New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), already more than $45 billion in debt for new trains, buses, and infrastructure, now needs to borrow billions more to keep operating during a slow and uncertain economic recovery.
The agency projects a $10-billion operating deficit through 2021.
Last year, the MTA used 16 percent of its revenue to make debt payments. With vastly fewer commuters and the city’s shrunken tax revenues, the proportion could be 26 percent in 2021, MTA officials said. By 2024, the proportion still could be 23 percent, they noted.
Since the 1980s, the MTA has borrowed steadily to rebuild a transit system that had decayed over decades. By 2000, it had run up $11 billion in long-term debt.
That figure could swell to $50 billion in 2024, officials say.
TREND FORECAST: Already on par with Third World rail transportation long before the COVID lockdowns, with fewer commuting to work and more people leaving the city and less tourists arriving… the greater the MTA debt load will climb and the deeper the quality of the system will fall.
