This expose really opened my eyes to how our political system will spend billions for a new station but won't fix broken track signals and chewed out cabling:
Maintenance isn't sexy. It doesn't make for catchy political campaign promises. It's dirty, it's hard, it never ends, and you've succeed best when no one notices.
But we live in a world full of old technologies and old systems that need constant maintenance and repair. Big infrastructure like the NY Subway is a prime example. 'Innovation' is only of marginal help when dealing with a system like that. Sure, if we had a spare ~$200 billion and were willing to completely evacuate New York City for 3 years we could rip everything out and build a new subway system to rival Singapore or Hong Kong. But this is the real world, and we have to rebuild the proverbial ship while it's still at sea. And the degree to which we have the tools and money to do so is a consequence of our political system.
For anyone who found the OP article interesting, and who cares about technology as it really is across the world rather than as it's portrayed by the Silicon Valley hype machine, I highly recommend the book cited at one point in the article: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, by the historian David Edgerton. It completely changed how I think about technology and the ways people use it.
It's not just our political system. Italy had a crippling drought not seen since 1800 in 2017. Rome shut off public fountains, drinking stations, and finally addressed the 40%-45% water loss due to leaks in the pipes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...