearly doubled in the past two decades to 5.7 million, but New York is the only major city in the world with fewer miles of track than it had during World War II. Efforts to add new lines have been hampered by generous agreements with labour unions and private contractors that have inflated construction costs to five times the international average.

New York's subway now has the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world, according to data collected from the 20 biggest. Just 65 per cent of weekday trains reach their destinations on time, the lowest rate since the transit crisis of the 1970s, when graffiti-covered cars regularly broke down.

None of this happened on its own. It was the result of a series of decisions by both Republican and Democratic politicians - governors from Mr George Pataki to Mr Cuomo and mayors from Mr Rudy Giuliani to Mr Bill de Blasio. Each of them cut the subway's budget or co-opted it for their own priorities. They stripped a combined US$1.5 billion from the MTA by repeatedly diverting tax revenues earmarked for the subways and also by demanding large payments for financial advice, information technology help and other services that transit leaders say the authority could have done without.

They pressured the MTA to spend billions of dollars on opulent station makeovers and other projects that did nothing to boost service or reliability, while leaving the actual movement of trains to rely on a 1930s-era signal system with fraying, cloth-covered cables. They saddled the MTA with debt and engineered a deal with creditors that brought in quick cash but locked the authority into paying US$5 billion in interest. Reporters for The Times reviewed thousands of pages of state and federal documents, and interviewed more than 300 people, including current and former subway leaders, contractors and transit experts. The examination found that the agency tasked with running the subway has been roiled by turnover and changes to its management structure. Dozens of people have cycled through high-level jobs, including many who left to work for contractors who do business with the MTA. Byzantine layers of bureaucracy have allowed transit leaders and politicians to avoid responsibility for problems.

MISSED CHANCES

But the theme that runs through it all is a perennial lack of investment in tracks, trains and signals.

Managing New York's subway is a challenge. It is the largest urban transit system in the US and one of the oldest in the world. It is also one of the few to operate 24 hours every day. And in the past two decades, MTA leaders have guided the authority through the Sept 11 attacks and Hurricane Sandy, disasters from which it is still recovering. After the emergency declaration this year, the authority unveiled an US$800 million rescue plan that included adding train cars and staff.

But politicians and transit leaders missed chances to deal with the problems sooner. And through it all, The Times found, the MTA has used sloppy data collection and accounting games that hide from the public the true causes of the subway's problems.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers who depend on the subways are missing court hearings, arriving late for medical appointments, losing out on jobs, or being robbed of time with their children.

Last year, for the first time in decades, the number of people riding the subway actually slightly declined - an astounding development in a growing city with a booming economy. "It's heartbreaking," said Mr David Gunn, a former transit system president who helped drag the subways out of the 1970s crisis only to see the system deteriorate again. While many politicians have contributed to the decline of the subway over the years, the problems reached a fever pitch under Mr Cuomo, who as Governor appoints the MTA chairman and effectively controls the authority.

Mr Cuomo tried to stave off the emergency by committing additional funding to capital construction and getting involved in decisions about how to spend it. But several transit leaders said that the interference backfired, and that the Governor would have helped more if he had introduced legislation to boost funding for core maintenance. Ms Dani Lever, a spokesman for Mr Cuomo, acknowledged that the subway was in "unacceptable disrepair", but argued that politicians and transit leaders had done their best with limited resources and a flawed agency. She said the problems stemmed from a lack of accountability caused by the city and suburbs having seats on the MTA board, and the city and legislature having power to veto capital spending. "A camel is a horse designed by committee, and the MTA is a train service run by committee," Ms Lever said.

Much of the subway's signalling equipment was decades beyond its life span. Internal MTA records show that on the morning of July 17, at least 124 delays were caused by signal issues on several lines.

Nearly a decade earlier, a budget crunch had led MTA officials to relax standards for vehicle inspections and overhauls and allow maintenance jobs to go unfilled. At least 24 delays across the city that morning had roots in malfunctioning motors, faulty brakes or broken air-conditioning systems, records show. And the MTA had saved more money by putting off track maintenance not deemed absolutely essential. At least 55 delays stemmed from track problems that morning - not counting a fire.

BUDGET CUTS

New York's subway system has always struggled to get the money it needs. Decades of cost-cutting and deferred maintenance led to the darkest days in the history of the 113-year-old system: The crisis in the 1970s, when the subway became a symbol of urban decay.

Officials rescued the subway with a simple formula: Invest in the system, and it will improve. After more than a decade of spending, about US$50 billion in today's dollars, reliability soared. Cars travelled 10 times farther before breaking down. Riders returned in droves. It was a golden era; New York and its subway seemed to be on the rise together. Then, records show, officials pulled back.

It started with New York City's mayors. While the MTA - the sprawling organisation that operates the New York subway and bus lines, two commuter railroads and several bridges - is run by the state, the subway is owned by the city. In addition to creating confusion, this dynamic sparks funding battles. Historically, the city has funded about 10 per cent of the MTA's total budget. Mr Giuliani decided to change that in 1994, when he became the city's first Republican mayor in two decades. Facing a budget shortfall and eager to show he could run the city without raising taxes, he announced he would cut the city's contribution to the MTA's operating and capital budgets by US$400 million. Mr Giuliani defended the reduction by calling the authority bloated, but he did not suggest any reforms to increase efficiency.

The reductions did not immediately cause problems. That paved the way for other city and state politicians to make more cuts. If the city's cuts hindered the subway, the state's actions practically hobbled it. Lawmakers in Albany trimmed funding for subway maintenance throughout the 1990s, records show, even as the state budget grew from US$45 billion to US$80 billion. Then they kept funding mostly flat for years, despite the surge in ridership.

MISGUIDED SPENDING?

Last year, Mr Cuomo pushed the MTA to spend nearly US$1 billion on enhanced lighting, signs, countdown clocks and other upgrades at dozens of stations. Mr Joseph Lhota, whom Mr Cuomo appointed MTA chairman in June, defended the spending. "Service and reliability shouldn't just be while passengers are on the train. It should be while they're on the platform," he said, adding that not having phone-charging ports was unacceptable in the 21st century.

But Mr Roger Toussaint, who ran the MTA's main union from 2001 to 2009, said the spending reflected a pattern of focusing on flashy projects over maintenance. "The spinal cord of the subway system is the ability to move trains - signals, power and the actual track and infrastructure," he said. "They haven't been spending money on the spine. They've been spending money on the limbs."

Over the years, subway performance slid. The percentage of trains arriving at their destinations more than five minutes late - the MTA's cut-off for whether a trip is "on time" - has increased in 14 of the past 15 years. "Mean distance between failure", the measure of how frequently trains break down, has worsened almost every year since 2010.

The financial crisis in 2008 intensified the problems, in part because of the MTA's reliance on taxes and fees. The MTA curtailed 40 types of maintenance. Among other moves, it lengthened schedules for routine work on most cars from about every 66 days to every 73, and schedules for comprehensive overhauls from every six years to every seven. Mr Lhota said the cuts, which have never been restored, were the biggest reason for the rising delays. "The maintenance intervals were stretched, and they were stretched too far," he said.

AVOIDING CULPABILITY

Although riders have bemoaned delays for years , they often have no idea what is causing them. This is a by-product of 30 years of transit officials seeking to avoid blame for the system's problems, The Times found. Every day, officials collect data that could be used to improve the system. For every incident that causes a delay, workers are supposed to log the time, location, duration, cause and department responsible. In theory, the data could be studied to identify patterns in delays and shed light on how they might be fixed. That has not happened. In 1986, the MTA's inspector-general discovered that the delay records were "seriously flawed" - and shot through with biased reporting, unauthorised adjustments, illegible entries and omissions. In the 1990s, investigators twice concluded that the count was riddled with errors and misrepresentations. Mr John Gaul, then the assistant chief of rapid transit operations, acknowledged at the time that the process was susceptible to fraud because operators were being asked to collect data on their own performances. "In many cases, undue pressure had been imposed on supervisors in the field to meet on-time performance goals," he said. The officials also said that different tactics had been used over the years to avoid culpability. From September 2009 to May 2010, records show, some 530,000 delays - 80 per cent of all delays recorded - were lumped into a category called "supplement schedule". The officials said that whenever maintenance work in the system caused a scheduling change, virtually all delays were put under this label, regardless of their cause. In recent years, the MTA has stopped using the category.

Today, MTA documents say that the most common cause of delays is "overcrowding". More than 111,000 delays were put into that category in the first four months of this year alone. That was 37 per cent of all delays. New York politicians and transit leaders have seized on the figures to suggest that most of the subway's problems come down to its popularity. The murkiness of what is truly causing delays only feeds frustration for riders like Ms Chetina Muteba, an advertising strategist whose 30-minute commute in July became a two-hour odyssey of packed cars and angry riders. "You're just kind of like, 'It's a lost cause'," she said. "It's kind of like beating a dead horse."

NYTIMES