The Times (London)

By Frankie Edozien

When Bob Kiley, 65 (right), moved from Boston to New York in 1983 to take charge of its mass transit system, he was overwhelmed by its magnitude, fearing that it would take a miracle to restore the ailing subways (Frankie Edozien writes).

“The transportation system is 12 times larger, carrying 12 times as many people (as Boston). You need the Twelve Apostles sometimes, I think, to really be carrying this thing off,” he said.

By the time he finished in 1990, the scary, barely efficient subways, often smelly havens of criminal activity, had returned to being quintessentially New York: reliable, fast and comfortable.

Gene Russianoff, a lawyer with New York City’s Straphangers Campaign, a pressure group, had many squabbles with Mr Kiley but learnt to respect him.

“All the 6,000 subway cars were replaced and rebuilt; the same with the buses,” he said yesterday. “He spent billions of dollars and things got better. These things don’t always happen in government.”

But not all Mr Kiley’s proposals were popular. His move to get rid of buskers in the subways failed.