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Thursday morning aboard the packed F train from Kensington to DUMBO. Commuters are doing what they do best — accepting their sorry fate — but the crowded conditions and constant jostling fray the collective fabric.

“When I get off this train,” a woman shouts to no one in particular, “I am calling 3-1-1!”

And therein lies the problem. The city’s 311 system handles many things, but it cannot help a subway rider’s plight.

That’s because the state, or, more to the point, Gov. Paterson, has control over the single biggest facet of our urban life.

At one time, the subway system was run by the city government. But in the late 1960s, at the city’s behest, Albany placed it under the control of an authority it had set up to run the faltering Long Island Rail Road and Metro North commuter rail lines.

The stated goal was to insulate the subway system from city politics — but the “cure” has been worse than the supposed disease: now the political officials who are most responsible for the MTA’s dire circumstances are not held accountable for them.

Now, we are at an impasse. The MTA claims it needs a 23-percent subway and bus fare hike — plus severe service cuts and deep layoffs — to keep the system afloat. That led to the usual kabuki dance in Albany where officials floated ever-changing schemes that included payroll taxes, lesser fare hikes and tolls on the East and Harlem river bridges.

This week, top officials of the Environmental Defense Fund came to our office to ask us to support those tolls as a way of making drivers pay their share to keep the transit system afloat.

We agree that a regional transportation system requires contributions from all users — drivers, subway and bus riders and even pedestrians and bikers (who benefit from a good mass transit system) — but giving the MTA more money at this time is like giving a drunk another drink and the keys to the car.

No new revenue streams — tolls and fees that will inevitably be raised as soon as the MTA finds intself in another “crisis” next year — should be created for the authority until it is reformed from top to bottom. A good start would be to fire the existing board, whose members rarely get out of their company cars to see how the other 90 percent lives, and replace it with one whose majority is comprised of transit-using urbanites.

Ideally, these board members would be appointed by the mayor — who gets blamed for subway and bus shortcomings even though he is virtually powerless to fix them.

Which is why that woman on the F train on Thursday needs to forget about calling 311 and instead call the governor and demand a transit agency that works for New York City.

©2009 The Brooklyn Paper

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