To witness some truly defeated souls, check out the platform at the 96th Street station after 11 p.m. The night of the week doesn't matter--you'll see assorted victims of our decaying public transportation infrastructure scanning for a 1 train that they know is at least a half-hour away. You'll see your classmates puzzling over a potential gamble on the M104, and you'll see weary people from Marble Hill or Inwood contemplating the empty hours they've spent waiting for the worst train in Manhattan. Indeed, the mind reels at the possibility of late-night 1 service getting any worse than it already is.

But it will.

On Nov. 21, Spectator reported that the Metropolitan Transit Authority will be raising fares, cutting service, and eliminating or re-routing three or four subway lines in order to close what is, according to The New York Times, a $1.2 billion budget gap next year and a $9 billion shortfall over the next five. Closer to home, the off-peak frequency of the 1 will go from one train every 20 minutes (in reality, a train every 30. Maybe.) to one every 30. The cuts are the latest results of a crisis that's already forced the MTA to scale back its planned 7-train extension, and that will likely slow construction of the long-delayed Second Avenue Line.

In Spectator, Transportation Alternatives' Wiley Norvell called this a "doomsday scenario." He's right, but it's important to understand that it's a "doomsday" that the MTA has only inherited. It's the endgame of a crisis that's been building at every level of public life--one owing to a lack of political courage on what should be one of the city's most fundamental concerns.

In March of 2008, the City Council passed Mayor Michael Bloomberg's congestion pricing initiative. The plan would have levied an $8 charge on non-commercial vehicles entering a "congestion zone" below 60th St.--according to the Times, this would have produced an estimated $500 million in annual revenue that the MTA could then borrow against. Aside from the obvious benefits of reduced traffic, congestion pricing would have provided an influx of funds to stave off or even prevent fare hikes or service cuts. It also would have made the city eligible for over $354 million in federal funds rewarding innovative urban transportation improvements.

Because of an uneven separation of city and upstate political power, the measure had to be approved in Albany before it could be implemented. That April, Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver--whose Lower Manhattan district would have been in the congestion zone--announced that he would not bring congestion pricing to a vote on the Assembly floor.

The Assembly was dominated by downstate Democrats, many of whom feared the political repercussions of making constituents pay to drive into Manhattan. It's also led by Silver, who was looking to deal a landmark defeat to his then-archrival--Republican Senate majority leader Joe Bruno. Congestion pricing had broad support from Republicans looking to back Bruno and Bloomberg, and it had broad opposition from Democrats responding to populist suspicion of congestion pricing and eyeing a return to majority-status in the Senate.

Silver claimed the initiative didn't have enough Democratic votes to pass. It died without a floor vote--but not, hopefully, without a few salient lessons sinking in.

The Democrats were finishing a crucial process started by Republicans who had successfully repealed the commuter tax in 1999. The tax charged income made in the City by people who didn't live there, under the principle that those who benefit from New York should be responsible for maintaining it--regardless of where they happen to live. With the defeat of congestion pricing and the resulting fare hikes, the suburbs' collective "drop dead" to their state's cultural and economic engine is complete. Mock the bridge-and-tunnel crowd all you want--in a time when America is more urbanized than ever, they won.

The MTA's decline nakedly reveals just how backward our public priorities are. With public transportation suffering, energy independence a hot issue, and emissions choking the ecosystem, the car dealt the train and the bus a decisive political defeat--this in a city with a sprawling network of bike lanes and one of the largest subway systems on earth. Nothing illustrates public deafness on transportation issues quite like the irony of the same outer borough constituencies who opposed congestion pricing losing the W, M, Z and G trains--except, maybe, for the slightly perverse fact that Silver's refusal to broker a compromise ensures that his district will be an exhaust-clogged parking lot for years to come.

This doomsday is not happening in a vacuum. It's the culmination of a decade of political spinelessness, and the product of a consensus that refuses to think into the long-term. As Adam Bonislawski recently pointed out in the L Magazine, the subway uses the same system of signal transfers that were in place the day it opened in 1904. This is more than interesting trivia. It's a symptom of endemic public fecklessness.

Its cure is to start fighting the next fare hike by changing the way we think about transportation. The next Secretary of Transportation should give incentives to cities willing to experiment with congestion pricing and similar innovations. And New York voters should force congestion pricing back onto the agenda. If we simply wait for the public and its representatives to snap out of their self-destructive myopia, doomsday might start looking pretty good. With the MTA, things can always get worse.