N.Y.C.’s New Subway Chief Comes From Boston and Doesn’t Own a Car

As New York City’s subway system, the nation’s largest, lurches out of the throes of a pandemic that has drained it of millions of riders and the fares they pay, it will have a new permanent leader for the first time in more than two years.

Richard A. Davey, a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation who once led Boston’s transit system, was named on Wednesday as the next president of New York City Transit, the agency that runs the city’s subway and buses and is a division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Mr. Davey, 48, who currently advises transit systems across the world as a partner at Boston Consulting Group, will take the reins at one of the most difficult moments in the subway’s 117-year history, as it faces an existential question: How many of its prepandemic riders will return, and when?

With New York continuing to take cautious steps toward post-pandemic normalcy, top officials, from the governor to the mayor to major corporate leaders, agree that a vital, robust subway is crucial to the region’s economy and its recovery.

In an interview, Mr. Davey, who will take over the transit agency on May 2, acknowledged the challenges but said the central role that the subway and buses played in the city was something that drew him to the job.

“New York is a city that relies so heavily on its transit system,” he said. “And if the transit system doesn’t work, then New York isn’t working.”

His first priority, he added, will be to grow ridership and lure back riders whose fares are crucial to financing the subway’s operation.

Before March 2020, New York’s subway carried about 5.5 million people on an average weekday. When shutdown orders sent students and workers home, left others unemployed and kept tourists away, the subway’s ridership plunged by more than 90 percent. The bus system, whose riders are more likely to come from predominantly low-income, minority or immigrant neighborhoods, saw ridership fall by close to 80 percent.

More than two years later, the system is still struggling. Last week, the subway hovered at around 58 percent of prepandemic ridership, while bus ridership stood at about 62 percent. Under current projections, subway ridership is not expected to reach 86 percent of prepandemic levels until 2024.

But with more companies adopting a hybrid work schedule, many of the riders who do start filling public transit again will no longer be typical five-day-a-week commuters.

The depressed ridership has created a looming financial crisis for the public transit agency. Before the pandemic, the M.T.A. raised 38 percent of its revenue from fares, a relatively high percentage compared with other major American transit systems.

Though federal pandemic aid has helped the transportation authority postpone fare increases and avoid drastic service cuts, its most recent financial plan forecasts a $500 million deficit in 2025 that will balloon to about $2 billion in 2026.

Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s chairman and chief executive, said the system’s…