To help weekend crowds combat route changes, the MTA redesigned its service advisory signs last fall.

The MTA is losing millions in poorly-planned weekend track work, and the agency is not doing an adequate enough job in providing alternate routes or information on service changes, a new report issued jointly by Thomas DiNapoli and John Liu says. The State and City Comptrollers’ report claims that the MTA wasted over $10 million over three years as trains were not placed back in service as work wrapped early. Furthermore, a sampling of projects found significant cost overruns as well.

“When the MTA fails to manage its service diversions properly, it’s more than an inconvenience; it’s a waste of taxpayer money and it derails local businesses,” DiNapoli, the state comptroller, said. “Our audit found that MTA’s service diversions are increasing in frequency and leaving taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars in cost overruns. The subway system is showing its age, but the MTA has to do a better job managing all aspects of these diversions, from rider notification to budgeting.”

The report — the first one issued jointly by the two comptrollers’ offices in some years — landed yesterday, and it was but another salvo in the barrage aimed at the MTA’s track work. Earlier in July, weekend service changes drew headlines when The Times noted how growing weekend ridership at some stations and along some lines has led to disgruntled passengers. The MTA subsequently promised to study weekend service along the L, but this new report seems to show how one study won’t be enough.

The details of the report are fairly unsurprising. Basically, the MTA’s track work is a mishmash of GOs that often aren’t recorded properly, aren’t communicated to the public properly and cost to much. For instance, the report found that that Transit spent just $228,000 in 2010 informing its 2.3 billion riders of service diversions while the Long Island Rail Road spent over $740,000 on its 81.9 million riders. At randomly selected stations, auditors found 20 signs instead of Transit’s alleged 50 and did not find signs at street level, in subway cars or on platforms in many instances. Furthermore, while Transit has a policy that calls for newspaper advertisements, they ran just twice out of 50 sampled diversions.

On the efficiency front, the findings were even worse. Servuce diversions increased in number between 2008 and 2010, and those lasting for more than a month rose from seven to 57. More damning though were the allegations of poor time management that cost the MTA upwards of $10.5 million and its passengers countless aggravations. Says the report: “Transit often reroutes riders’ trains even when no work is taking place. When asked for the General Order Worksheets that track time spent on each diversion, Transit management could only provide auditors with 29 of the 50. Of those 29 diversions, work started late on 28 and stopped early on 21. Unproductive work time ate up anywhere from 10 to 27 percent of the time trains were diverted, though there was no cost mitigation.”

“Sadly this confirms the nagging suspicion of riders, residents and business owners alike, that subway service is taken down more than necessary,” Liu, the city’s comptroller, said. “The MTA must understand that the City never sleeps and weekend service is neither ancillary nor expendable. We expect the MTA to maintain and repair the tracks, while keeping disruptions to a minimum.”

The two final areas studied showed similarly poor findings. In a study of 15 diversions and 12 contracts, the comptrollers found that four of these contracts were over budget by $26.6 million. Furthermore, shuttle buses are seemingly employed without regard for the ridership numbers. Transit officials generally could not explain how estimates were used to determine shuttle bus demand, and the only estimate they could provide was six years old.

For its part, the MTA issued its usual statement on weekend work. “Due to the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation of the subway system, planned service diversions are necessary in order to perform maintenance and capital work,” the authority said. “We make every effort to minimize customer inconvenience by coordinating work — performing multiple jobs in the same area so that we do not have to go back again. However, some projects are extremely involved, requiring several shutdowns.”

Still, in a response to the comptrollers’ report, Transit acknowledged its shortcomings. DiNapoli and Liu issued five recommendations. They include better outreach on service changes; closer monitoring of expenditures; a push to restore subway service as soon as possible; and a renewed attempt to better assess shuttle bus demand. Simple changes could go a long way toward making off-hour and weekend travel much, much less inconvenient for millions.

Trackbed removal along the G train often requires weekend service shutdowns. (Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Leonard Wiggins)

When my dad, who is currently on vacation in Prague, received his Second Ave. Sagas email this morning and read my take on the MTA’s increased weekend ridership, he had a question for me. “When are they supposed to do maintenance and improvements if not on weekends?” he asked.

It’s a good question, and one apparently lost on our public officials. In fact, John Liu himself, the city comptroller who has been mentioned as a potential 2013 mayoral candidate, didn’t seem to comprehend that point. “The MTA can no longer have the luxury to think that weekends are expendable; weekends are commuting days now,” he said to The Times. “People who commute Monday to Friday say nice things about the subways. But the complaints about weekend service resound all throughout the city.”

Apparently, the MTA had the same thought. Without referencing The Times article, the authority issued a pointed press release this afternoon intended to highlight the work crews do over the weekend. “At least three of this past weekend’s work projects involved jobs that required the removal of track,” the statement said. “A new concrete roadbed was installed on the uptown B/C Line track between 103rd and 110th Streets, in Manhattan. Once completed, the improvements to the roadbed will provide a smoother, quieter ride through the area.”

While noting that crews were also working on the connection between the uptown 6 at Bleecker St. and the Broadway/Lafayette station, the authority, which released a corresponding flickr photoset, had a message: “While these jobs pose some inconvenience for customers, weekends are the only time when complicated track, signal and electrical projects can be performed due to the necessity for workers to have access to tracks without having to be concerned about passing train traffic. Other types of jobs, such as station rehabilitation platform edge replacement also require suspension of train service.”

That is, of course, the problem: No matter how many people ride on the weekends, the numbers will not eclipse those dependent upon weekday subway service, and the MTA must rehabilitate its infrastructure which, at places, is 100 years old. When else can they do that except during the weekends?

To help weekend crowds combat route changes, the MTA redesigned its service advisory signs last fall.

A few weeks ago, on Father’s Day, I was waiting for an express train back to Brooklyn from Manhattan at around 9 p.m. that Sunday night. When the 2 train pulled into 14th Street, it was packed. I had enough room to stand comfortably, but no seat opened up until a few folks got out at Fulton Street. The train remained crowded — not just for a Sunday night — until I left at Grand Army Plaza.

For frequent riders, these crowded weekend trains aren’t a new phenomenon. In absolute numbers, weekend ridership remains far behind weekend totals. In fact, the combined ridership for Saturday and Sunday in April reached 5.4 million while the subway seems 5.2 million per weekday. Yet with fewer trains on the rails and popular tourist and nightlife destinations packing in people, trains can be nearly as crowded on the weekend as they are during the week, and this is, according to an article in today’s Times, a new and surprising development for Transit.

As Michael Grynbaum reports, large swaths of subway routes aren’t seeing the massive decreases in ridership that used to be a weekend hallmark. Weekend totals, he writes, “have doubled in the past 20 years, far outpacing the growth of ridership during the workweek.” “You would probably have to go back to close to World War II — when people were working six days a week — to find a similar trend,” William M. Wheeler, the MTA’s director of planning said to The Times.

Transit officials are attentively watching these ridership trends which they say are spurred on by “the shifting cultural and economic picture of New York.” No longer are residents afraid of riding the subways after dark as they were from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. With rampant gentrification pushing the city’s less safe neighborhoods to the margins of the map along with a concerted push by the city to clean up the subways and capital investments in rolling stock, the subways are far safer than they once were, and it shows.

An accompanying graphic highlights how some stations aren’t seeing major weekend decreases in riders, and Grynbaum has more:

Dozens of residential developments have sprouted up around subway stations in once-desolate parts of Brooklyn and Queens. And the rise of a service-oriented city economy means many workers report to jobs on the weekends or at off hours.

Just 10 years ago, the transportation authority was running advertisements that encouraged riders to take advantage of extra space on weekend trains. Today, in nightlife-heavy neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, the subways move nearly the same number of riders on weekends as they do during the week, a phenomenon once considered unthinkable.

At the Bedford Avenue stop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which serves about a third of the L train’s passengers, an average weekend day retains 90 percent of the ridership of a weekday. At Prince Street in SoHo, recently recast as an upscale shopping mecca, the retention rate is 85 percent.

For the MTA, though, this increase in ridership leads to disgruntled weekend passengers when service changes — which this weekend, impacted 16 lines — lead to roundabout reroutings and shuttle buses. The number one gripe many have with the MTA these days focuses around weekend travel. “The MTA can no longer have the luxury to think that weekends are expendable; weekends are commuting days now,” John Liu, the city comptroller who never met a complaint he wouldn’t audit, said. “People who commute Monday to Friday say nice things about the subways. But the complaints about weekend service resound all throughout the city.”

So as Liu audits the MTA’s weekend service patterns — to what end, I have no idea — the MTA will continue to reroute trains for the weekend. Even with ridership down, it’s still overall a fraction of the weekday totals, and a plan floated by Jay Walder last year to shudder full lines in order to blitz them with work gained little traction. “[The weekend] is the only time available to get these projects completed,” MTA spokesman Charles Seaton said.

And so New Yorkers will complain. They want smooth weekday rides and full weekend service, but they can’t have both. Ridership, which should inch ever upward, will push the MTA to find a better weekend solution and provide more reliable replacement service while it can. Ultimately, though, William Henderson of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee put it best: “There are no answers that are going to be painless.”

For those of us who are following along as the MTA moves ever so slowly with its great public works projects, an event on Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York is right up our alleys. Entitled “Roads to Nowhere: Public Works in a Time of Crisis,” the panel discussion will feature top officials from the MTA and Regional Plan Association, among others, talking with Times reporter Michael Grynbaum on the state of the city’s rail infrastructure.

The discussion starts at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 22nd, and the museum is at 5th Ave. and 103rd St. The description is as follows:

New Yorkers living in the midst of economic crisis are getting mixed signals about the future of public works. Will the No. 7 subway line be extended to New Jersey? Will the Second Avenue subway ever be finished? When will real work on Moynihan Station get started? What is the fate of New York’s public works given the fiscal crisis in Albany and the economic stranglehold of “The Great Recession”?

Michael M. Grynbaum, transportation reporter for The New York Times, leads a discussion on public works in a time of fiscal crisis with Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, President, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Capital Construction Company (MTACC); Joan Byron, Director, Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at Pratt Institute; Denise Richardson, Managing Director of the General Contractors Association of New York; and Jeffrey M. Zupan, senior transportation fellow at the Regional Plan Association. Co-sponsored by the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Regional Plan Association and presented as part of the Museum’s ongoing Urban Forum series on New York Infrastructure.

The museum is asking those who plan to attend to register ahead of time. It costs $12 for non-members, $8 for seniors and students and $6 for museum members. However, those who call 917-492-3395 to reserve can mention Second Ave. Sagas to receive a discount. I’ll be there. Say hi if you see me.

Why does the Second Ave. Subway cost so much? The answer must be out there.

I started this site in late 2006 when it became clear that the Second Ave. Subway would receive a $1.3 billion infusion of federal funds that would finally get the project off the drawing board and onto subway maps across the city. By the time I got around to discussing the project’s timeline in March 2007, the MTA had pushed an initial opening date of 2012 back a year. The MTA had hoped to wrap up Phase 1 by 2013 before moving onto Phase 2 in 2014. Phase 3 was to begin in 2015 and Phase 4 in 2017 as the full line was to be ready by 2020. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men.

As time wore on, the news got worse and worse. In late 2008, the MTA promised a 2015 completion date for SAS Phase 1, and in 2009, the authority had to push that date back again to 2016. Today, the authority continues to insist that the project will open in December 2016 even though the federal government anticipates an opening date as late as 2018 and costs as high as $5.7 billion.

The years have not been the only problem plaguing the Second Ave. Subway. In the early part of the 21st Century, Phase 1 of the subway was to cost $3.8 billion. Today, the MTA hopes to bring in at around $4.5 billion but had cut the third track to eliminate $1 billion from the project’s balance sheet. Six years out, the final cost of Phase 1 is no sure thing.

The Second Ave. Subway isn’t alone in this grand MTA venture. The Fulton St. Transit Center was supposed to open three years ago at a cost of $700 million, and now work won’t be complete in Lower Manhattan until 2014. It will cost $1.4 billion. Even the new South Ferry station, a relatively minor project, opened nearly 16 months late and $100 million over budget. That station has since sprung numerous leaks. This is project management at its worst.

So that’s my long-winded introduction to this evening’s news. As New York prepares for the holidays and people pack up, Barry Kluger, the MTA IG, has released a report — available here as a PDF — highly critical of the MTA’s capital construction management structure. The findings in the right are not a surprise. “The failure to complete mega-projects on time and within budget has raised serious concerns about how MTACC has managed these projects and indicates a need for more effective oversight from MTA,” it says.

The report itself is mostly mundane. Kluger talks about the interplay between MTA HQ, MTA Capital Construction, the MTA Board’s Capital Program Oversight Committee and the Independent Engineering Consultant brought on to advise the board on issues concerning the capital project. Essentially, too many cooks are in the kitchen, and project management and risk assessment efforts often get bogged down in the finer details of an overly bureaucratic.

Ultimately, Kluger’s report suggests fixes as exciting as delineating responsibilities, presenting reports in clear and concise manners and better setting expectations, priorities and evaluation criteria. For the MTA, this hardly groundbreaking news. In fact, Jay Walder urged Kluger to conduct this review, and the Authority has already begun to implement many of the suggestions the inspector general put forward to streamline mega-project management. If the agency can better assess risks, it can at least begin to understand why costs are on the rise.

For now, this MTA IG report is only the tip of an iceberg. As Kluger writes, “Upcoming work will explore other potential causes [of delays and costs increases], including those more fundamental and systemic in nature.” That’s going to be the meaty report. Why does it take so long to build a subway line in New York City? Why does it cost so much? As the MTA gears up to fight for money to close the $10 billion gap in its capital budget, those are questions the authority is going to need to answer. Better management might be a start, but it’s only just that.

Addendum: As Kluger’s report came out late on Wednesday, it has received a modest amount of media play from the usual suspects. In Transportation Nation’s coverage, Jim O’Grady claims that, of all the MTA projects, only the 7 line is on time and on budget. As I wrote just a few weeks ago, that’s simply not true. The line is a year behind schedule, and the only reason it’s ostensibly on budget is because the city axed an entire station at 41st St. and 10th Ave. — or close to half the project. That doesn’t strike me as a project that’s on time or on budget.