MTAs $252M emergency intercom flop is another insult to taxpayers

Straphangers are no strangers to delays caused by trash fires, but the more insidious scourge is the MTA’s cash fires.The agency has wailed that it’s broke and needs the revenue from “congestion pricing” tolls just to keep the lights on.Baloney: While bad New York laws help explain why the MTA spends more on construction than any other major city, the agency itself keeps burning through taxpayer money on utter idiocy.The latest mind-boggling spend: $252.7 million on 3,000 “Help Point” intercoms in the name of boosting public safety.

On Tuesday, the MTA’s inspector general’s office released a damning report on the devices, launched in 2018 across all 472 stations.A whopping 50% of the 140,698 calls made over the lines from May to October of 2023 were crank calls.One caller alerted the operator that an airplane had just landed on the (underground) tracks; another placed a McDonald’s order; a third asked for free rides.No comedic geniuses among them, but the MTA should have seen this coming: Putting a bunch of free-to-use intercoms in areas where millions of bored (and sometimes insane) people wait for trains everyday was bound to result in this kind of misuse.Even worse, when the call was a true emergency, callers often experienced lengthy delays before actually getting ahold of an operator.

Indeed, more than 1,000 emergency calls went unanswered altogether last year.That means that the intercoms could be making riders more unsafe, since callers could be wasting precious time trying to reach a Help Point operator when calling 911 off a cellphone or finding a cop would be faster.Put more plainly: It’s moronic to spend any funds on underground intercoms when just about everyone and their mother has a phone in their back pocket 24/7.

With a quarter of a billion bucks burned on this useless, harebrained scheme, it’s no wonder that New York commuters are steamed at being ordered to cough up even more to fund the agency’s spending addiction.The ...