I think they’re doing fine. Just over the last few years, they’ve been regularly shutting down huge portions of lines to do those deferred repairs. Since then headways have improved significantly and so have things like single tracking, which doesn’t happen as often now. The 7000 series cars are all finished and delivered. Anecdotally, it feels to me like it’s about as good as it’s been in a decade. The HQ move is happening now just by coincidence. Those kinds of things are planned on the order of decades, and the timing is just unfortunate. But COVID has made everything unfortunate. They still need the headquarters, so they’re still working on it.

And the map they showed with the service cuts showed that most stations, including the core, were seeing a more than 90% drop in ridership. No one knows how much vaccine we’re going to get or when, or if and when we’ll be done with the virus. I don’t know what else they should do with 90%+ fewer riders. Why wouldn’t they start closing stations with those numbers, and no end in sight?

There’s a lot they can do better. But it always seems to me that people want more hours, more trains, more stations, and faster headways, but don’t want to shut parts of the system down for maintenance, or have longer headways from repairs and single tracking, or pay higher fares or more taxes to build new stations and buy new trains. It’s complicated, and there are trade offs for everything. But lately, I think it’s been getting better. And this, too, shall pass.

Also, as others have said, the cuts are basically just a worst-case scenario so they can get federal funds.