[JustAnotherFan]

I love that this board is exploring this in May.  Everyone does understand that this very question was asked throughout March and April.  Right?

The quick answer - the only viable way many healthcare and other essential workers could get to the hospitals was by the public transportation system.  Take it away and staff shortages would have created far more dramatic problems in health care facilities and grocery stores.

As risky as the system might be it was still better than the alternatives, remember not every healthcare worker in NYC has a private vehicle.   So if the public transportation system was closed the workers would need to take taxis/ubers/lyfts at much greater cost.

And does anyone really believe a lyft driver transporting dozens of workers in and out of COVID treating hospitals would stay COVID-free?   Of course not.  If MTA was closed, the relatively inefficient private driver model would likely cause even more deaths in that sector.

As a native New Yorker, I can assure you if they closed the MTA during the peak of the outbreak the government would literally have killed thousands of people.  As the workers would have failed to get to their jobs and many aspects of local health care would have seized.

Oh and FWIW - there are racial and neighborhood discrimination problems in NYC with taxis, Ubers and Lyfts.   I can only imagine how long it would take an African American nurse to secure a ride from her home in the Bronx to get to her 4AM shift at a hospital overflowing with COVID patients and death.  The number of reasons a taxi or a gig driver would skip that ride request are depressing, but real. 

To bring it back for the native Cali types it is kind of like telling Los Angeles residents to continue working at their jobs sites but to get there each day without using the area freeways.   In theory a few people could successfully navigate surface streets, but if every resident in LA had to take surface streets the region would fall into chaos in a few minutes.

However, if you were going to [keep subways] open you should have done the following:
1. Do not require people to go through turnstiles or even touch the displays to buy MTA cards. You can do this by ...
2. Make it free to travel the subway by opening all of the gates at each station. Anyone who has lived in NYC knows how often the gates are open for people leaving the station. Just cut the alarms and keep them open all the time. Don't worry about who has the right badge.
3. Do not cut the number of trains. In NYC they cut service so the people coming from poorer neighborhoods into Manhattan to work were still crammed together in cars, breathing down each other's necks (more likely form of transmission than touching surfaces), even though ridership supposedly dropped. 
4. Get the cops out of the subways. NYPD has been one of the primary vectors and they are too touch feely.

[JustAnotherFan]

I love that this board is exploring this in May.  Everyone does understand that this very question was asked throughout March and April.  Right?

The quick answer - the only viable way many healthcare and other essential workers could get to the hospitals was by the public transportation system.  Take it away and staff shortages would have created far more dramatic problems in health care facilities and grocery stores.

As risky as the system might be it was still better than the alternatives, remember not every healthcare worker in NYC has a private vehicle.   So if the public transportation system was closed the workers would need to take taxis/ubers/lyfts at much greater cost.

And does anyone really believe a lyft driver transporting dozens of workers in and out of COVID treating hospitals would stay COVID-free?   Of course not.  If MTA was closed, the relatively inefficient private driver model would likely cause even more deaths in that sector.

As a native New Yorker, I can assure you if they closed the MTA during the peak of the outbreak the government would literally have killed thousands of people.  As the workers would have failed to get to their jobs and many aspects of local health care would have seized.

Oh and FWIW - there are racial and neighborhood discrimination problems in NYC with taxis, Ubers and Lyfts.   I can only imagine how long it would take an African American nurse to secure a ride from her home in the Bronx to get to her 4AM shift at a hospital overflowing with COVID patients and death.  The number of reasons a taxi or a gig driver would skip that ride request are depressing, but real. 

To bring it back for the native Cali types it is kind of like telling Los Angeles residents to continue working at their jobs sites but to get there each day without using the area freeways.   In theory a few people could successfully navigate surface streets, but if every resident in LA had to take surface streets the region would fall into chaos in a few minutes.

However, if you were going to [keep subways] open you should have done the following:
1. Do not require people to go through turnstiles or even touch the displays to buy MTA cards. You can do this by ...
2. Make it free to travel the subway by opening all of the gates at each station. Anyone who has lived in NYC knows how often the gates are open for people leaving the station. Just cut the alarms and keep them open all the time. Don't worry about who has the right badge.
3. Do not cut the number of trains. In NYC they cut service so the people coming from poorer neighborhoods into Manhattan to work were still crammed together in cars, breathing down each other's necks (more likely form of transmission than touching surfaces), even though ridership supposedly dropped. 
4. Get the cops out of the subways. NYPD has been one of the primary vectors and they are too touch feely.