Archive for April, 2010
Apr
09
Funding transit through selling spare parts
Posted by: | CommentsThe MTA has long recognized the collectors value in its spare and old parts. A rollsign from, say, the now-reefed R40s can command a pretty penny from those who enjoy subway memorabilia, and recently, the MTA has found value in dirt. Today, Heather Haddon from amNew York delves into the economics of the MTA’s recycling and reclamation programs. In addition to those pieces of subway history that Transit sells as memorabilia and collectibles – green and red station entrance globes, anyone? – the MTA, she says, can make millions selling old bus parts and recycling unused diesel fuel.
Interesting, she also highlights the MTA’s vast reserves of dirt. Currently, the authority is digging new tunnels under 11th and 2nd Aves. and the East River for various capital projects, and the agency has found itself with spare dirt on hand. “Developers of tennis courts,” Haddon writes, “and playgrounds are eager to scoop up pure dirt, and 100,000 tons of it from the East Side Access project was used to landscape the recently opened Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park.” That long-awaited project in Brooklyn will soon enjoy another 30,000 tons of dirt from the East Side Access tunnels. Who knew?
Apr
09
Listen live to Second Ave. Sagas on NYC Tracks
Posted by: | CommentsAt 5 p.m. this afternoon, I’ll be making a Blog Talk Radio appearance to talk subways. I’m a guest on NYC Tracks’ weekly podcast. Coming out of the CUNY Journalism school, NYC Tracks is a new site focusing on the goings-on beneath city streets, and today’s podcast features amNew York’s Heather Haddon alongside yours truly.
The 30-minute show can be heard here in an hour, and the player embedded at right above will carry it as well. We’ll be discussing the week in transit news. So be sure to check that out.
Apr
09
MTA to cut $40 million from back-end projects
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In a few months, the MTA will drastically scale back train and bus service throughout the New York region in an effort to close approximately $383 million of a $790 million budget gap. As the authority struggles to find savings to cover the remaining $378 million shortfall, CEO and Chair Jay Walder announced plans yesterday to save $40 million through cuts to projects that won’t impact service.
To achieve this goal, the authority has conducted what they call a “top-to-bottom review of every project in the operating budget to see what can be eliminated or put on hold.” To do this, the authority has cut or put on hold 141 non-essential projects that either are not required by law or are not necessary to maintain passenger safety or quality of service. This total includes nearly 50 percent of all projects originally slated for 2010.
On a generally level, these cuts are aimed at trimming the MTA’s fat. Thirty-five facility renovation projects are being shelved, including some that replace working parts with newer ones. The MTA will not be upgrading its fleet of employee vehicles, and 82 IT upgrades are being shelved for another year for a savings of $17 million.
Specifically, one major project designed to improve the MTA’s armrests on commuter rail lines will be deferred another year. The news of armrests snagging pants first came to my attention during the early days of Second Ave. Sagas, and in 2007, the authority vowed to fix it. Now, in order to save $3 million, the pants-ripping armrests will remain, and the authority will simply eat the $15,000 a year it pays in tailoring costs. “We’re going to rely on people to get used to the way the armrests are,” Walder said.
In the end, as MTA COO Charles Monheim said, “this is nuts-and-bolts stuff.” Yet, the MTA has to find another $338 million in savings. Walder is working to renegotiate vendor contracts and will soon meet with labor heads to discuss that situation. But it is, as the MTA recognizes, extremely tough to close an $800 million gap without raising fares or relying on a congestion pricing/bridge toll plan. Still, fare hikes remain off the table until 2010, the state legislature hasn’t acted on Pedro Espada’s bridge toll proposal yet, and the fat trimming will continue.
Apr
09
The shape of Tunnel Boring Machines to come
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Early last week, the MTA took us all for a visual trip inside the Second Ave. Subway launch box. With the starter tunnels nearly complete, the Capital Construction crews will soon lower the tunnel boring machine 60 feet under the ground to start the trip from 96th St. to the existing tunnels at 63rd St.
Yesterday, via its NYCTSubwayScoop Twitter account, Transit unveiled some information about the tunnel boring machine that will soon dig the city its long-awaited Second Ave. Subway. The picture above – courtesy of MTA Capital Construction - shows the tunnel boring machine currently at work digging out the 7 line extension. The one for Second Avenue is quite similar.
Per Transit, the TBM for the East Side dates from the late 1970s. It has been reconditioned and is now “like new.” Now on the way from Newark, the TBM was tested in New Jersey and will be reassembled in front of the starter tunnels underground. A new era in the New York City subway will soon be upon us.
For this particular tunnel boring machine, a trip underground in New York City is nothing new. This is the same TBM that dug out the 63rd St. tunnel a few decades ago. Now, it will reunite with that tunnel and activate currently unused tracks that connect to the BMT Broadway line. Most recently, this machine dug out the Fall River CSO in Massachusetts.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll have more on the tunnel boring machine and its launch date approaches. For now, I’ll leave you after the jump with two final images – again via Capital Construction – of the TBM underneath 11th Ave. The first shows the TBM getting pulled through the station cavern at 34th St., and the second shows the TBM’s trailing gear. Soon, we’ll have pictures similar to these but under Second Ave. as the phantom subway inches closer to reality. Read More→
Apr
08
On snowy days, MTA sees too many sick days
Posted by: | CommentsStaten Island bus drivers have a snow day problem, according to New York City Transit. Based upon data from a few snowy days this February, more divers are calling in sick on snowy days, the Daily News reports today. According to Transit, more drivers than usual called in sick on February 9, the day of a major storm in the New York City area, and by the time the snow had settled, 88 drivers out of Castleton – or 21 percent of that depot’s drivers – had filed for a sick day, and 15 percent of drivers from Staten Island’s Yukon depot had done the same.
To fill these service gaps, the MTA had to turn to workers who collect overtime, and the cash-strapped authority isn’t too pleased with the potential sick-day abuse. “Clearly there are cases where people are taking advantage of sick-day policies, and when and where we are able, we’re going to go after those cases in a very serious way,” Jeremy Soffin, MTA spokesman, said to Pete Donohue.
Vinnie Serapiglia, a vice president at Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Local 726, defended drivers who life outside of the city and could have faced “tough commutes” back to their suburban houses in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. “I don’t understand the thinking of the transit authority. The guys come here and put their all into the job,” he said, “and it seems like they are constantly under attack by management.”
Apr
08
For cameras, looking at an in-house solution
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Since the stabbing that left two people dead on a downtown 2 train nearly two weeks ago, much has been written about the MTA’s inadequate surveillance camera system. We know that the MTA and Lockheed Martin are in a legal battle over a system that hasn’t been implemented properly, and we’ve explored the benefits and limitations of subway security cameras. Today, amNew York has an interesting take on the situation. According to a Heather Haddon piece, the MTA’s in-house solution has worked much better than any outsourced plan.
Haddon discusses the two approaches and the economics behind it:
While hundreds of high-tech cameras that cost the MTA $20 million are broken, cheaper models installed a few years back are doing their job pretty well, amNewYork has learned. The simpler cameras, costing roughly half as much as the high-tech models that were contracted out, took about six months to install and have been used by police dozens of times to catch bank robbers and other criminals, elected officials say…
In 2006, the MTA signed a $20 million contract to install 900 high-tech cameras in 32 stations, including 14 in Manhattan. Those cameras were supposed to start rolling in 2008, but a key contractor went belly up that year, delaying the project, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz confirmed. “Since that time, the MTA … has continued to work to get the cameras online and all the locations will be fully operational by June of this year,” Ortiz said…
But the simpler system designed and maintained in-house has been nabbing criminals for years. In 2005, Assemb. Dov Hikind, (D-Brooklyn), allocated $1.2 million to get 120 closed-circuit cameras up in nine borough stations on the D, R and N lines. The system features $400 Panasonic closed circuit cameras on the platforms, mezzanines and stairways, capturing more angles than the other MTA devices, which point at entrances and turnstiles, union officials say. The recording device costs about $15,000 at each station.
If my math is correct, the MTA is paying $20 million to install cameras that, if developed in-house, would cost approximately $840,000 (32 stations at $15,000 a piece and 900 cameras at $400 each). I don’t have the details about the system developed with Lockheed, and I have to imagine it included some sensitive security measures that extended beyond just video surveillance. But I have to wonder too if, sometimes, the MTA is just trying too hard. If the in-house solution works and is cheaper, why throw out the baby with the bathwater?
Apr
08
Treating the trains as we would our kitchen
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This past Sunday night, I found myself on a reasonably crowded 2 train heading from the Upper West Side to Park Slope. As the train went local and slowly snaked its way down the West Side, I had ample opportunity to surreptitiously survey the scene. What struck my fancy was something quite disgusting.
Sitting across the car from me where a family traveling together. The young parents had their daughter — maybe five or six years old — in tow, and she was trying to chow down on some fast food chicken fingers and fries. At one point, the girl spilled half of the box of food on the floor, and as her dad leaned over to inspect the damage, I was sure he would sweep it up into the plastic bag he had with him. Instead, he pushed the fries and chicken under the seat, and as the train continued onward, every few minutes, he would kick more of the food under the seat, grinding it into mush in the process. I was disgusted.
Eventually, the three exited the train, and I turned to my girlfriend, who also witnessed this display with similar disgust. “Do you think,” I asked, “they do that at home when they drop something on their kitchen floor?” I often find it easier just to kick food under the table than it is to own up and clean it up. Don’t you?
This behavior isn’t rare in the subways. People think they can just abdicate responsibility for their actions because, hey, someone else will have to clean it up. Rampant rudeness on trains is a known problem, and websites such as Train Pigs document those who eat and litter underground. Yet, it shouldn’t be like that.
New York City Transit’s trains are a shared space in the city. No matter our upbringing, our class, our socioeconomic position in the city, we ride the trains to get from Point A to Point B in a cheap, fast and environmentally friendly way. The trains, then, are only as clean as we make them. We can blame the MTA for its lack of garbage cans — a problem at stations with one entrance — and we can question the decision to skimp on station cleaners amidst an economic crisis.
Still, the fact remains that we the riders should be the ones who clean up after ourselves. We shouldn’t ignore food that spills, and maybe we shouldn’t let others off the hook either. I didn’t say anything to the family that spilled dinner on the floor and then tried to kick away. I let them off the train with just a glare, and others did the same. No one wanted to pick a fight, and we all faced the typical collective action problem. It was, we though, someone else’s problem.
Maybe, though, had one person said something, we could have shamed that family into doing the right thing. We could have let them know that we saw what they did and how they tried to cover it up. We could have told them that we knew they were taking a shared city resource, something upon which we all depend and something we all want to see clean, and sullying it through rude behavior. But we didn’t.
The MTA urges people to take their trash with them, and yet, many do not. Perhaps, we should urge people to treat train floors as they would their kitchen. When I spill something in the kitchen, I don’t kick it under the counter and hope no one notices. I clean it up because it’s what we are supposed to do at home and what we should also do on the trains.
Apr
07
Transit rejects IND/BMT transfer in South Williamsburg
Posted by: | CommentsThe Broadway station on the G, the IND Crosstown line that runs from Brooklyn to Queens, and the J/M/Z’s Lorimer St. station on the BMT Jamaica line are separated by a half block and two turnstiles. Residents have long wished for a transfer between the G and the J/M/Z lines, and as the population in the area has swelled, Transit has faced numerous requests to provide, at the last, a free out-of-system transfer as they do at 59th St./63rd St. in Manhattan between the 4/5/6/N/R/W and F trains.
According to a recent report at BushwickBK.com, Transit has rejected a recent request to grant this transfer. The authority says there’s no need for a transfer, and with money tight, the agency isn’t about to give up a few extra swipes. “NYC Transit does not intend to implement any external walking transfers,” Transit spokesperson Deirdre Parker said. “It is possible for our customers to travel conveniently on almost every conceivable path within Brooklyn.” Even, as Parker notes, with over 50 percent of subway riders using unlimited cards, a free transfer would be convenient as there are no points in the system where the G and J/M/Z share a station.
Apr
07
Report: 7 line costs ‘trending above’ budget
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Eventually, this cavern will be the new terminus for the 7 train at 34th St. and 11th Ave. (Photo courtesy of MTA Capital Construction)
As the Tunnel Boring Machines continue their march toward 41st St. and 8th Ave., the 7 line extension is slowly, slowly taking shape. Yet, this city-funded subway extension, built for the benefit of real estate developers along Manhattan’s final frontier on the Far West Side, may be facing another hiccup. According to a report in the Daily News this morning, engineers are concerned that costs are exceeding the budget, and still no one knows who will pay for the overruns.
For this tortured project that may not be the best use of city subway construction funds, cost overruns have continually been a thorn in its side. Due to an increasing price tag, planners had to shelve plans to build a badly-needed station at 41st and 10th Ave., and even a station shell that would allow for future expansion was deemed too costly. We witnessed a shocking lack of planning for the future, a problem that has plagued the New York City subways for the better part of eight decades.
Today, the problem is one of rising costs and a budget set years ago. According to a report from the engineering firm McKissack + Delcan, costs are “trending above” the $2.1 billion budget for the 7 line extension. The Daily News says that “costs are rising partly because it is taking longer than anticipated to obtain easements and title to property needed for ventilation, signal, communications and other systems.” Pete Donohue has more:
The consulting firm hasn’t determined the size of the developing deficit, but Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester) called the situation a “huge, unresolved mess.”
“The MTA is looking at a project no one has the money to complete,” Brodsky said. “The city’s broke. The state’s broke. The MTA’s broke.”
The 1.5-mile extension – from Times Square to 34th St. and 11th Ave. – wasn’t in the MTA’s plans, but was sought by Mayor Bloomberg to spur development. In September 2006, the MTA agreed to build it after City Hall pledged up to $2.1 billion for construction. City and transit officials never signed an agreement fixing responsibility for cost overruns. At the time, some transit advocates and officials feared the MTA would wind up diverting money from more worthwhile projects to the No. 7 line extension.
Andrew Brent, a spokesman for Bloomberg, said yesterday, “If it becomes clear at some point that overruns are unavoidable, we’ll address how they would be covered then.”
For now, the MTA’s official documents list the project as on budget, and that won’t change until the authority’s own internal assessments are complete. Clearly, those this is bad news. The city is broke; the MTA is broke; and only, say, a stimulus grant at this point could close the budget gap.
Meanwhile, as West Side developers call for the station at 41st and 10th Ave., the MTA could soon face a funding crisis for Mayor Bloomberg’s pet subway project. The authority shouldn’t be expected to pick up the overruns, and if one capital project has to be delayed until the money is there, it should be this one. It is, arguable, the worst use of $2.1 billion one would find in the city today.
Apr
07
370 Jay Street comes under fire again
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New York City Transit’s 370 Jay St. as seen from Google Streetview.
For years, any reference to 370 Jay St. was Big Apple slang for the New York City Transit Authority. The big hulking building at the corner of Jay and Willoughby in Downtown Brooklyn had housed the TA headquarters for decades, but in 2002, Transit operations moved to Lower Manhattan. The building at 370 Jay St. remains a very large thorn in the side of Transit’s real estate department.
Since 1995, the building itself has been shrouded in scaffolding. Pieces of the façade fell that year, and although the MTA has planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on repairing the building for the better part of ten years, the money has never materialized. Supposedly, the 2010-2014 Capital Plan, yet to be approved by the state, will appropriate money for the project, but in the meantime, the scaffolding still stands.
Over the years, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership has called upon the authority to sell or renovate the building. It is, they say, a blight on Downtown Brooklyn. The scaffolding creates a 420-foot-long corridor of dark shadows, and the storefront space sits empty and unused. In Oct. 2008, The Brooklyn Paper profiled the state of the protests and found that the MTA planned to spend $150 million to upgrade a building worth approximately $100 million. The work would not begin until 2012 at the earliest, and local pols were pressuring fast action.
Today, amNew York highlights the local anger over the state of the building, and the story is much the same. Now, the work is estimated to cost over $180 million, and no one knows when it will begin (or funded, for that matter). Heather Haddon has the MTA’s take on it:
Brooklyn business owners and residents are asking the MTA to wash its hands of its 370 Jay St. property, a 13-story hulk in the heart of downtown Brooklyn that has deteriorated since NYC Transit yanked most of its operations from there about four years ago…
The city owns the building and leases it to the MTA, so the agency wouldn’t make money by selling it. But the 418,000-square-foot property needs $184 million to gut it and replace the facade, up 23 percent from the previous estimate in 2008, according to MTA figures. “The MTA has failed when it’s tried to become a developer,” said Assemb. Richard Brodsky, (D-Westchester), who wants the agency to rethink its plans for 370 Jay St.
Money for the renovations was postponed by two years and is now included in the 2010 capital plan, MTA documents show, though it’s unclear when the building will be ready. In the meantime, the agency recently took out a lease in midtown for about $3 million a year to house operations that will eventually go in 370 Jay St. Once open, the new space will end up saving the agency money, “to the tune of approximately $25 million a year,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.
In a sense, 370 Jay St. has now come to symbolize the problems at the MTA. It has been in a state of disrepair for 15 years, and renovations have been on the MTA’s massive To-Do list for at least the last eight years. Yet, it still sits there empty, devoid of economic activity and a visual sorespot on Brooklyn’s downtown landscape.
The MTA continues to say it will actually save money when it can move back to 370 Jay St. In the meantime, though, Transit will soon celebrate a decade away for its once and future headquarters. Maybe, as Brodsky said, it’s time to rethink that plan.
