“Say there’s an incident at the front of the train, and the train operator is incapacitated. You have 1,000 people on the train, and no one to get them out. This is my disaster scenario. What do they do, walk out onto the track with the third rail?” he says. Technically, says an NYCT spokesperson, police and firefighters are supposed to handle evacuations. But workers aren’t convinced. As Kevin McCauley, a subway telephone maintainer and union rep, puts it: “Who’s going to evacuate a robot train?”

If you want to see the ghost of 1975, visit the 205th Street station on the north end of the D line in the Bronx. In a study released last August by the New York City Transit Riders Council, a state-appointed oversight group, it was declared one of the five worst-maintained stations. When I stopped by, the ceilings were a corroded mess of decaying plaster, and the walls were missing large chunks of tile. The structural pillars were chewed up, like they’d been attacked by an army of beavers. Though it was a dry day, the platform was spotted with pools of water, and the tracks were strewn with garbage, including a pair of children’s shoes tied together. “It was actually worse twelve months ago,” said a station attendant with a broom. “This looks a little better now.”

Crappy aesthetics are not necessarily a sign of imminent physical danger, but they have a tangible effect. One thing that transit administrators rediscovered in the eighties is that cosmetics matter—the better the subway looks, the more inclined people are to ride it. And the fewer riders, the less funds there are to run and maintain the system—and make it look good.

MTA officials say that no matter what problems emerge today, things are infinitely better than they were in the seventies. Indeed, they love to reminisce about the subway’s disco-era dysfunction, because it allows them to take credit for today’s remarkably clean, on-time rails. But more than a third of those improvements were financed by borrowing, and the bill is now coming due, to the tune of $1.25 billion a year in debt service, or about 15 percent of the MTA budget. And more debt is on the way: The MTA will sell another half-billion dollars in bonds this year.

With money scarce, the MTA is forced to make strategic sacrifices, and the pattern is pretty obvious. Pataki screws the MTA for cash; then the MTA turns around and screws the subway—it gave the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North, used by a relatively affluent population, nearly 100 percent of the money they needed in recent years while delivering 61 percent to the subways. Then the subway stiffs New York’s poorest neighborhoods: Four of the five worst stations are in the Bronx.

Most subway stations don’t look half as bad as those, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other serious problems lurking beneath the surface. Consider the never-ending fight against water. Everyone remembers last September’s flood. But few realize that on an average day—even when it’s dry outside—about 13 million gallons are pumped out of the system. It’s an unavoidable by-product of the city’s geography, and a detail of 150 transit workers does nothing but manually clean the gunk that collects in drains throughout the system.

The water problems are worse than clogged drains, though. In many areas of the city, most notably in Brooklyn, where Jamaica Water Supply Co. stopped pumping out water near the Archer Avenue extension a few years ago, the water table is rising. “It is wreaking havoc,” says Alfonce Wojicek, the NYCT’s chief officer for track infrastructure. On the Queens Boulevard line near the Van Wyck station, say subway watchdogs, a drenching downpour can submerge the tracks entirely and shut down service.

A more serious, everyday concern associated with water is that it can short out corroded parts of the electrical systems, including that age-old relay wire made famous by the A-and-C fiasco. The Bergen Street fire, too, emerged from a combination of water damage and old wires. Subway workers complain they’ve been forced to construct ad hoc devices to prevent water-related electrical fires. “The A line has still got these relay rooms that are just horrendous. They have these plastic-bag-type tarps over them to redirect the dripping water,” says Peter Foley, a former line-equipment technician who now works for the transit union. “There’s going to be another fire just because of the water dripping down.”

When fires break out, ventilation fans become critical—and currently, only about 65 percent of the subway’s fans get that “state of good repair” seal of approval. The current five-year plan calls for that percentage to rise to more than 70 by 2009, and reach 100 by 2024. “For me, the fan rooms are as bad an issue as the equipment rooms,” says Michael Sinansky, an engineer who sits on the Transit Riders Council. Every few years, there’s a serious fire on a train or track, he notes. “If those trains are in the river tunnels, and the fan wasn’t operating, it’s really a disaster.” In 1990, a fire in the Clark Street station was made worse when the fans turned on in “supply” mode instead of “exhaust” mode, blowing the smoke down onto the platform; two people died of cardiac arrest while trying to escape.

Fires can also be caused by steel dust. Six years ago, the NYCT bought two vacuum cars that ride around the system, sucking it up. That has helped. But some experts worry about the effects of the dust on the delicate lasers in the new computer-guidance systems. “You have a lot of sensitive components,” says Dennis Boyd, a train operator for 21 years. “We’ll have to wait and see.”