Archive for January, 2011
Jan
05
At Penn Station, the ghost of ARC lives on
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Penn Station simply cannot handle an increase in train capacity.
It’s been over two months since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled the plug on the ARC Tunnel project, and the fallout from his decision is still raining down upon the region. While the 7 line extension to Secaucus made headlines in mid-November, all has been quite on the cross-Hudson front. Still, the problems ARC was designed to address and the problems that plagued the ARC project live on.
Two stories — one grander than the other — kept the ARC tunnel in the news this week. First, The Post’s editorial board used the MTA Inspector General’s report on the MTA’s construction cost overruns as proof that canceling ARC was the right idea. Their logic is spurious at best.
“You can’t blame New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie if he feels some satisfaction over news out of the MTA,” Alexander Hamilton’s former paper said. “A new report by Inspector General Barry Kluger found that the transit agency’s major development projects — the Second Avenue subway, the LIRR link and the Fulton Transit Center — are five years late and $2 billion over budget. But they’re all too far along for MTA Chairman Jay Walder to kill them. Which is precisely what Christie did to the Hudson River commuter tunnel, before it slipped into the overrun abyss.”
The Post claims that the problems plaguing the MTA — “lack of oversight and bureaucratic infighting” — are the same as those that would have descended on ARC, and because of those concerns, Christie was right to cancel the project. To me, it would have made far more sense for Christie to address those two concerns and figure out a way to bring the project under budget before killing it. He chose not to tackle those problems, and the way he made his decision should not be applauded.
Meanwhile, the problems ARC was designed to address are alive and kicking. Penn Station has not turned into a panacea of through trains, and the crowded rail hub is facing capacity concerns. As part of an ongoing series detailing concerns about our region’s aging transportation infrastructure, Andrew Grossman of the Wall Street Journal went in depth into the Penn Station problems. He writes:
NJ Transit, LIRR and Amtrak must get 170 trains loaded on 21 platforms in four hours, moving more than 120,000 commuters and long-haul travelers out of Manhattan. It is the nation’s busiest station. If all goes according to plan, a train opens its doors on a platform every 60 to 90 seconds, picking up or dropping off about 900 passengers—the equivalent of two full Boeing 747s.
In 2010, 6% of peak-period NJ Transit trains were late through November, with delays more common on most of the lines that run in and out of Penn. Sometimes the failures are catastrophic and perhaps unavoidable, as following the late-December snowstorm that delayed scores of trains for days. But other delays—malfunctioning signals, overhead wires knocked down by trees that the railroad can’t afford to trim—can be chalked up to factors like human error, poor planning or a lack of funding.
Penn Station is one of many choke points in the aging transit system moving people around metro New York. In an era defined by states’ austerity and tapped-out transit authorities, much of the fundamental infrastructure is outdated and overcrowded. And there’s little prospect of it getting much better without politically unpalatable steps being taken, such as higher fares and tolls or a major reallocation of taxpayer dollars.
All of the trains arriving and departing Penn Station, which opened a century ago, come from two tracks toward New Jersey and four tracks toward Long Island. All must arrive on one of the 21 tracks, but many trains can’t fit on some tracks with shorter platforms. By contrast, Grand Central has 46 tracks—and far fewer delays.
A late Amtrak train impacts a New Jersey Transit train which impacts a Long Island Rail Road train which impacts an Amtrak train. It is a problem that many had hoped ARC would solve and now, as Grossman notes, transportation planners are “scrambling” to find better solutions. New Jersey Transit is at the mercy of Amtrak, but the MTA is trying anything it can find to improve the situation.
The authority, says Grossman, “is investigating whether it can run trains through Penn and into New Jersey, shaving precious minutes off the amount of time each spends on a platform, freeing up some capacity. It’s also looking at running some Metro-North trains into Penn once a project to provide LIRR access into Grand Central Terminal is finished.”
Eventually, something is going to have to give. New Jersey and New York will have to figure out a way to work together to address the region’s cross-Hudson rail capacity concerns. The two states will have to work hard to keep costs on the ARC successor project to a reasonable level and will have to battle overruns. The economic impact of planning and building nothing is too severe for us to wait much longer.
Jan
04
A tale of a viaduct, a sign and the need to pay attention
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Manhattan-bound F riders are gearing up for months of inconvenience. (Photo courtesy of @JeffreyNYC)
One of my main themes at Second Ave. Sagas over the past four years has involved New Yorkers’ relationship with transit news. I’ve looked at how the millions of people who rely on the MTA for travel don’t pay attention to the news, how the news doesn’t do an adequate job explaining certain transit stories and how the MTA’s own approach to customer service oftentimes compounds the problem. Nowhere is that more evident than in today’s developing outrage over the upcoming shutdown of stations along the F line in Brooklyn as part of the Culver Viaduct rehab project.
The basis for this tale is a simple one: After three years of planning and the start of Phase 1 of the Culver Viaduct rehabilitation plan, the MTA announced this week that, beginning January 10, Phase 2 shutdowns will begin. In other words, from January 10 through May, as part of a $275.5 million rehab on a structure that’s falling apart, the following changes will be in effect:
- No Manhattan-bound F or Queens-bound G service at 15th Street Prospect Park and Ft. Hamilton Parkway Stations.
- No Manhattan-bound F service at Smith-9th Sts Station. Queens-bound G service stops at a temporary platform.
- All Manhattan and Queens-bound trains stop on the express track at Church Avenue and 7th Avenue stations.
- Manhattan-bound F and Queens-bound G trains stop at a temporary platform accessed via the Coney Island-bound platform at 4th Avenue-9th Street station.
Somehow, despite years of warning, the locals are outraged. Popular neighborhood blog Fucked in Park Slope is too beside itself for snark while Gothamist is fielding some priceless emails. “We’re new to Windsor Terrace (2 months) and fairly new to New York (6 months),” one Brooklyn resident said. “I’m absolutely livid that this is happening with a week’s notice, especially in the winter. This is the first we’re hearing of this and is part of a chain of the F train messing with us. I’ve lived in cities for the past 10 years and I can tell you this level of fuckery wouldn’t fly in LA or Boston.”
So where to begin? Where to begin? Should we point out that subways in Los Angeles and Boston, you know, shut down over night so that people can’t get home via public transit after midnight? It certainly would be worse living in Windsor Terrace if the last F train departed from midtown at 11:30 p.m. every Friday and Saturday.
But instead, let’s look at some history. In late 2007, New York City Transit unveiled their plans for the Culver Viaduct, and while the timeline has been pushed back and the project slightly scaled down in the intervening years, the same service changes apply. In fact, in a presentation to Community Board 6 in 2007, Transit presented the exact same service patterns going into effect next week. Take a look:
A presentation from 2007 shows plans portending next week's F/G service outage in Brooklyn.
That 2007 presentation wasn’t the only one Transit has delivered to Brooklyn. Take a look at a similar one from 2008. It’s just another in a long line of slideshows Transit’s community relations officials have given to Community Boards. In fact, as recently as this past fall, I sat in on a meeting at which officials discussed these exact service changes.
Furthermore, the MTA has released its own video on the project; and crews have been working on the viaduct for nearly ten months. In other words, since 2007, then, Brooklynites knew or should have known that their service was going to be cut for a few months, and if people moving to the area or already living their failed to do adequate research, that’s on them.
Of course, oblivious locals who don’t seek out transit news aren’t the only ones to blame. In fact, I don’t expect people to attend Community Board meetings and few non-members do. But New York’s various news outlets pay people to attend and report on those meetings, and over that last few years, that’s just what they’ve done. Newspapers ranging from The Daily News to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle have covered the work.
My site is but a small fish in the giant sea of New York media, but unfortunately, Brooklyn news outlets haven’t done a thorough job of explaining the impact of the Culver Viaduct rehab. Take a glance through the Brooklyn Paper search results of stories relating to this work. The paper mentions that service to and from Smith-9th Sts. will be impacted, but it doesn’t explore how the need to run F and G trains on the express tracks will lead to trains bypassing 15th St. and Fort Hamilton Parkway. That’s a failure of media.
Finally, the MTA isn’t absolved of all blame either, and in fact, the authority hasn’t upheld its end of the deal. At a Community Board 6 Transportation Committee meeting earlier this fall, committee members specifically asked the MTA to warn the neighborhoods well ahead of time. Instead, the MTA started hanging up signs portending a four-month service outage just seven days ahead of time. Even though the MTA had warned community groups and received a far amount of press coverage, Transit should be papering stations well ahead of the service outages. The authority can’t force news down people’s throats, but it can do a better job of getting the word out ahead of time. One week is not enough lead time for a warning of this magnitude.
This day of outrage in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace highlights how people simply take the transit system for granted. They’d rather every station but theirs get rehabbed and are content to let infrastructure age if it means they aren’t inconvenienced. The millions of New Yorkers who ride the subway every day are also content to ignore the news that impacts their lifeline to the economic hubs of the city, and the media that covers these areas is content to do a half-hearted job of it. The MTA too doesn’t make it any easier. This is outrage that has been in the works since November 2007, and with a little more effort from everyone, it should have been completely avoidable.
Jan
04
Stranded A train riders set to sue
Posted by: | CommentsAs the MTA deals with the fallout from its response to last week’s blizzard — the Daily News would like the authority to overreact to even just a slight threat of snow — lawsuits over stalled trains were all but inevitable. Now, we learn that Aymen Aboushi of the Aboushi Law Firm is looking for plaintiffs who were stuck on the stranded A train want to join a suit against the authority.
Aboushi says that seven passengers are willing to join him in filing a suit, and he hopes to court more. He’s seeking, according to amNew York, an “unspecified amount of money” and “will demand the MTA create guidelines for what to do if passengers are left on a train for more than three hours.” How altruistic of him. “No one’s trying to get rich off this,” the lawyer said to the News recently. “This is to hold the MTA accountable for what happened. We’re really trying to get the MTA’s attention for the average New Yorker.”
The stranded A train was the victim of a perfect storm last week. Stuck in between the Aqueduct stop and Howard Beach when the snow knocked out power to the third rail, the train could not be rescued, and passengers were stuck in the cold for six to eight hours. While Aboushi claims those stranded were left without heat, the MTA says the passengers were brought into two heated cars. Still, the lawyer wants an accounting. “The MTA,” he said, “didn’t offer these people so much as a MetroCard.”
Jan
04
To tell and show with a new branding campaign
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These new signs will begin appearing in subway cars everywhere this weekend.
The MTA enters 2011 in a bind. Public trust in the authority has all but vanished amidst another round of fare hikes and service cuts, and politicians find it to be an easy whipping boy for their own failures. Yet, the subways are, except when felled by the weather, moving forward, and to do that, the authority must go, hat in hand, to Albany to ask for a way to fill a $10 billion hole in its capital budget.
That hole is not an insignificant one. As the MTA’s infrastructure inexorably continues to age, the authority has had to ramp up spending on non-revenue-generating maintenance projects. The Second Ave. Subway, for instance, is a traditional project that can be supported by construction bonds because the bonds can be issued off of guarantees of increased ridership and more fare revenue. Repainting a station ceiling and repairing a broken handrail do not lead to the same ridership and revenue increases.
So the MTA needs that money, and the authority needs to prove that the money is going toward making the system more pleasant and more useful for everyone. Enter SubTalk. For nearly 20 years, SubTalk posters had been the voice of the subway, but they have been the voice of no. Don’t hold the doors. Don’t run on the staircase and platforms. Don’t lean over the platform edge. Don’t litter. The informative posters — such as an overly optimistic one about the Second Ave. Subway’s once-projected opening date — seem few and far between.
And so in early December, as I reported then, the MTA rebranded its house ads. “Improving, non-stop” became the new tagline, and the posters featured innovations. One discussed the new countdown clocks; another presented the MTA’s embrace of real-time information on its website; a third talked about the Select Bus Service upgrades. “Traditionally we have used the space to tell our customers what not to do on the system,” Paul Fleuranges, the Senior Director of Corporate and Internal Communications, said to me, “but with this messaging we’re using the space to communicate with our customers by telling them what we’re doing or plan to do.”
What irked many though was the death of Train of Thought, the successor to the now-defunct Poetry in Motion. As part of the rebranding, the MTA temporarily shelved Train of Thought, the posters with quotes from leading intellects, and many were unhappy. “I don’t begrudge them wanting to put their best foot forward,” Gene Russianoff said to The Times. “But if it comes at the price of permanently kiboshing the poetry, I think that’s a mistake.”
The MTA insisting to me that the “Improving, Non-stop” rebranding “is not an image campaign, rather a better use of our internal space.” But even it were an image campaign, I can’t fault the authority for that. Amongst the blizzard and fare hikes, projects delayed and budgets exceeded, labor unrest and dwindling funds, the MTA doesn’t just seem as though it’s constantly under attack; it is constantly under attack. Oftentimes, those attacks are well deserved; other times they’re not.
Yet, we cannot deny the economic reality of the situation: The $10 billion that the MTA needs for its capital budget is far more important than a few posterboards of poetry or inspirational quotes that, by and large, are ignored by most riders. If moving, as Fleuranges said to me, “away from the ‘House of No’ to ‘The Church of What’s Happening Now’” leads to some recognition of capital improvements and an eventual outlay of badly needed capital funds, I think we can sacrifice a few quotations by Abraham Lincoln or Henri Poincare for a few months. I’m sure there’s an app for that anyway.
Jan
03
MTA IG set to examine blizzard response
Posted by: | CommentsThe MTA has already pledged an internal review of its poor response to December’s blizzard, and now its own internal watchdog will do the same. Barry Kluger, the MTA inspector general, will conduct an investigation into the agency’s response to the snow storm, The Wall Street Journal reported today. He will explore “the way the MTA prepared for the storm and the way it responded” as well as “the agency’s emergency plans and whether they were properly implemented.”
Authority officials said they welcomed Kluger’s investigation even as they conduct their own. “We are working on our own comprehensive review and welcome the Inspector General’s review as we all look to improve performance moving forward,” MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said to the Journal. I have to believe we’ll see some significant changes in the way the MTA responds to weather alerts before the next big snow storm of the season hits the region.
Jan
03
Taxi Commission’s Group Ride Program dying a quiet death
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The TLC's Group Ride Vehicle Program has been a resounding failure. (Photo via flickr user AllWaysNY)
I live around the corner from the former B71 route, and when the MTA cut this bus route from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens, I was disappointed but I understand the reasoning behind it. When the bus would deign to show up on time, which wasn’t often, it made for a quick ride down to Smith St. on the days I was too lazy to walk, but the MTA was bleeding money on the route. When the Taxi & Limousine Commission announced that the former B71 would be one of the pilot routes for the Group Ride Program, I was guardedly optimistic. Perhaps a private operator could succeed where the MTA had failed.
That optimism was entirely unfounded. Not once in the two months that the pilot ran did I see a dollar van pass down Union St., and by October, Sulaiman Haqq was ready to call it quits. “This is the reason why public transportation is subsidized,” he said. “It is not profitable.”
Of all of the city’s transportation initiatives in 2010, none were as poorly executed, as misguided and as unsupported as the Taxi & Limousine Commission’s Group Ride Program. Designed as a pilot program to replace under-performing bus routes that cost the MTA too much to run, the dollar van suffered to draw riders. It’s shocking, I know, to find that vans that never showed up, didn’t run on a regularly schedule and didn’t take MetroCards couldn’t attract enough passengers to be profitable along routes the MTA found cost-prohibitive to support.
In mid-December as the companies operating in Queens along the former Q79 and Q74 routes closed up shop nine months early, TLC commissioner David Yassky admitted that he didn’t really think this idea through. “The pilot program has yielded a great deal of information about what works and doesn’t work in providing group-ride service,” Yassky said. “At this point, the market does not appear to support service in these areas and we will continue to look for opportunities to supplement the MTA in underserved areas.”
This past weekend, the TLC again opened up the former Q79 route to applicants. and while neighborhood associations are pushing for Group Ride service or a restoration of the Q79, I’m not optimistic another operator will find success where others did not. It simply does not make sense to target low-ridership corridors that aren’t profitable.
In late November, as this failure become evident, Cap’n Transit offered up his analysis of the situation. Later this week, he and I are going to tackle some successful van routes in New Jersey in an effort to understand what works and why. For now, the TLC is going to try again as they claim service along the Q79 will return later this month, but if it didn’t work the first time, how is it going to be any better the second time around?
Jan
03
A year of living dangerously
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How the MTA spends its billions. (via)
It’s never much fun to begin a new year on an ominous note, but unfortunately, turning the calendar page to January did not fix New York State’s or the MTA’s fiscal problems. With a new governor — one who is, for now, scandal-free — ready to take on Albany with some strong rhetoric, labor costs are in the crosshairs, and unavoidably, Andrew Cuomo’s stance toward the state’s powerful public unions will ensnare the MTA too.
As The Times reports today, in his first State of the State address, Gov. Cuomo will uphold one of his major campaign promises as he will attempt to freeze state wages for at least a year. Considering the state’s $9 billion deficit, a wage freeze would be more symbolic than anything else, but as one anonymous Cuomo official said, the new governor, a labor-endorsed one at that, has to start his tenure off on the right foot.
“The governor said during his campaign that the difficult financial times call for shared sacrifice,” the official said to The Times. “A salary freeze is obviously a difficult thing for many government workers, but it’s necessary if the state is going to live within its means.”
Nicholas Confessore of The Times offers up a bit more:
[B]ecause such a step would not require legislative approval, Mr. Cuomo could achieve it while bypassing the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, labor’s most powerful allies in Albany.
Of course, a freeze — which Mr. Cuomo promised he would seek during his campaign — would be subject to negotiation with the unions. But labor contracts for the vast majority of the state’s 190,000 employees expire on March 31, giving Mr. Cuomo an opening to seek changes at a time of public unease toward government workers’ benefits.
Salaries, health care and pension benefits for state workers represent one of the largest and fastest-growing areas of spending, accounting for about one-fifth of all state dollars.
Budget advocates have been quick to embrace Cuomo’s pledge. Elizabeth Lynam, a vice president at the Citizens Budget Commission, is looking forward to the brewing labor fight. “It’s a shot across the bow at organized labor, which has to date been uncompromising,” she said. “Hopefully it will lead to broad-based changes in the way state employees are compensated.”
Now, enter the MTA. At the end of 2010 and for the third year in a row, the MTA had to raise fares, and in 2011, for the third year in a row, many of its unionized workers — those belonging to the Transport Workers Union — will enjoy a raise for the third year in a row. MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder has already vowed to work toward a net-zero increase in labor spending, and if the workers are earning more, that simply means there will be fewer of them on the MTA’s payrolls.
Meanwhile, later this year, the MTA and the TWU will head to the bargaining table to hammer out another labor pact, and you can bet that Cuomo and his team will watch these negotiations far more carefully than Gov. Paterson did in 2009. Under the microscope will be the MTA’s pension and benefits obligations. In 2010, 19 percent of MTA expenditures went to fund pensions (nine percent) and health & welfare benefits (10 percent). Total expenditures in those categories topped $2.1 billion, and by 2014, that number is expected to raise to at least $2.7 billion. It’s certainly a plus today for the MTA’s bottom line that the TWU wasn’t successful in its 2005 effort to lower its retirement age from 55 to 50.
Essentially, we’re sitting on the edge of a dangerous game. If Cuomo is successful in instituting this wage freeze, the TWU will be firmly in his crosshairs, and he will apply tremendous pressure on the MTA to give up no ground. Another strike would likely result in the end of the TWU as a viable union but giving up ground to the authority will lead current president John Samuelsen exposed to an already-disgruntled rank-and-file.
For better or worse, labor pressures will be one of the top transit storylines for 2011. If workers’ salaries and benefits keep going up, riders will be outraged. If the unions are battered or broken by Albany, the workers will be very unhappy. No matter what, this story will be have a bumpy ride and an ending that can’t be happy for everyone.
