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The MTA is under pressure to spend big on New York’s infrastructure

A report suggests the bill could be around $115 billion

9/16/24 10:47AM

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is under a lot of pressure at the moment, and not just from disgruntled New Yorkers who’ve suffered another hellish commute. The authority will declare its capital budget for the 2025-2029 period by October 1, and two separate reports have called on the agency to cough up as much as $115 billion over 5 years to get NY’s public transport back on track.

The $115 billion estimate comes from the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), an independent fiscal watchdog. Meanwhile, a report from the state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli last week suggested that the MTA needs anywhere between $57.8 billion and $92.2 billion to cover the costs of replacing old units, expanding the network, and improving accessibility — or (as the president of the CBC put it) “the basics”. Both analyses suggested that the MTA could struggle to meet those financial thresholds, even with potential revenue from New York’s paused congestion pricing plan taken into account.

Travel money

For the 2020-2024 Capital Program, which was approved shortly before Covid struck the US in earnest, the MTA pledged to invest nearly $55 billion into the region’s subways, buses, railroads, and bridges/tunnels.

According to the authority’s capital commitment figures in the years since, however, it will have fallen short of that target by the time it publishes plans for the coming period next month.

Despite committing a record $11.4 billion in 2022 to revamp some of the busiest transit systems in the Western world, the MTA’s spending has slumped in the years since, dropping to $8 billion in 2023, and just $2.9 billion planned for this year. Interestingly, the agency reportedly claimed that the 2024 goal would have been $12 billion, were it not for pending litigation around the now-halted congestion pricing.

Meeting budget might be even harder in the post-pandemic world too. Indeed, passenger usage of New York City’s public transport remains subdued relative to pre-2020: subway daily ridership was just over the 3 million mark last week, nowhere near the 5+ million in 2019.

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TIME names the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year for 2025

TIME just announced its Person of the Year… and it’s not a single person.

The magazine selected the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 honoree, spotlighting the executives and engineers behind the year’s AI boom. One of the two covers features eight tech leaders perched on a steel beam — recreating the iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo from 1932 — including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, xAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the center, whose chips power many of today’s AI models.

Why the Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year

Western Auctioneer with Two Fingers up and Gavel in Hand

As investors pick sides in Netflix vs. Paramount, analysts say a renewed Warner Bros. bidding war looks inevitable

Analysts at Bloomberg on Wednesday said Paramount’s WBD hostile takeover offer could go as high as $35 per share.

Max Knoblauch12/10/25

The Netflix-Warner Bros. deal now faces a wall of opposition

Netflix will owe Warner Bros. $5.8 billion in cash if the deal is terminated on antitrust grounds.

Max Knoblauch12/5/25

Jon Keegan12/5/25

The New York Times, Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity

The New York Times is suing the AI search engine startup Perplexity, alleging repeated copyright violations.

In the complaint, the Times accuses Perplexity of scraping the company’s content and generating outputs that are “identical or substantially similar” to Times content:

“Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied, distributed, and displayed millions of copyrighted Times stories, videos, podcasts, images and other works to power its products and tools.”

The Times also alleges that Perplexity’s AI tool generates “hallucinations” and falsely attribute them to the Times, creating confusion that harms the company’s brand.

In a separate suit filed Thursday, the Chicago Tribune accused Perplexity of similar copyright violations.

Perplexity’s “answer engine” made early inroads in an attempt to replace traditional web searches with AI-powered responses, but its larger competitors such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have been adding similar features. OpenAI recently released its own AI-powered web browser, ChatGPT Atlas, which challenges Perplexity’s Comet browser.

Jesse Dwyer, Head of Communication for Perplexity told Sherwood News in a statement:

“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

New York Times Sues A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Over Use of Copyrighted Work

“Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied, distributed, and displayed millions of copyrighted Times stories, videos, podcasts, images and other works to power its products and tools.”

The Times also alleges that Perplexity’s AI tool generates “hallucinations” and falsely attribute them to the Times, creating confusion that harms the company’s brand.

In a separate suit filed Thursday, the Chicago Tribune accused Perplexity of similar copyright violations.

Jesse Dwyer, Head of Communication for Perplexity told Sherwood News in a statement:

“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

Jon Keegan11/28/25

European regulators will examine if Apple’s maps and ads businesses require stricter oversight

Apple has notified European regulators that its Apple Maps and Apple Ads platforms meet the threshold to be called “gatekeepers” under the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act, the European Commission said.

European antitrust regulators will now examine if the tech giant’s Maps and Ads units should be subject to stricter regulation. According to the DMA, when a platform reaches 45 million monthly active users and a market cap of €75 billion ($79 billion), it triggers the “gatekeeper” designation and additional rules apply.

While Apple notified regulators that the threshold has been met, it is pushing back on the designation, saying in a rebuttal to rule makers that the platforms are actually relatively small compared to the competition in Europe and should be excluded. The EC has 45 working days to make a final determination about the designation, and Apple would have six months to comply, Reuters reported.