Build the stuff that city residents will use every day, and put everything else on hold. When it comes to long-term planning, the MTA board of directors avoids difficult choices. The Authority’s 2000 capital plan, for instance, envisioned not only buying 1,130 new subway cars but kick-starting the Second Avenue subway line, building a rail link to La Guardia Airport, and connecting the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal (called East Side Access).

It was a beautiful wish list, but it would’ve taken Robert Moses in his prime to get it all built. Upstate voters killed a $3.8 billion bond issue in 2000 that would’ve paid for some of it, so the MTA whipped out its credit cards and put the bulk of the last capital plan on plastic. And to cover the rest, it restructured old debt, thereby saving money up front but adding billions to future interest charges all the way out to 2030. “The operating budget is now in jeopardy, not just because of inflation in the costs of operating the subway system, but from the way they financed the last capital plan five years ago,” says Ravitch. “They refinanced their debt at a much higher cost because they wouldn’t bite the bullet.”

Governor Pataki has been ruthlessly starving the MTA for a decade now, and there are no signs that he’s about to change.

The latest capital plan is, true to form, a piece of unrealizable fiction, crammed with self-serving stories for each politician to tell. East Side Access, pushed by Pataki and D’Amato, is back, with a price tag of $4.6 billion. So is the Second Avenue Subway, beloved by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, at a cost of $2.8 billion. And the plan provides $2 billion to extend the No. 7 train, which Bloomberg has made part of his plan to develop the West Side; $500 million to security projects, which everyone loves; and commits $400 million in federal money to a new South Ferry terminal, a longtime goal of Staten Island’s congressman, Vito Fossella. The plan also happens to be short of funds by more than $16 billion. Much as we might want them, it simply will be impossible for all these expansions to proceed at once.

The MTA needs an algorithm for inflicting the least damage possible while making painful choices among long-range programs. It also needs to push the federal government to let it use some 9/11 funds throughout the transit system, on the principle that it’s just as important to better connect downtown to the rest of the city as it is to renovate the stations there. Other things being equal, the No. 7 extension, which will connect an entire new frontier of development to the rest of the city, seems the most useful. And the South Ferry terminal, which will rip apart Battery Park to shine up an area already getting doused with 9/11 funds (the Port Authority is planning a $2 billion, Santiago Calatrava–designed station nearby), seems the most useless.

Squeeze more cash out of drivers. Back in the sixties, Governor Nelson Rockefeller diverted toll proceeds from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to pay for mass transit. It was a masterstroke, and the same trick can be used again—on the East River bridges. MTA officials have been talking about that as long as there has been an MTA. “I remember sitting in Mayor Lindsay’s office while Bill Ronan, the first chairman, was saying, ‘If we have to, we’ll start putting pretty girls out there with big hats,’ ” Stangl recalls. Call it a sign of the times that the girls will be replaced by E-Z Pass tollbooths, but the MTA can no longer avoid such drastic measures. “If fares don’t go up, you’ve got three choices,” says Ravitch. “You can appropriate money from the state budget, the MTA can borrow money, or you can let the system go to hell. There is no fairy godmother.”