The following appeared on Monday, January 24, 2022 on The Island Now’s website:

The Metropolitan Transit Authority continues to face a multitude of management, operational and fiscal problems.

The ongoing COVID crisis, as well as the lax criminal justice system, cost overruns, delayed project completions, electrical grid failures, closures due to Hurricane Ida flooding, ransomware hackers breaching the MTA’s time-clock provider and never-ending overtime abuses are just a few of the issues the MTA has had to grapple with.

The latest COVID variant, Omicron, is not helping the transit situation. Many private sector employees who had returned to the office are back working remotely at home.

Subway ridership that had recovered somewhat to 50 percent of pre-pandemic numbers dropped to 40 percent in early January.

City COVID regulations requiring COVID vaccination cards to be checked before entering restaurants, I have learned anecdotally, have also kept people from traveling into New York City.

A Park Avenue restaurant I have been frequenting for over 25 years was packed on Thursday nights back in December. But not last Thursday when I dined there. Out of 50 tables, only five had customers.

The MTA’s problem child is the New York City transit system.

Subway crime continues to rise. In November 2021, for example, the daily average robberies increased to 2.9 from 1.3. Major felonies jumped from 3.8 to 7.8.

Total number of robberies in November were 88 compared to 39 in November 2020.

The day after Christmas there was a rash of crimes in the subway system. Four attacks were reported. A subway conductor was attacked, a woman was stabbed, an innocent bystander was pushed onto subway tracks, and gunshots were fired by a man who provoked a verbal dispute with several people waiting for a train.

On Saturday, January 10, a vagrant claiming “I am God and I can do it” shoved a woman to her death in front of an oncoming subway train. The victim was the sixth person thrown onto the tracks in the past 12 months.

Manhattan Institute analyst Nicole Gelinas has reported that “violent crime in the subways is still more than twice as high per rider as it was in 2019. The victims are random, but the perpetrators are not. The same hardcore class of criminals (and untreated mentally ill) just have fewer people underground to prey upon.”

And then there is the issue of fare beaters. Since beat cops were told in 2019 not to pursue them because district attorneys refuse to prosecute, subway fare evasion has more than doubled. In 2020, the MTA reported that 13 percent of riders jumped the turnstile versus 6 percent in 2019. (Some suggest the actual numbers could be as high as 18 percent.)

This phenomenon is costing the MTA annually more than $300 million in lost revenues.

Transit services have been scaled back thanks to the Omicron COVID variant. The New York Times reported on Jan. 7 that “on any given day this week, 21 percent of subway conductors, about 1,300 people—have been absent from work….” In addition, 25 percent of the 12,000 bus operators were out sick.

The work shortage has forced the MTA to reduce subway schedules, to suspend service on three of the system’s 22 lines, and to cut bus schedules by 15 percent.

With subway, bus, LIRR and Metro North ridership expected to be well below pre-pandemic numbers, it is projected that the MTA will lose as much as $500 million in fare-box revenues this year.

And while the authority will fund more than $16 billion in deficits over the next three years with federal grants, those dollars are one-shot revenues that serve as stop-gap measures.

Once the federal funding runs dry, the MTA will face a desperate situation.

This helps explain why a report released by the state comptroller in December, “Capital Needs and the Resilience at the MTA,” noted that “the MTA is the engine that drives New York City’s economy, and it is running on borrowed time.”

Sadly, for the MTA to avoid “going off the rails,” riders starting in 2023 may be forced to pay huge fare and toll increases in return for declining services and maintenance.

The following appeared on Monday, December 13, 2021 on The Island Now’s website:

For people who give books as Christmas presents to political junkie friends, here are my 2021 gift book picks:

James Madison: America’s First Politician by Jay Cost. This is a very readable biography of the father of the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s fourth president, by Dr. Cost, the Gerald R. Ford Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Cost skillfully describes Madison’s lifetime mission “to forge a stronger union of the states around the principles of limited government, individual rights, and, above all justice.”

The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson. Dr. Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has written an important book that explains how progressives are undermining citizenship, sovereign borders and destroying the middle class. Without a middle class, Hanson persuasively argues, “society becomes bifurcated. It splinters into one of modern masters and peasants.” And he concludes that in this situation, “the function of government is not to ensure liberty but to subsidize the poor to avoid resolution and to exempt the wealthy, who reciprocate by enriching and empowering the governing classes.”

The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry by Brad Miner. With wit and charm, Miner, a former literary editor at the National Review, invites readers to discover the oldest and best model of manhood—the gentleman. He “lays out the thousand-year history of this forgotten ideal and makes a compelling case for its modern revival.”

American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent 2008-2020 by George F. Will. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist’s ninth collection of his commentaries on U.S. culture, institutions, political arenas, and social venues. Will, who turned 80 this year, has been a leading conservative columnist for almost half a century. His reflections on current controversies and the recently departed confirm The Wall Street Journal’s observation that Will is “perhaps the most powerful journalist in America.”

The Last Days of New York: A Reporter’s True Tale by Seth Barron. In this work, Barron proves he has a keen detective’s eye for uncovering what Mayor Bill de Blasio’s progressive formulas have wrought: debt, decay and government bloat. Barron “brings to life the inner workings of how a corrupted political system hollowed out New York City, leaving it especially vulnerable, all in the name of equity and fairness.”

The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus and the Fall of New York by Ross Barkan. Published several months before Cuomo’s resignation, journalist Ross Barkan explains why Cuomo’s “heroism” during the pandemic was built on lies. Cuomo, he writes, “was too slow to shut down the state. He compared coronavirus to the flu and downplayed the threat. He failed to adequately coordinate hospitals to handle the surge of patients…. The Cuomo myth grew in proportion to the bodies piling up in hospital morgues. It lingered beyond any point of rationality.”

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger. The author, himself a man of the left, argues that the Bay Area’s underlying program “is an ideology that decimates some people by identity or experience as victims entitled to destructive behaviors.” As a result, while homelessness has been in decline in many major cities in the past five years, it grew by 32 percent in San Francisco. Seventy-three percent of the homeless live on the streets. A vast majority are drug addicts or mentally ill. California progressives are, in Shellenberger’s judgment, ruining California’s local cities because “they defend the right of people they characterize as victims to camp on sidewalks, in parks and along highways as well as to break other laws, including against public drug use and defecation.” To get a preview of what New York City could turn into, read this book.

Mario Cuomo: The Myth and the Man by George J. Marlin. Pardon me for promoting my latest book. But if you want to understand what makes Andrew Cuomo tick, you must understand his father. My book explains why Mario Cuomo was the most complicated, self-righteous, pugilistic and exasperating governor in New York state’s history.

Happy Reading in 2022!