I think it just boils down to American voters either having lower standards or not being willing to punish politicians for incompetence.
If the subway service in, say, London or Tokyo or Paris became as bad as some of the systems in the US, it would be a major political scandal and the people running the city would fear for their jobs. That doesn't happen in the US, even in places like New York where a majority of commuters use public transit regularly.
>not being willing to punish politicians for incompetence.
Punish them how? Here in America (and especially New York) we have a "two-party" system that works arm in arm to steal as much money as possible to line their own pockets. Voting for a different party doesn't mean getting a different policy - it simply means that patronage money is going into the pocket of different politically connected cronies.
Most of the rest of the world has "two-block" politics in practice, if not formally. The vast majority of national elections are between two prime minister candidates, whatever the makeup of their underlying coalitions is fairly marginal.
I think the difference in the US is much more fundamental, pluralism is baked in to the culture in a way that is pretty unique anywhere in the world, so people have very strong reactions to members of other tribes seeking authority over them. This has gotten very explicit recently, but the dynamic was always there.
There are some "cultural differences" here in the US that are used by the two corporate parties to distract and divide the people, but when it comes to substantive issues, there is no difference between the two. The same generals preside over the same endless wars. The same rotating crowd of FED chairmen, SEC lawyers, and supply-side economists hold sway over our "economy" (see lifelong Democrat and Goldmach Sachs alumni Gary Cohen who is making economic policy for Trump). The same crowd of insurance and drug company lobbyists run our for-profit healthcare system (whether or not we call it "Obamacare" and offer insubstantial subsidies to people mandated to buy insurance they can't afford from for-profit companies for policies with massive deductibles that render the insurance largely useless). The same crowd of authoritarians are appointed to prosecute the "war on drugs", which is really a war on the citizens and civil liberties. The same group of CIA agents are appointed to run the same police-state domestic (and global) spying programs and group of other various police-state agencies that are steadily eroding what few rights and privacy we have left.
All of these things remain exactly the same no matter how much people cry about Trump, or wear pussy hats, or scream about 54 different genders or how "white supremacy" is the problem. All of these substantive policies would have been identical (and run by many of the same people) had Hillary won the election. In reality, the .00001% of the people who own this country and both corporate parties are laughing at all those people while they continue to rape the people and steal our freedoms.
NYC’s subway system doesn’t see improvement because upstaters are conservative and aren’t going to benefit from it. The wealthy boomer republican districts believe that expanding public transportation into their towns will bring in the undesirable poors, and also oppose allocating funds to projects that don’t benefit them directly.
Well, that's one of the problems with the MTA: it's not technically under the direct control of any individual elected official. The MTA is an independent agency governed by a board that consists of five members appointed by the governor of New York State, four by the mayor of New York City, and three by county executives on Long Island and Westchester.
If the MTA were simply a city agency for which the mayor was directly responsible, it would be possible to channel voter anger (and there's plenty of voter anger, by the way) into action. But it's the governor who really has the most control, and he's responsible to a wide swath of voters outside the New York City region (who tend to want less spent on the MTA in any case). Plus many voters don't really understand how the MTA is structured, and elected officials can hide behind this independent-agency arrangement.
Exactly. If you read the article, it answers the OP's question pretty thoroughly. Comes down to incompetence and favoritism at the highest levels. The voters simply haven't done anything about it.
If the subway service in, say, London or Tokyo or Paris became as bad as some of the systems in the US, it would be a major political scandal and the people running the city would fear for their jobs. That doesn't happen in the US, even in places like New York where a majority of commuters use public transit regularly.