Someone Obviously Spent Too Much Time Playing Monopoly Over Thanksgiving Weekend

Buried lede: San Francisco’s BART system is nowhere near as cool as the 7 train:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., president of New York City Transit, will announce an overhaul today of how the subway system is run. The changes are designed to give individual subway lines a greater degree of autonomy by putting each one under the direction of a manager who will be responsible for almost everything that happens on the tracks, in the trains and in the stations.

The goal, Mr. Roberts said, is to have 24 subway lines operating in many ways as 24 self-contained railroads. (The number may vary, depending on how the lines are counted.) They will compete against one another and be rated on service, cleanliness, on-time performance and other measures.

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The obstacles are numerous, and it is not clear that the reorganization will be the panacea that officials envision. Many problems extend across the system. The lines share miles of track, flooding can disrupt service across multiple lines, and work on the tracks must be coordinated with an eye toward the entire system. In many cases, union rules will make it difficult to isolate personnel decisions to a single line. Signals and train movements will continue to be directed from a master control center.

And a manager running just one line still has sprawling responsibilities. There are 394,000 passenger trips each weekday on the No. 7 line alone, more than the daily total for the entire BART system in the San Francisco area.

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Mr. Roberts insisted that the changes are more than superficial. Currently, he said, the people who make decisions are often several bureaucratic layers removed from the problems that riders experience.

A request to fix a leak that causes slippery conditions on a station staircase can languish for months or years, he said. Most changes in train schedules have to be submitted to an executive who oversees the schedules on every line.

Under the new system, the general manager for each line will be able to make most of those decisions, large and small. They will be responsible for the workers who drive the trains, staff the token booths and clean and repair the cars.

“The general managers who take over the 7 and L are going to be running their own railroads,” Mr. Roberts said.