From today's NYT, on the travel ban in NYC declared before the snow storm:
"As of 2014, there were 3.9 million people working in New York City, earning an average daily wage of $409. A majority of those workers commute via the city’s public transit system, even when the roads are in good condition. If the subway closing led just 10 percent of people who work in New York City to take the day off today, the cost in lost labor was around $160 million — lost wages for those who are not fortunate enough to get a paid snow day, and lost productivity to the employers of those who did get paid without working.
Of course, you have to weigh that cost against the cost of being caught unaware in a snowstorm that’s really big.
(...)
What’s harder to defend is the choice to close the subway, which is more resilient to snow than the roads are, in large part because so much of it is underground.
(...)
In 2010, an A train got stuck in the snow for 10 hours, stranding several hundred people. The M.T.A.ended up paying a $2,500 settlement to each stranded rider. It was unfortunate (particularly for the riders), but if a stuck train is the worst thing that might happen when running the subway in the snow, that makes a very strong case for running the subway in the snow. After all, those settlements totaled a bit over a million dollars, a small price to pay for keeping the city running and working for a day."
US journalists also understand political economy pretty well:
"Politicians face strong political incentives to overreact to crises. Mr. Cuomo made a similar overreaction to the Ebola crisis several months ago by ordering quarantines of returning medical workers that were widely considered unnecessary and punitive by public health experts.
He wasn’t wrong on the politics; an unnecessary abundance of caution on Ebola polled well. But that doesn’t make it smart policy."
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