Archive for November, 2010
Nov
30
Video of the Day: Roosevelt Island tram returns
Posted by: | CommentsVia The New York Post comes a video look inside the brand-spankin’-new Roosevelt Island Tramway cars. Out of service for the past nine months as the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation modernized a system prone to leaving commuters dangling 250 feet above the East River, the new cars are bigger, more stable and, supposedly, longer lasting than the ones they’ve replaced.
“Roosevelt Island’s Tramway is once again the most modern urban aerial transportation system in the world,” Leslie Torres, President of RIOC, said this morning. “It’s built to serve residents, business, and tourists for the next thirty years.”
The tram upgrades cost a total of $25 million — with $15 million coming from the state and $10 million from the RIOC. The modernized tramway includes two separate tram systems in which each cable operates independently of each other. This way, the RIOC can better conduct preventative maintenance while keeping one side of the tramway in service. Cabins are now attached with double-hanger arms for a more stable ride, and the tramway is now equipped with four back-up generators. (In April 2006, the tramway had stalled above the East River for 11 hours.)
“The tram is not just a vibrant symbol of all that is unique about Roosevelt Island,” Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney said at the ribbon-cutting. “It’s an only-in-New York icon of our great city just like the Empire State Building or Grand Central Station. It’s also an extremely active, critical mode of mass transit, and I am delighted to join its thousands of riders in welcoming it back and better than ever.”
Nov
30
In Los Angeles, a subway system grows
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The LA subway system is set for a massive expansion. (Map via The New York Times)
For decades, New York City has been the transit capital of the U.S.A. We enjoy an expansive 468-station, 722-mile subway system that runs 24 hours a day and stretches across five boroughs. Transit’s daily ridership is higher than the combined total from every other subway system in the country, and without the subways, New York City as it is today would simply not be a viable geographic urban hub.
But over the last four decades, as the region has struggled to maintain its vast infrastructure, expansion plans have fallen by the wayside. Since the opening of the Chrystie St. Connection in 1968, the city hasn’t built out its system. A modest expansion along Archer Ave. and the completion of the 63rd St. tunnel were the major projects during the 1980s and 1990s. Today, at a cost of nearly $7 billion, the MTA is adding one stop to the 7 line and three along the Upper East Side’s stretch of Second Ave. It isn’t, by any means, impressive.
Three thousand miles away, on the coast known more for its cars than its trains, the City of Angels is working toward its own subway system. Los Angeles is planning to spend $40 billions on a 28-mile expansion of its rail transit system. The city will build an 8.6-mile extension of the Purple Line through Koreatown, an 11-mile addition to the Gold Line, an 8.5-mile light-rail route from LAX and another light rail route from Santa Monica to Culver City Adam Nagourney in The Times today takes a look at this reimagining of the Los Angeles transitscape:
Taken together, these developments have emboldened mass transit enthusiasts here and lent credibility to what has become something of a legacy project for Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who ran for office pledging to build a transit system that would upend long-established commuting habits and ease what has long been a bane of life in Los Angeles.
“This put to rest all this talk of, ‘Will we ever build a subway?’ ” Mr. Villaraigosa said, somewhat triumphantly, in an interview. “This is a big deal. People have been talking about it for years. And they were making fun of me: ‘Where is the subway?!’ ”
Los Angeles once had a large, intricate and thriving public transportation system, with so-called Yellow Car trolleys that ran on downtown streets and a vast network of Red Cars, operated by the Pacific Electric Railroad, that ran throughout the region. This was dismantled amid the city’s fervent embrace of the automobile (encouraged, in no small part, by oil interests in Los Angeles that realized the economic potential of the car).
But with a vote by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority’s board last month to approve the Purple Line expansion, there is a consensus that these projects are going to be built, even among those who describe them as a waste of money in a region that will never embrace mass transit. The projects are being financed by a half-cent sales tax surcharge approved by Los Angeles voters two years ago and expected to raise $40 billion over the next 30 years.
Yet, in LA, as the pipe dream of the Subway to the Sea inches closer to reality, residents, planners and politicians are still questioning the wisdom behind the spending. For Mayor Villaraigosa, the $40 billion appears as a traditional bond issue. Since the city plans to add distance and capacity, they can bond against future anticipated fare revenue, but even then, many wonder if Los Angeles can become a city of the subway.
One mass transit consultant from the Bay Area has labeled the plan in no uncertain terms. “They have been pushing rail expansion for decades now,” Tom Rubin said, “and it has not had much of an impact in terms of increasing transit ridership. The big problem is that these are very, very expensive, and we wind up spending so much money on building these rail lines that there is not enough to operate bus service. So we wind up cutting back on bus operations and then raising fares, which drives the riders away.”
Rubin highlights the same capital-vs.-operations battle being fought in New York, but he seems to ignore that adding distance to rail makes pushing for it as a viable modality more appealing. If the subway goes where people need it to go, they will leave their cars behind. If, as promised, a 50-minute drive becomes a 25-minute subway ride, driving becomes a waste of time.
“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Robert Cervero, director of Berkeley’s Transportation Center, said to The Times. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.” (Jonathan Hiskes at Grist disputes this simplification.)
Ultimately, Los Angeles won’t move ahead of New York anytime soon, but the Land of Freeways is moving forward. On the East Coast, we’re stuck in neutral. Saddled with debt, unable to issue bonds appropriately and faced with crushing costs, our 106-year-old subway system expands outward slowly, if at all.
Nov
30
For disabled riders, an inaccessible system
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Earlier this fall, a group of advocates fighting for the rights of disabled New Yorkers made headlines when they filed suit against the MTA over plans for the Dyckman St. station rehab. The suit, which alleges an overall failure on the part of Transit to make the subway system handicapped-accessible, says that the authority is not fulfilling its obligations under the ADA as it renovates Dyckman St. in Upper Manhattan. The MTA does not comment on ongoing legal fights, and work has proceeded apace at the station.
Piggybacking off of the attention given to the lawsuit, Jillian Jonas wrote an extensive piece on the state of underground accessibility for Gotham Gazette, and as you would imagine, disabilities advocates are not happy. Only 89 subway stations are accessible while 379 are not. “It is an absolute disgrace that 20 years after the ADA was passed, more than 80 percent of the subway stations in New York are inaccessible,” attorney Julie Pinovar said in October and repeated to Jonas.
In essence, the problems are threefold: The MTA is legally required to upgrade only 100 “Key Station” under an exemption from the Americans with Disabilities Act, an unfunded federal mandate, and advocates have been happy with that arrangement. Meanwhile, escalator and elevator outages lead to situations where accessible stations are made inaccessible, and disabled riders have little advanced notice of the malfunctions. Finally, the MTA opted for Access-A-Ride in the early 1980s, and the costs from that program have spiraled out of control, leading the authority to try to cut services for the disabled. No one is happy with the arrangement.
Ultimately, the problem is one of paying it forward. MTA officials opted for a paratransit solution at a time when they didn’t have money or foresight. They reportedly believed Access-A-Ride would cost just $9 million a year, and now it costs $450 million annually. Had they spent the money over the decades on station upgrades, fewer riders would need Paratransit, and most of the system would be accessible. Had the federal government been willing to foot any of the bill for the costly ADA upgrades, the entire fight would be moot.
“The MTA made a stupid decision in the 1980s when … they [were] foolishly relegating people with disabilities to Access-A-Ride, not realizing how the cost would grow over the years if they didn’t do more than make buses accessible,” Edith Prentiss, a vice president with Disabled In Action of Metropolitan New York, said. “For years, bus lifts were as unreliable as subway elevators are today.”
While Paratransit trips number just under 16,000 a day — compared with over 5 million daily subway riders — this is a costly problem that hits disabled riders particularly hard. They do not want to be relegated to second-class status and have been vocal critics of the MTA. Still, a solution remains out of hand and out of sight as money and costs are, as always, the overarching problems.
Nov
30
Interviewing Jay Walder: Labor relations and revenue sources
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A postcard distributed by union leaders earlier this year when MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder took a summer vacation is indicative of the tense relationship between labor and management at the MTA.
In yesterday’s excerpt from my interview with Jay Walder, the MTA head and I spoke about the economic pressures which the authority is currently facing. Walder spoke at length about avoiding future service cuts and ensuring that money promised to and raised for the MTA actually finds its way into the authority’s coffers.
Today, we pick up the thread of the MTA finances but with a different bend. One of Walder’s biggest failings — and he’ll admit it himself — has been management’s strenuous relationship with labor. The TWU, the authority’s largest union which is currently suffering through dissension in the ranks, has not shown a willingness to compromise on benefits, pensions or raises, and with contract negotiations on tap for late 2011, the MTA is searching for ways to rein in runaway labor costs.
Meanwhile, while maintaining spending levels are a priority, so too are increasing revenues. To do so without service cuts or fare hikes, the MTA has looked to non-traditional sources of advertising. By offering station branding and full train wraps, the authority can drive marketing opportunities and generate more dollars to fill its depleted coffer. Even station names are for sale.
Second Ave. Sagas: One of the assumptions in the 2011 budget projections, as far as I can tell, is that the labor costs won’t really be increasing over the next two years. Do you think that that’s a realistic and obtainable goal?
I strongly believe that labor has to be part of the solution. That is a view that has been stated by the governor-elect. It’s a view that has been stated by the mayor.
Jay Walder: I’m actually very proud of what the MTA has achieved in reducing costs so far, but an area where I’m terribly disappointed that we clearly have not achieved what we’re trying to do is in forming partnerships with our labor unions, to be able to look at this and in essence, say that we’re talking about a historically difficult time in which businesses and families all across the state are struggling. One might have hoped that we might have found the context to stand together with our workforce, shoulder to shoulder and show that we were able to do things differently, that we were able to find different productivity. We recognize that some of the arrangements that had existed for long periods of time, even if you don’t change them for existing employees, need to change on a going-forward basis. We didn’t find a way to be able to do that.
Having said that, I strongly believe that labor has to be part of the solution. That is a view that has been stated by the governor-elect. It’s a view that has been stated by the mayor. People are saying, “Look, we can’t do this apart from labor. We have to do this with labor.” Some people point to the period in the 1970s when the city was in the midst of its financial crisis, and labor and management did stand together and did try to find a solution to be able to deal with that crisis. It allowed the city to get back on its feet and prosper and grow. I think we’re at that same sort of time.
Do I believe that it is possible to do it? Yes. It is easy to do it? Obviously not. We haven’t succeeded to this point. I’d be kidding you if I said that. But I do think it’s possible to do it.
The point that we made is not that our workforce should not be compensated; it’s to say that you really should be tying compensation into the achievement of productivity improvements. Everybody I’ve talked to inside and outside of our organization believes productivity improvements are possible. What we need to do is bring it to the table, to stand together to be able to do this and to say, “Hey, if we’re really trying to figure out how to do this, to protect our transit system, to continue to have jobs for people but to show people that we are really using every dollar wisely, how do we do it together?” I’m not giving up on that. I haven’t given up on that. I believe it is achievable. I think we’ll get there.
The Shuttle, branded for the Major League Baseball playoffs by TBS and MLB, has become a testing ground for the MTA's expanding advertising opportunities. (Photo by Lorenzo Bevilaquia/TBS)
Second Ave. Sagas: The Chicago naming rights deal with Apple has gotten a decent amount of attention over the last few weeks. I know the Barclays deal was the first major MTA naming rights deal. Are there other efforts being made to identify naming partners? Is there a push to look out of the box beyond the traditional sources of revenue?
Walder: I wasn’t here at the time that the Citi Field issues came up, but I gather we didn’t succeed in that. I think the Barclays deal is the first time we have succeeded in doing something of that nature. Should we be thinking out of the box? What are the ways we should bring revenue in? The answer is yes.
I hope you’ll think of our advertising contracts in that way. What you saw this year were some real efforts to break down some of the barriers. We’ve done some really neat things in terms of advertising that are bringing real money in, and I think that the win-win on this is where you’re doing some things that both improve the ambiance of the subway environment and the bus environment but also raise some money for the transit system. My favorite one was the wrap on the train for TBS with the television screens. I think that’s a great example of breaking down some barrriers. We’re bringing about $100 million in doing that.
Let me give you another example which I just looked at this morning which I really like. You’ll look at this and say it’s not revolutionary but I don’t think you need revolutionary. We just opened up a Bank of American ATM location inside the subway station at 42nd St. and 8th Ave. in the mezzanine level above the 8th Ave. Line. Why do I like it so much? Because it’s bringing into the subway environment the type of retail presentation that we’re used to above ground. In other words, you look at this and you’ll say this doesn’t look very different from another type of ATM space that I might go into. But that’s exactly my point. What’s that doing is raising money for the subway but it’s also actually making people feel that this is what I see underground, it is the way I do it, it is bringing me that kind of retail that I want to see. I thought it was terrific because it was doing that.
All of these things come together. Can we make some money on some of these initiatives? Yes. We will make more money if we can improve the retail environment in the subway system, get greater value out of the spaces that we have there, improve the ambiance and the customer satisfaction. We’ll make more money than all of the naming rights deals that you’re talking about.
These other things are much more valuable to us if we can find a way to do that. The wrap that we did — the Target wrap — was terrific. There are lots of things you’re seeing this year that are breaking down some barriers.
I also believe that the way we incorporate technology into our stations also provides an opportunity to be able to increase revenue flow. In that case, we might well be able to actually meet three objectives. We can make some money off of the way we bring digital into our stations. We can be improving ambiance, and we may well come up with some ways to be able to provide useful real-time information to customers that follows and is all part of the same goal. If we can do those three things, than we really knock the ball out of the park.
Still to come, Jay Walder discusses capital expansion plans, the Second Ave. Subway and next-generation fare payment technologies.
Nov
29
Feds to NJ: Give us back our $271 million
Posted by: | CommentsThe fallout from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to cancel the ARC Tunnel continues as the feds have sent New Jersey Transit a letter formally requesting the return of over $271 million in federal funding. The letter — available here as a PDF — is the second such notice sent to the state, and while New Jersey Transit has disputed the amount requested, the feds have set a December 24 deadline for payment.
If New Jersey falls to contest the validity of the amount requested or pay by Christmas Eve, the FTA will consider the state delinquent in its payments. If the delinquency date is reached, the FTA can pursue numerous options. It could report New Jersey to credit and bond rating institutions, and it can request interest of six percent annually. Finally, it can forward the debt to the U.S. Department of Justice for collection enforcement as well.
Ultimately, the feds have “deobligated” New Jersey from repaying all it is had doled out for ARC because $77 million of the initial $348 million went unspent. Thus the state must pay the difference, and by the time they do so, New Jersey will have sunk $600 million into project planning for a total loss of $871 million. “We now know that his looking out for our financial interests will cost New Jersey taxpayers at least $271 million,” John Wisniewski, chair of both the New Jersey Democratic State Committee and New Jersey Assembly Transportation Committee, said. “To make matters worse, the governor has now pledged New Jersey money to help finance New York’s subway expansion — without even seeing a plan or a cost estimate. It doesn’t seem like he’s being much of a financial watchdog, only a theatrical bulldog.”
Nov
29
The dangers of glorifying Penn Station and the 1970s
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The original Penn Station as seen from the Gimbels department store. (Via the Library of Congress on flickr)
During an as-yet unpublished part of my interview with Jay Walder, the MTA CEO and Chairman spoke of the progress the authority has made since the early 1980s. When Walder started at the MTA in 1983, track fires and power outages plagued the system, and the mean distance between subway car failures was a meager 7000 miles. Today, after three decades of investment and new rolling stock purchases, Transit’s fleet averages 150,000 miles between failures. No one should miss that era.
Yet, 1970s nostalgia is alive and well in New York City. Urban dwellers who either moved here too late or were born to late experience all that the city had to offer during its darkest days have a tendency to glamorize them. People yearn for the “art” of graffiti-covered subway cars. They bemoan the state of tourist-filled Times Square and harken back to an era of prostitution and peep shows. Alphabet City? Fuhgeddaboudit. They cleaned that former haven for drug users and dealers decades ago.
The latest in 1970s nostalgia comes from Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha. Last week, they penned an ode to Penn Station for The Times. Now, this isn’t about the McKim, Mead and White Penn Station that was unceremoniously destroyed in the 1960s. Rather, they’re talking about the rat maze of tunnels shoved underneath Madison Square Garden that does disservice to the idea that a train station should be a Great Public Work.
The lamentations over the death of Penn Station began, they say, “before the bulldozers,” but we should celebrate the current version of Penn Station for what it represents and offers. The pair, one of whom at least one is not from New York, offer up a paean to an era when New York was “gritty.” It’s a comparison that plagues baseball players of a certain quality as much as it is one that falls upon New York City as its nadir. They write:
What has been forgotten in this hysterical nostalgia is that our current Penn Station is also a miracle: pitiless and comically jury-rigged, sure, but miraculous. Three railroads and two subway lines deliver more than half a million people each day directly to almost anywhere except Grand Central. It is one of the great achievements of New York…
Because everyone agrees that Penn Station is a failure, nobody has ever tried to make it anything other than baffling to the outsider. That’s the famous welcoming spirit of New York! The Long Island Rail Road has no interest in telling anyone how to get to New Jersey Transit, and vice versa. No one is in charge of knitting it all together, or no one bothers to. It’s bad bureaucracy and bad faith, not bad design — though at least our bureaucracies reflect our metro-area standoffishness…
This is a diorama of our recent history. People love to say they miss the ragged, gritty, vivid aura of New York in the ’70s. Yet it still lives! Down in the corridors of Penn Station, you can appreciate how much effort it takes to hold off entropy. Think of it as a ’70s theme park, but without gangs or muggers or hookers roaming around … very frequently. It is the careful chaos of this commuting ballet and the marvelous cultural freeze-frame of our city that the worshipful cult of the Old Penn Station want to destroy.
There is nothing in Penn Station to suggest bad faith and bad bureaucracy have anything to do with the conditions, and there is everything — from poor signage, to complicated and convoluted staircases and exits — to suggest bad design. Simply put, Penn Station is indicative of a design from a time when the city didn’t care about public transit, and it shows. It isn’t a structure that deserves glorifying.
The remains of the Gimbels Passageway bring long-time New Yorkers back to a more dangerous era. (NY Post/Chad Rachman)
At the other end of the spectrum is a column on the Gimbels Passageway from Steve Cuozzo of The Post. The Passageway, once a clear sign of the dangers of the subway system, made headlines earlier this year when Vornado announced plans to reopen it as part of its Penn Plaza development plan, and Cuozzo reflects back on the dangers that lurked in this passageway for many decades before it was shuttered. He writes:
To revisit the long-closed Gimbels Corridor is to relive New York’s past-tense future. In the early 1970s, conditions in the pedestrian tunnel presaged the bleeding city of the 1980s and early ’90s. Filthy, fetid and unpoliced, it entertained rampant lawlessness, squalor and decay years before they fully possessed the streets…
Prior to a recent “tour,” I hadn’t set foot in it since 1974 or ’75. Back then, the interminable, 800-foot stroll, as long as four city blocks, was too much even for my youthful spirit of adventure. Street weirdos and sex hawkers on Eighth Avenue were amusing; knife-wielding hustlers, legless beggars and the howling insane in a dimly lit corridor a mere nine feet wide for much of its length were not. The mad harmonica player who stalked me end to end was the last straw.
Once you were inside, there was no way out except to reach the other end. In the midst of teeming Midtown, bare-bulb fixtures like those in mines marked a path through a Calcutta-like sprawl of diseased, predatory humanity. The corridor seemed to exist beyond the reach of any authority. Vornado says it’s owned by the MTA. The MTA says it’s owned by Amtrak, which told me it thinks it owns a portion of it. Who was in charge 35 years ago is an even deeper mystery.
While Cuozzo’s story may verge on the hyperbolic, he point remains the same. “Those,” he says, “who romanticize our dark age need a tour, too.” We don’t want our transit system to slip back into a state of disrepair, and we don’t want to view the 1970s disregard for investment as anything but a bad stretch of years in the city’s otherwise illustrious transit history. The Gimbels Passageway and Penn Station, with its Moynihan-filled future, is but a metaphor for a route we should avoid.
Nov
29
The wrong way to enforce SBS proof-of-payment
Posted by: | CommentsOver the weekend, I wrote a not-so-sympathetic post on a woman who jumped the fare and bemoaned getting caught. I compared her actions to jumping the turnstile in the subway, and I don’t feel bad for her plight. This story, on the other hand, irks me.
To set the stage: Yvette Stokes uses her 30-day MetroCard to procure a Select Bus Service receipt at 106th St. and 2nd Ave. Upon boarding, enforcement agents ask her for her proof of payment, and she obliges. Then, 72 blocks and 15-20 minutes later, another group of officers board the bus and again ask riders to procure the POP receipts. Ms. Stokes rummages around in her bag and pulls out a two-day-old receipt instead. “The officer was very agitated with this and started shouting at me,” she told The Post. “The very next thing he said was that I couldn’t hold up the bus — and then he ordered me off the bus.”
After exiting the bus, Stokes shows the officer the proper receipt, but he writes her up a $100 ticket anyway, ignoring her proffered receipt. The summons has since been dismissed, and the MTA claims the officer did nothing wrong. Yet, this response is unnecessarily hostile. By checking POP receipts multiple times one one bus route, police are making normal bus riders seem like criminals, and the office in this instance showed an utter lack of common sense. If the point of SBS is to convince riders to take the bus over subway-like distances, Transit and its agents must toe the fine line between proper enforcement and overbearing ticketing.
Nov
29
Interviewing Jay Walder: On the MTA’s fiscal state
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Jay Walder is the center of attention during an April ribbon-cutting ceremony. (Benjamin Kabak/Second Ave. Sagas)
When Jay Walder moved his family and career back to New York from London 14 months ago, he did so with the expectation that he would head a fully-funded MTA. Gov. David Paterson had tabbed Walder to head the MTA as its new CEO and chairman because of his background in technological innovation. Walder was to use his expertise to modernize an authority struggling to incorporate 21st century technology into an early 20th century system.
Instead, Walder had to face head-on the MTA’s greatest economic crisis in a generation. Thanks to lower-than-projected tax revenues and the outright theft of dedicated funds by the state legislature, the authority found itself $800 million in the red. To balance the budget, Walder oversaw an intense effort to trim the MTA’s operating costs that included $500 million in administrative savings and steep service cuts with a fare hike to come at the end of December. Needless to say, it is not, as I noted in August, how he anticipated spending his first year back in New York.
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, Walder sat down with me for a 30-minute interview on all things MTA — or at least all things MTA we could cram into a half an hour. I’m going to run the Q-and-A in pieces this week. I’ve edited Walder’s answers only for grammar and, at times, removed some words for clarity and brevity. The words are his. I conducted the interview shortly after the MTA unveiled its latest 2011 budget projections and started off with questioning focusing on the authority’s economic outlook.
Second Ave. Sagas: What do you see as the best hope for avoiding future service cuts?
Jay Walder: Answer: I think our plan avoids future service cuts. When we looked at this, we felt that the best way to stabilize the finances of the transit system were as follows. We needed to continue to reduce our costs. We’ve saved over $500 million a year this year from cost actions, a portion of which — less than $100 million — is from service cuts but — and I’m not minimizing that — the other $400 million plus was not that. So we need to continue to reduce costs. We need to find ways to really improve productivity. In what you’ve seen us do right now, you haven’t seen that [increased productivity] within the broader work structure.
Second Ave. Sagas: Does that include the various initiatives announced in May, including consolidating the Bridges & Tunnels shops and ensuring that LIRR maintenance crews can service Metro-North trains and vice versa?
Walder: It includes any number of institutional arrangements, work rules, other things like that. While respecting the fact that our employees should be well trained and well compensated, we have rules in many different ways that stand in the way of getting the most productivity and efficiency and being the most cost effective. What we really want to be able to do is prove to everybody that we are actually making every dollar count, that we are an efficient and effective provider of public transit services. And I think if we can do that, than that gives you a very very critical plank in protecting the services that people want. That’s the first part.
The second part is I think we need to accept that periodic fare and toll increases are necessary in supporting the public transit system. I don’t think we should shy away from that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think we should build them into a business plan but I think we should recognize that they need to be predictable and they need to be at amounts that we think are fair and reasonable which broadly approximates inflation and things of that nature.
The third part is that there is no public transit system anywhere in the world — perhaps with one exception — that operates without public support beyond the riders of the system, and there are lots of reasons why that makes sense. The transit system allows a degree of economic development that would not take place otherwise. You do not capture back into the transit system the value of that economic development. It gets captured into state taxes, local taxes. It gets into the tax base. It provides for environmental benefits that come from it, and it provides in terms of our socially conscious elements. It provides for mobility and opportunity with limiting prices as an impediment to doing that. We have to recognize that’s the third leg of the stool.
The first leg of the stool is to show that you’re an efficient and effective provider of public transit and that you’re meeting people’s needs in doing that. The second leg of the stool is accept the fact fares are part of the picture and what you’re doing, and the third leg of the stool is the fact that we will rely on public support to do this. If we want to be operating in a way in which we’re protecting the services, we have to ensure all three of these things. Many of these things are interrelated. Your best ability to be able to protect subsidies that come to the transit system is actually showing people that we’re using the money well.
MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder is hopeful that transit defenders can pressure the state into delivering money that should be dedicated for transit to the MTA. (Graphic via Streetsblog)
Second Ave. Sagas: You announced recently that the authority is still waiting for a payment from the state, and Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo recently spoke of the fungible-ness of transit funding. Are there concerns that the state is going to repeat last year and take money away that’s supposed to go to transit to fill their general budget gap? Where does that leave the MTA?
Walder: The general budget gap for the state is clear. The state is obviously dealing with a very, very difficult financial situation, and I think that’s clear right now. Clearly all we can do is to project that the taxes that have been raised on the basis that they will be supporting our transit system…the only basis we can work on is the view that those monies will be available to and will come to the transit system. That doesn’t mean that we predict that the economy will get better or other things of that nature. It’s only saying that whatever comes into those funds is available for the transit system. It’s the only reasonable basis for which we can work, and I think you’re seeing some public view put forth by a number of people that says the taxes were raised on this basis. In fact, they were very explicitly stated as “We’re raising this tax to be able to support our transit system because we want to have a transit system that prospers, that allows the region to prosper, that provides opportunity and does other things like that.”
Are there risks that are there? You’d be hard pressed to say there aren’t risks. I think the fact is that there clearly are risks that are there, but the best argument you can make is that the taxes were raised for this purpose. We’re using the money well, and it’s meeting a public objective that we need to meet.
The next parts of the interview will focus on Walder’s tenuous relationships with the MTA’s various labor unions, the future of the Second Ave. Subway and the authority’s next-generation fare payment technology. Check back this week for more.
Nov
28
Sounding off on the 7-to-Secaucus plan
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A rough sketch of the proposed 7 line extension to Secaucus. (Via The Wall Street Journal)
As the city’s plan to extend the 7 line to Secaucus gains support from the real estate lobby and, nominally, from N.J. Gov. Chris Christie, this far-fetched idea has stayed in the news for a few weeks. As intriguing as a cross-Hudson subway tunnel would be, the dollars aren’t there yet. Whether they ever will be remains to be seen, and many in the outer boroughs would rather see spending on underserved areas of New York City before the subway crosses state lines.
Today, The Times, which first broke the story nearly two weeks ago, has some reader feedback in the form of letters to the editor on Bloomberg’s plan. Let’s see what people are saying.
The first letter comes from Spero T. Leakas, a New Jersey lawyer. He writes:
Considering that Manhattan is the commercial hub of New York City and the metropolitan region, why would the subway system extend 20 or so miles east of the region’s center into Queens but not extend at all west?
From a transportation perspective, the region is currently a very unbalanced scale, and I am very happy to see that this is seriously being discussed.
Municipal or state boundaries are no excuse for not uniting a region’s populated areas into one cohesive transportation system. Under the proposal, the areas of Hudson County, New Jersey, are certainly worthy of having the No. 7 line.
Bob Previdi, a former planner with Transit, supports the measure from a transportation point of view. “The line,” he says, “should either continue on to Newark, where it can link to passengers from the Morris and Essex and Raritan Valley lines, and Newark Liberty Airport as well, or the tunnel should go to Hoboken. Hoboken is closer than Secaucus and is the second major hub for New Jersey Transit service.”
Michael Rogovin, another former Transit planner, says the 7 line extension idea is “deeply flawed.” He writes:
Trains bringing commuters from Queens already discharge huge crowds into stations at Grand Central, Fifth Avenue and Times Square, beyond the capacity of these stations to efficiently handle the volume of people. The extension of the No. 7 train to the West Side that is already under construction will add to these crowds.
Adding thousands of New Jersey commuters to the same narrow platforms and limited stairs, ramps and escalators (with little or no chance of expansion at these stations), would create unbearable crowding and a safety nightmare.
Rogovin believes increasing capacity at Penn Station should remain the primary objective for any cross-Hudson rail tunnel. Using the subways to achieve the ends of the now-deceased ARC Tunnel should be a last resort only.
Right now, there’s no firm proposal for the 7 to head to Secaucus, and the money isn’t in place. But if it keeps people talking about ways to solve a problem, perhaps it can become a real possibility for increasing trans-Hudson rail capacity.
Nov
27
Fare-jumper bemoans getting caught
Posted by: | CommentsTry this one for size: Upper East Side marketing director is late for a meeting. She sees a Select Bus pull up to her stop at E. 79th St. and Second Ave., and without paying, she hops on the bus. The driver tells her she will need proof-of-payment, but she can’t get off because the doors are closed. The driver, Daryn Mayer claims, allegedly says, “OK. Don’t pay. Ride for free.” He later denies saying that.
At the next stop, enforcement officers board while Mayer does not get out to pay. She can’t produce the receipt and gets slapped with a $100 ticket. She’s challenging the fine, but the MTA has little sympathy for her. “When asked by the inspector, the bus operator denied he had let her on the bus, and said he explicitly told her she needed to pay her fare. At that point, she was removed from the bus and received a summons,” authority spokesman Kevin Ortiz said. She also, Ortiz said, “became combative, responding with an expletive.”
The story in The Post, linked above, seems designed to elicit sympathy in Mayer, but I can’t find much in her story. Boarding a Select Bus without pre-paying is akin to hopping the turnstile. You aren’t excused from paying the fare because the train might leave, and the same applies to the bus. Select Bus Service has been up and running since early October now, and ignorance of the law is no defense.
