About Kyle

Kyle M. Kirschling wearing a white safety helmet and a bright safety vest, smiling, in a subway emergency exit door during a site inspection.

Making Infrastructure Pay

Kyle M. Kirschling is a consultant who specializes in improving cities’ infrastructure. He is a licensed CPA and holds a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University.

As an advisor to the New York City Transit Authority, he sped up subway trains (reversing a 23-year trend) by conceiving a new operations strategy, saving two to four minutes per train trip and increasing on-time performance from 67% to 81% in 12 months, at zero cost (includes the “Save Safe Seconds” campaign and “SPEED Unit,” as reported in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere).

He and economist Raymond C. Niles co-authored Substeading, which advocates a new legal framework to unleash private investors and entrepreneurs into cities’ unused subsurface.

He is the author of Engineering the New York City Subway, the first publication to explain why New York City has a subway, and he is the author of An Economic Analysis of Rapid Transit in New York, 1870-2010, an evaluation of the impact of private, public, and hybrid institutions for transit ownership and operation.

Disclaimer: the thoughts and opinions expressed in this website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Kyle’s current or former employers.