Things don’t always get worse.

In outlaw days, someone stole the steps to the elevated train station at Livonia Avenue in Brooklyn, and there were no plans to replace them until a photograph of a man shimmying up the banister ran on the front page of a newspaper. An arsonist burned the mezzanine of another el station, at Intervale Avenue in the Bronx, and it stayed closed for three years; officials did not want to rebuild it. The Franklin Avenue shuttle line in Brooklyn fell into such ruin that M.T.A. officials wanted to walk away from it. An influential figure with the Regional Plan Association, a research and advocacy group, urged closing 30 stations and shutting down entirely several lines in the Bronx.

All these episodes took place during the 1980s, when gangsters might as well have openly connived with establishment figures. Neglect, dressed up as responsible resource-allocation decisions, can be just as violent as a can of gasoline and a book of matches, if slower acting. Most immediately, the victims were people cut off from transportation: nurses’ aides, fabric cutters, doormen, shipping clerks, young students going off to school, sick people headed to their doctors. Had these shrinkage schemes not been foiled, they would have been acts of vandalism against the future. But people pushed back. Politicians howled. The transit authorities yielded. The total riderships in 2016 for Livonia in Brooklyn and Intervale in the Bronx were one million at each station.

Sometimes, politics works. Sometimes, what looks like pandering winds up being good civic hygiene.

On Thursday a new generation of thinkers and researchers with the Regional Plan Association published a new plan for the region, a serious work about transportation, housing and sustainability that weaves thorough analyses of problems with proposed solutions. It commands respectful attention, not awe. One of its ideas is to break up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or at least farm out its work to new public bodies, in order to protect transit operations from changes in the political weather.

The current subway mess begins, it should be noted, with an epochal success by political figures. In 1979, with the transit system on the brink of collapse, Gov. Hugh L. Carey appointed a shrewd and well-liked builder, Richard Ravitch, to be chairman of the M.T.A. Mr. Ravitch insisted that everyone — in government, and in the general public — see that the infrastructure was made of parts that had to be replaced before they failed, not after. Since then, the public has invested more than $100 billion. Ridership has doubled. New York has boomed.