Archive for December, 2009
Dec
20
Hypnotizing subway GIF of the day
Posted by: | CommentsHave fun with this one. It’s quite the way to waste a few minutes while you try to stay warm on a snowy Sunday.
Dec
18
Snow cancels weekend work, Nostalgia Train
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New York City Transit’s winter weather fleet is ready for service. (Photo via NYCTSubwayScoop)
If the folks reading us the weather are to be believed, we have one giant winter storm heading our way. Right now, the weather service is predicting up to a foot of snow for New York City, but I’ll believe it when I see it. The MTA, on the other hand, has to prepare for the weather no matter what, and to that end, they have canceled all weekend work. Only stations along the BMT Brighton Line and the Far Rockaway line are closed due to ongoing work.
On a sad note, the weather is also shelving the Nostalgia Train for the weekend. It’s simply too cold, and there too many contingency plans in place for Transit to devote resources toward the old train cars. It will return next weekend for a final ride in 2009.
So what then can we expect this weekend? Well, due to the need to store as much rolling stock as possible underground, the agency often uses express tracks for storage during winter storms. Thus, trains that normally run express for all or parts of their routes may run local. Passengers using lines that run outdoors may experience slower train rides or longer-than-normal waits. A few weeks, Transit urged passengers who take the A, E, D, F, N, Q, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to allow extra time during snow storms.
Meanwhile, the agency has a fleet of work trains ready to combat the snow. “Our goal is to keep our services up and running so that our customers can get to where they need to be no matter what the weather,” NYC Transit President Thomas F. Prendergast said. “We have a tremendous investment in machinery, manpower and experience so that customer confidence remains high in our ability to transport them safely.”
For those waiting for trains at stations aboveground, be on the look for some anti-snow vehicles Transit sent out a release earlier this week with info:
Snow Throwers – Precise directional snow throwing equipment. Includes a two stage impeller and side mounted rotating brushes to throw snow up to 200 feet and can remove 3,000 tons of snow an hour. This is similar to a household snow blower, just a lot bigger.
Jet Blowers – This equipment uses a jet engine to remove accumulated snow from the roadbed and deposit it a distance from the tracks so that it cannot slide back. This piece of equipment is used primarily to keep the yards clear.
De-Icer Cars – Equipped with scraper shoes that scrape off ice and also uses equipment to direct a stream of deicing fluid to melt and/or prevent ice buildup on the third rail. If ice is permitted to build up, subway car power pickup equipment will not be able to draw electric current from the third rail and the train will stop.
Ballast Regulator – Uses brush/broom to evenly sweep and push up snow onto an undercab conveyer and away from the track.
The picture atop this post shows the equipment ready and waiting for the snow. Will the storm hit? Who knows. But for this weekend, we are spared the pains of weekend service changes.
Dec
18
Pointing a finger at state, city over student transit cuts
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As New York City students face the reality of life without a free MetroCard, most of the outrage has been directed at the MTA. How could the MTA desert the city’s children? How could they play politics with the city’s future? Doesn’t the authority know truancy rates will increase?
Over the past week, I’ve examined both the politics and the mathematics behind Student MetroCard cuts, and the picture is not a rosy one. The state, once a guarantor of the Student MetroCard program, now pays just $6 million in transportation subsidies for its students while the city hasn’t increased its funding past the $45 million mark in a decade and a half. The MTA, meanwhile, is saddled with $160 million in costs for the program.
For families, the pain will be acute. Based on my calculations, it will cost at least $687.60 for a family to send one child back and forth to school every year. Add some extracurricular stops, and the costs will rise to approximately $800 a year. As Sharon Otterman explored today in The Times, many families will struggle to find that money, and the city’s school choice program would suffer. “If I had to pay for the MetroCard, my mother would have preferred a school closer to me,” Alejandro Velazquez, a 15-year-old from the Bronx who travels 40 minutes to school each way, said. “There’s one right down the block from our house.”
I am guardedly optimistic though about the MTA’s position here. What is notable about Otterman’s article is her utter lack of sources who blame the MTA for pushing through these cuts. People are out there who are willing to point fingers, but journalists who are doing their jobs will not give them a platform. The state and city should bear the costs of transporting students, and journalists should know that.
In the end, it’s a tough situation for everyone. Urban areas are not legally required in New York State to provide free transportation to students, and the MTA in particular is under no mandate to give away transit to students while the millions of New Yorkers who rely on the transit network for to power the area’s economy wait longer for more crowded trains. While state officials may want the MTA to “find money” through other cuts that sustain student transit, the reality is that student transit is not the business of the MTA, and student transit is now acutely holding down the MTA from fulfilling its role.
“No other transit agency in the country subsidizes free or discounted student travel,” agency spokesman Kevin Ortiz, said. “Transporting students usually falls on the government body responsible for educating them.” Amen.
Dec
18
Walder, Samuelsen face off over employee cuts
Posted by: | CommentsAs Jay Walder takes aim at the MTA’s labor costs, he and incoming TWU head John Samuelsen have engaged in a war of the words. On Wednesday, Walder called on the agency “to eliminate work that is no longer necessary.” He continued, “We must take this place apart to find effficiences that will make it strong…The frank reality is that the majority of our costs come from labor, and we need to find ways to be more productive.”
Samuelsen, on the other hand, defended the overtime his workers accrue and the work schedules of the Local 100. “Our position is: Years of mismanagement and neglect on the city and state level are not going to be compensated for off the backs of Local 100 members,” Samuelsen said. “If they move against Local 100 members with layoffs they are going to have a fight on their hands.”
At some point, the MTA is going to have to overhaul the authority’s internal structure from top to bottom to realize its economic efficiency. That will involve layoffs of redundant managers and the consolidation of agencies. It will also involve an elimination of rampant overtime and the loss of some union jobs. Both sides are going to feel some pain in order for the MTA to stay afloat. We’ll find out if management and the union leaders have the stomach for the consolidation or will simply spend months posturing as the rest of us have to pay.
Dec
18
Many answers, but no real solutions, for MTA woes
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As the MTA struggles with the political fallout of the rampant service cuts the authority may need to implement to cover its budget, officials everywhere are looking for answers. We know that some advocates are pushing a move to cover the operating gap with capital funds — a misguided idea at best — but other officials are searching for ways to provide for a steadier stream of transit funding and not just a one-time fix. The answers are out there, but are any of these proposals a real solution?
Right now, the MTA can look to three sources of potential revenue: the city, the state and the federal government. So far, Mayor Bloomberg has been quieter than most in this brouhaha. He campaigned on transit but has done nothing to support, let alone reform, the MTA since winning reelection next month. He hasn’t pledged to cover student transit costs; he hasn’t tried to renew his calls for congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls; he hasn’t looked at ways to further fund the MTA. For now, at least, City Hall is a non-starter.
Although the mayor’s silence is disappointing, the words spewing forth from the City Council are downright alarming. As Chris O’Leary detailed at On Transport, the City Council doesn’t have a clue about how the MTA works. After cutting funding for years, City Council members criticized the MTA for a legally required vote this week and claimed that a meeting in the works for months “ambushed” the city. Most of the Council members seem to support the quick fix of moving capital funds.
Up in Albany, things are simply a mess. Sen. Pedro Espada wants the MTA to sell its real estate holdings. In a letter to Jay Walder, he wrote, “The MTA must prioritize fiscally prudent lease and sale of assets before deciding to leave children, seniors and hard-working citizens stranded without a safe, reliable and affordable means to get to and from work, school, grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments.” Selling assets in a down real estate market is a great way to minimize potential gains. I say pass.
Meanwhile, Sen. Brian X Foley is so confident of the MTA’s fiscal state that he is already proposing to roll back the payroll tax. Because the tax provided the MTA less than expected, Foley wants to lower than tax by 68 percent in Suffolk County and 34 percent in Nassau County. Do I really need to tell you how dumb of an idea this is right now? Foley would leave the MTA with even less money than it current takes in.
Sheldon Silver is still a hope, but he hasn’t endorsed tolls or congestion pricing yet. His district stands to lose the most from these service cuts, and I’ll look at him more in depth later today.
For his part, Gov. Paterson, while not proposing any new ideas, seems to recognize the MTA’s limited options. Speaking yesterday with WOR’s John Gambling, Paterson questioned how much the MTA could really save by eliminating jobs and overtime. He echoed Jay Walder’s call to “take the place apart” and noted, in so many words, that reinstating the commuter tax could solve many of the agency’s financial woes. For now, that idea remains the Holy Grail of funding and a political non-starter. I wonder though if Walder and Paterson could succeed in overhauling the bureaucracy of the MTA. It would be a tall undertaking but a vital key to reforming transit in New York.
In the end, for a temporary fix at least, the MTA might be able to turn to the feds. Speaking on New York 1 earlier this week, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood expressed the Obama Administration’s support for transit’s future in New York. “It is a priority for President Obama and those of us at the DOT to make sure that cities have good mass transportation,” he said. “We’re willing to work with the state of New York, with the governor with the mayor and others in the legislatures to make sure that New York has a first rate transit system and a transportation system.”
LaHood’s comments suggest to me that the President and LaHood would prefer to see their money go toward expanding mass transit’s reach in New York and not just keeping a struggling authority afloat for a few more months. But if push comes to shove, the feds, with their deeper pockets, just might be, for now, the MTA’s best hope.
Dec
17
Walder eyes overtime, jobs as ways to save
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One of the strangest realities about the looming MTA financial crisis relates to wages. Non-union employees at the MTA — including everyone in a management position — is currently slated for a 10 percent wage reduction while all union members are going to enjoy three straight years of raises. Chew on that one as the MTA prepares to cut its student MetroCard program.
Jay Walder, the authority’s CEO and Chairman, as well as the MTA Board representatives are well aware of this discrepancy between the MTA’s economic reality and the new labor contract. Their hands, for now, are mostly tied, but Walder is going to examine carefully the MTA’s payroll as he looks to avert potentially disastrous service cuts.
According to The Post, Walder is going after overtime. Currently, the MTA spends more than $500 million a year on overtime, and Walder sees this, rightfully so, as wasteful spending. “We need to take the place apart,” he said, referring to the need to change the culture at the MTA from management on down to the rank-and-file. He expects to layoff approximately 700 employees, and rampant overtime will be curtailed.
Still, other Board members took a more aggressive tone yesterday. Tom Namako reports on one:
Board member Nancy Shevell set her sights on the transit union, saying this year’s fare hikes will end up funding TWU Local 100′s “unrealistic” 11 percent raises over the next three years. “Where did the fare increase go? Where did that money go?” she said. “So much of it is going to our union members and the unrealistic work rules and unrealistic increases they’ve received.
“It is really unfair that one large group is not going to be affected by the economic downturn and another large group — for example, our youth and our disabled and working people — are having to pay the price,” she said.
In response, John Samuelsen did what he seems to do best: He defended his union raises at the worst time possible. “It’s easy to talk about taking a pay cut when you’re making a few hundred thousand a year,” he said of the MTA’s looming non-union paycut. I wonder if Samuelsen is losing the war by winning this battle though. Now isn’t the time to be too vocal in support of a pay raise.
In the end, though, the union raises fall at the feet of the MTA as much as they do the arbitrators who sided with the TWU. Norman Brown, a non-voting Board member who serves the MTA as one of labor’s representatives, chided the former MTA leaders — Lee Sander and Dale Hemmerdinger — for punting on the labor negotiations. He urged the MTA to keep negotiations in the future in-house and avoid arbitration. The union is willing to work with MTA leadership to reach solutions acceptable to both sides, and by involving outside parties, Brown argued, the MTA runs the risk of drawing arbitrators who are not familiar with the way the MTA’s finances work or the way the transit system is run.
Brown, of course, is right. In the end, the arbitrators sided with the TWU in an all-or-nothing hearing because that’s what the city’s other unions have received lately. Never mind that the MTA is a state authority or that it financial ability to pay is not tied directly to tax rates as the city’s is. The arbitration was the death knell here.
Now, though, it’s time for the two sides to work together to solve their differences. The MTA can’t afford increasing costs, and the union members can’t afford to see their employer, the people who sign the checks, stumble toward bankruptcy. Something, from both sides, has to give.
Dec
17
Politicians call for separated bus lanes along 1st and 2nd Aves.
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Preliminary renderings of the planned East Side Select Service routes did not include physically separated bus lanes.
Good news about transit in New York has been hard to come by over the last few weeks. We’ve been inundated with stories about budget crises and know-nothing politicians who can’t seem to figure out that this whole mess is their fault. But today, we have some good news about a group of 19 New York representatives who seem to care about sensible transit solutions. These 19 have called up on the MTA and NYC DOT to develope physically separated bus and bike lanes along the planned route for the 1st and 2nd Ave. Select Bus Service.
The back story goes a little something like this: As part of a joint effort to improve bus service throughout the city while targeting areas not as well served by subway service as others, the MTA and the Department of Transportation have identified a series of corridors ripe for Select Bus Service, the New York City modification of a bus rapid transit plan. Last month, the two sides unveiled the plans for the 1st and 2nd Aves. bus routes, and most transit advocates were dismayed to see that the plans did not include physically separated lanes.
Over the next few weeks, the two agencies heard it from all sides. Business owners misguidedly hate any bus improvements improvements whatsoever, and transit advocates did not understand how DOT thought it can run a successful BRT line while still subjecting the buses to the problems inherent in lanes not physically separated from regular auto traffic. A few days later, DOT backtracked, saying that they might place barriers along some parts of the bus routes. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of a much-needed element of any effective BRT implementation.
Last week, 19 New York City representatives chimed in on the debate. As Streetsblog’s Ben Fried reported yesterday, Rep. Micah Kellner shared the letter a group of City Council members, U.S. House members, and State Senate and Assembly representatives sent to Janette Sadik-Kahn and Jay Walder. The letter — available here as a PDF — reads in part:
While we recognize and appreciate the Department of Transportation (DOT) plans to improve travel time and convenience through Select Bus Service (SBS) on First and Second Avenues, we urge you to take the project further. True BRT can be faster and more reliable than traditional bus service or SBS, and far less expensive than comparable subway system upgrades. While we unequivocally support the full-build Second Avenue Subway, we understand that trains are not scheduled to operate on the line until at least 2016 and extending the new line below East 63rd Street, as part of Phase III of the project, will take even longer. As such, the Second Avenue Subway project does not obviate the need for efficient BRT. This is especially true for disabled individuals who use buses more than any other form of transportation in the City. A strong BRT program could be in place inexpensively by 2011.
We call on DOT to take advantage of this rare opportunity to overhaul street-level transit in a progressive and innovative manner that reaches well beyond SBS. DOT should institute changes to the First and Second Avenue route that include not only prepaid off-board fare collection, signal priority, and a dedicated rush-hour bus lane (all present in the Fordham Road SBS), but also a physically separated busway, a physically separated bikeway, level boarding, safer crossings for pedestrians, and real-time arrival information. It is our understanding that buses running via a true BRT system on the current M15 route from beginning to end would be approximately thirty-three percent faster, on average, than SBS buses on the same route.
Such a plan would elevate the City to even greater national and international prominence for sustainable urban development initiatives that innovate and endure, and we believe there would be substantial public support for BRT — significantly greater support than we expect the SBS plan to generate. With a sensible “complete street” design that keeps cyclists and pedestrians out of harm’s way, this project would also save lives.
According to Streetsblog, DOT will release an updated plan for the 1st and 2nd Ave. Select Bus Service next month. In the meantime, the 19 signatories of this letter deserve some recognition and praise for their efforts. This is indicative of the kind of leadership on transit New York deserves and needs. Hopefully, some good — some physically separated bus lanes — will come of it.
Dec
17
Against the use of capital funds to cover the gap
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At yesterday’s MTA Board meeting, two sides to an important policy battled emerged. On the one hand were those who supported the so-called Gene Russianoff plan, a call to shift 10 percent of the MTA’s available federal stimulus funds from its capital budget to cover its operating gap. On the other side were those who lived through New York City in the 1970s and experienced first-hand what capital neglect meant to the city’s subway system and what it led to.
Doreen Frasca, a 2008 Paterson appointee, spoke out in favor of shifting the funds. She urged the agency to shift its pay-as-you-go funds to cover its operating gap and wanted to make the move to transfer nearly $90 million in stimulus funds, the maximum allowed by the feds, to the MTA’s operating balance sheet as well. “I will vociferously support transferring 10 percent of that money” to cover the gap,” she said.
Others spoke out against the idea. “I have great difficulty in moving capital money to operating,” Mitchell Pally, the Suffolk County representative, said. “That’s the problem we had in the 70s when we did that and it took us a very very long time to change the negative consequences of that.”
Norman Brown, one of the labor reps from the Metro-North Railroad Coalition, agreed. “The fear is that if capital is flexed to operating, that if federal funds are flexed to operating then the state and the city government will not be forthcoming with the funds they were previously forthcoming with,” he said. In fact, he continued, the state’s shifting of capital debts to the operating ledger is exactly why the MTA is saddled with excruciatingly large debts due to come due in a few years. To do the same in reverse would accomplish nothing.
Despite this burgeoning ideological policy debate, these comments only scratch the surface of the why of it all. On Tuesday, the Regional Plan Association released a statement that explained the policies behind its opposition to the funding shift.
First, the RPA says, there are two specific problems with “bleeding particular sources of capital dollars.” The pay-as-you-go fund allows the MTA to both keep the capital plan moving into the new year before the agency’s next five-year plan gets approved, and the capital budget faces a budget gap of 9.9 billion. To take money from capital today would drastically harm transit’s tomorrow.
The release continues:
2. Capital spending is good for long term economic recovery, which the MTA desperately needs given tax revenues are tied to the economic health of the region. Also, we’re in this operating mess because of past lack of investment. Moving these dollars to operating would undercut the system’s reliability and safety and jeopardize the progress that has been made since 1980 in restoring the system to a state of good repair. And by deferring required maintenance, it would actually increase future costs to sustain the system, requiring even larger investments – and putting more pressure on the fare – in the future. Similarly, halting or deferring projects like East Side Access or the Second Avenue Subway would undercut future economic growth and require returning federal funds that have already been committed.
3. The MTA’s riders and taxpayers are already paying a heavy price for past financing practices brought on by underinvestment (lack of capital spending). As a result of the disastrous system of “borrow now, pay-during-the-next-person’s-term-of-office” used to finance capital programs in the late 1990s and the first half of the current decade, starting in 2012, almost one in five dollars of the MTA’s operating budget is expected to be devoted to paying debt service. Cutting capital expenditures is the same as cutting service, just in the future rather than the present.
It’s important to underscore the interconnectedness of the future with the capital budget. It’s vital to recognize that the capital budget is a separate beast so that the MTA can continue to modernize and grow its capacity through a fund more secure than the operating budget. It’s also important to highlight how the MTA would actually have to return federal funds and how thousands of workers in New York’s fragile construction economy would lose jobs if the capital budget were to dry up. That is an immediate future scary to contemplate.
In the end, the MTA will have to escape from this capital mess by the best means on hand. It could raise fares; it could cut services; it could shift funds; it could ask Albany to institute real, permanent, reliable gap-closing measures such as congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls. Robbing from the capital future — or even from the capital present — is no way to cover an operating debt. The two budgets are separate for good reasons gleaned from recent history and should stay that way, financial crisis or not.
Dec
16
Mapping the potential service changes
Posted by: | CommentsIn these dark economic times for the MTA, I can appreciate a bit of map-making whimsy, and yesterday, The Times’ Clyde Haberman provided just that. The NYC columnist sat down with John Tauranac, originator of the 1979 MTA New York City Transit subway map, to talk about a map-maker’s approach to service changes. I’m still working on a post on the evolution of the design of the New York City subway maps, but Haberman’s article is nice introduction. Tauranac notes how crowded and overloaded with unnecessary information the current iteration of the maps has become and ponders the few clicks of a mouse it will take the MTA to eliminate the W and Z lines from its maps for the foreseeable future. “If the official mapmaker of the T.A. has any sense,” Tauranac said to Haberman, “he’s at work at it already.”
Dec
16
Drilling down on the politics of student MetroCard cuts
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Let’s revisit the Student MetroCard argument for a few minutes. After the MTA Board voted this morning to cut free student transit — and, in fact, even before the vote — politicians were already slamming the agency for doing so. In a way, as I said yesterday, proposing cuts to the student transit discount was designed to get the attention of politicians, but at the same time, why should the MTA continue to subsidize free student transit? After all, the state isn’t really funding the program any longer either.
To understand the politics behind the student MetroCard cut, let’s jump back in time approximately 15 years when Rudy Giuliani was mayor. At the time, the city gave $700 million to the MTA, and according to a Times article, $125 million of that — or three times the current subsidy — went to student transit passes. Those figures were in the news because Mayor Giuliani was planning on cutting the subsidy to renegotiate a lesser contribution to the MTA from the city.
After much back-and-forth between the city, the state and the MTA, the three parties struck a deal on student transit in mid-1995. Each party would all contribute $45 million to the venture, and the funding would be split evenly. The $45 million is an important figure because, up until this year, that was still the level of city and state funding for the program. Despite assurances of at least equal funding as costs rose and on-again, off-again promises to fully subsidize student fares, the city and state simply hid their economic deficiencies in the MTA’s fragile books.
In 1996, the student passes again made headlines. This time, politicians were proposing a switch to student MetroCards. Prior to that year, students received only bus passes and could not use them on the subways. With the relatively new MetroCard technology, the MTA could offer better options for commuting services. At the time, the agency said it lost $5 million annually on the giveaways.
Two years later, the state assembly began a process that expanded student MetroCard eligibility to even more people. At the time, The Times said the program would cost an additional $45 million to administer. Only the MTA was saddled with costs as state and city contributions never increased above that $45 million level. As the ranks of the city’s children has swelled, the cost to administer this program has too, and it now costs the MTA upwards of $170 million a year to provide free rides, at the mandate of the city and state, to students.
Yet again, student MetroCards are on the chopping block, and it has again become a hot-button issue. Transit officials and city budget experts are noting the politics behind the move but also the absurdity of expecting the MTA to give away rides. “This is something the city and state should pay,” the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas said to The Times. “It’s education spending, not transit spending. I think it is a pretty clever way to pressure the city and state to stop hiding their own budget problems in the MTA.”
MTA Board members concurred. “Who should have to pay for it are the people who provide the education, and that’s the state and the city,” Ira Greenberg, the Board’s LIRR Commuters Council representative, said today.
Looking again at the graphic atop this post, we can appreciate the absurdity behind those who criticize the MTA for a move the state itself just made to save money. Last month, New York State eliminated most of its funding for the student MetroCard subsidies. To balance its own budget, New York cut their contributions from $45 million to just $6 million. Although Gov. Paterson has promised to restore that money if the money for it rematerializes, why should the MTA be left picking up the tab? Any outrage should clearly be directed toward the elected officials who will not commit to funding student travel.
In the end, parents, as news outlets have found, will be quick to bash the MTA. It’s true that student MetroCard cuts are an easy to way to get attention, but the MTA should not have to cover for political shortfalls. “Nowhere else in the United States is the public transportation system responsible for the costs of transporting students to school,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said. “In other municipalities throughout the country the local government will provide that transportation free of charge, and in most cases, provide a fleet of yellow buses.”
