Railroads: A Model of Inefficiency

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U.S. management is supposed to be able to solve almost any business problem once it is identified. That is certainly not the case with the commuter railroads of the East, which have been going from bad to horrendous. Private enterprise has little interest in keeping up the money-losing commuter service.

A Philadelphia city official charges that the Penn-Central, for example, has no budget for maintaining the 248 cars that haul 32,500 riders daily into that city. The railroad denies it, but is un able to supply any budget figures. Bos ton's creaky commuter lines — the New Haven and the Boston & Maine — re quire huge state subsidies to run at all.

Last week the Massachusetts legislature appropriated $4.8 million to keep the roads rolling for another year.

For some railroads, the only solution seems to be outright government own ership of the commuter lines. So far, though, that has not worked either. The nation's biggest commuter line, the Long Island Rail Road, was taken over by New York State in 1966. Today the L.I.R.R. is in the worst trouble of all.

Commuters refer to the road as the Toonerville Trolley, and many have taken to wearing buttons that proclaim, "I hate the L.I.R.R."

Ambition's Reward. Since June, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (M.T.A.), which runs the road, has canceled ten to 15 trains a day. Those that do run are usually dirty, intolerably crowded—the L.I.R.R. hauls 160,000 people a day—and often unbelievably late. It is not unknown for a 40-mile trip to take three hours. In the last two months, the L.I.R.R. has had three accidents, in which 175 riders were injured. An M.T.A. executive admits that "The damn railroad is falling apart." Eugene Nickerson, the chief administrator of Long Island's populous Nassau County, last week asked President Nixon to declare Long Island a disaster area eligible for federal funds to improve L.I.R.R. service.

The troubles stem largely from an ambitious M.T.A. effort to make the Long Island a model commuter railroad. Using $132 million in state and federal money, the agency set out two years ago to re-equip the line with 620 fast, air-conditioned Budd Co. cars. Deliveries, which began last fall, have lagged 25 weeks behind schedule, and the cars have developed many bugs. Every day, more than half of the 94 cars accepted so far have been out of service because of mechanical breakdowns. The flashy Budd cars that do run have become prime targets for rock-throwing and BB-shooting vandals in the slums that trains pass through.

Union leaders charge that the M.T.A. in the past year scrapped 175 old cars that it badly needs now to maintain service; the M.T.A. replies that the cars were beyond repair. A conductor recently explained the passenger crush on a rush-hour train by saying: "We are one car short of normal—and normal is two cars short of what we are supposed to have."