Nine years since those cuts, the city is still suffering their effects. While some of the service has been restored, we may never see another V train or restoration of lost Staten Island buses, and the M104 bus will likely never make the turn across 42nd Street to the United Nations headquarters from the Upper West Side. The MTA’s own review of those cuts concluded: “Despite attempts to minimize negative impacts, the service reductions did result in certain customers losing access to transit service or experiencing a degradation in their service. When service cuts are driven by the need to reduce costs, such customer impacts are essentially unavoidable."

Impacts could be more widespread this time around. Congestion pricing aims to reduce vehicular travel in the central business district—easing congestion and improving air quality—by getting people out of cars and into transit. That means there has to be service to get people where they need to go. It’s simple: if the service isn’t there, the riders won’t come. Why fund new signals when there are fewer trains to take advantage of them?

No, cutting service isn’t the answer. The same political will that finally brought about congestion pricing is now needed to create a dedicated funding stream to operate the system. Raising the sales tax in the 12 MTA-served counties from 0.375% to 0.5% could raise $1.3 billion over five years. Changing the gas sales tax from a per-gallon charge to 4% could bring in as much as $2 billion over the same time period. (Sources and other funding options are available here).

Clearly, no one wants to raise taxes, but neither can we ignore the deleterious results of service cuts. New York and the surrounding region cannot afford to be caught in a transit death spiral. Our economy will suffer but riders will be the biggest losers.

Andrew Albert is chairman of the NYC Transit Riders Council and an MTA board member. Lisa Daglian is executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA.