The meat of the story is that the MTA purposefully allows their system to remain crippled to drum up public money.<p>&gt; That’s why the MTA has tried to associate CBTC [a enormous overhaul of the signal system for the subway] with countdown clocks. New York riders crave realtime information about trains. They don’t care how they get it. So when Transit wants to drum up support for an obscure, costly, many-decades-long capital project to upgrade to CBTC, they always point to the clocks. (“Sustained Investment Makes Real-Time Information Possible,” declares one 2012 press release.) Reporters, struggling to make sense of a half-dozen interrelated projects, follow the MTA’s lead and assume that realtime train-location information depends on signal upgrades.<p>&gt; But that would make for some pretty expensive clocks, and it would make them awfully long in arriving. The F train, for instance, if it had to wait for CBTC to get realtime arrival information, wouldn’t see it until 2035.<p>&gt;It’s a misleading narrative. You can get countdown clocks without touching the signals. The MTA knows this.<p>The analolgy with the ACA website comes at the end:<p>&gt; I keep thinking of Healthcare.gov. Everyone knows that the initial project was a costly disaster, but less well known is that a small team came along and saved it. The story includes this remarkable fact: The old system cost $250 million to build and $70 million a year to maintain. The new system—which actually worked—cost about $4 million to build; its yearly maintenance was about $1 million.