MTA Economics

Dodging a question, Lieber shows an MTA unwilling to confront its cost crisis

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on February 18, 2022
Well over budget and long delayed, London’s Elizabeth Line, shown here in a tour I took with Andy Byford in November, costs just one-third per kilometer than future phases of the Second Ave. Subway. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Albany oversight hearings are staid and rote affairs. Every now and then, a panel of state legislators call in the technocrats in charge of state agencies to talk about the topics on the minds of those legislators. Unfortunately, those topics often run to the banal when it comes to transit and the MTA. Why is this bus stop in my district on one corner but not the other? Why isn’t the MTA building platform edge doors? When will Staten Island get better transit service?

These are questions with well-known answers, but for the sake of their constituents, our elected officials have to go through this exercise. I find it very frustrating. The Senate and Assembly could hold wall-to-wall hearings on any number of issues plaguing our transit system, but these 90-minute sessions once or a twice a year if we’re lucky is all we get. When MTA CEO and Chair Janno Lieber appeared before a joint committee panel this week, I didn’t expect much to come of it, and by and large, my low expectations were met. The session even featured Diane Savino asking why the MTA plans to build the IBX but there are no plans to build a subway to Staten Island, a topic worth its own post exploring why her constituents don’t want one and no one is currently pushing funding for it. But I digress.

Midway through Lieber appearance, one brief exchange leapt out at me. George Borello, a Republican who represents Jamestown and a district as far away from the MTA’s service area as possible, was the only member of the panel to ask about the MTA’s runaway construction costs. The exchange was brief, and the emphasis is mine:

Borello: It’s been widely reporting that MTA construction costs are up to seven times the global average. Why is that the case? And what steps is the MTA taking to address these out of control costs?

Lieber: The bigger question of how we compare to the rest of the world is part of a longer conversation, but when people throw those numbers around, they frequently don’t even look at what’s the scope. So comparing a mile of New York City subway tunnel to a rubber-wheel facility where they have three cars that carry 100 people is nonsense. So if these comparisons are going to go on, you have to do apples-to-apples work…When you look at those kinds of comparisons, frequently they are informed by nonsensical lack of effort to compare projects based on scope, technology and the conditions of work.

This is a breathtakingly dismissive answer from the MTA head, and it’s wrong. A lot of people, from advocates to journalists to researchers, have conducted rigorous examinations into the MTA’s cost problems. They have indeed compared apples to apples – they’ve compared the Elizabeth Line’s deep-bore subway tunnel underneath London to the Second Ave. Subway’s deep-bore subway tunnel underneath Manhattan – and these efforts are simply not “nonsensical” nor lacking in effort. These four sentences uttered by the MTA head to a panel of legislators during an oversight hearing tells me all I need to know about the lack of sincerity of the MTA’s cost reform efforts.

The MTA’s cost problems are well documented and rigorously documented. Brian Rosenthal of The Times produced a thorough and accessible piece four years ago analyzing how everyone from unions to contractors to public officials is to blame and how the MTA’s usual excuses – environmental review laws, powerful unions, old utilities, fire codes – don’t hold up when compared with the Parises, Madrids and Londons of the world. Alon Levy and Eric Goldwyn at Transit Costs have established a database of global transit projects that break down each by its components. These are the apples-to-apples comparisons that show the MTA paying between three or five times more per kilometer than even the second most expensive projects in the world. These are completely sensical comparisons that show out of control costs.

So why would Lieber dismiss this question out of hand when it’s one he should face every time he is called to Albany? For one, an entire ecosystem exists based on the MTA’s construction costs. Contractors in NYC are a powerful political interest group, and they would lose the most if the MTA could cut even a third of their astronomical construction costs. So the impetus to cut costs would come at a political price for Lieber’s boss. For another, cost reform is almost as impossible a task as it can be in NYC. Lieber alone can’t reform the MTA’s construction costs, and he’s overstepping his bounds to suggest the MTA is flushing money down the toilet. His job to lead to the agency, and it’s the politicians’ job to back work rule reforms and overhauls of review laws that drag down MTA construction projects. He doesn’t have the power or political backing to do any of this himself. It’s both a flaw and the purpose of the MTA as a quasi-independent government authority.

Ultimately, Borello was right to ask, and his fellow Senators should be beating the drum on this topic non-stop. The MTA will not be able to expand its network sufficiently until the costs are under control, and understanding how and why the costs are so out of control and admitting it all publicly is the necessary first step. And all those cost comparisons floating out there? They’re accurate, and they’re not nonsense. Anyone in charge of the MTA should admit that.

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Interborough Express

The Interborough Express is Kathy Hochul’s crowning project, if she wants it badly enough

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on February 9, 2022
The light-rail version of the Interborough Express, shown here connecting to the L train at Wilson Ave.

When Gov. Kathy Hochul announced her support last month for a truncated version of the RPA’s 25-year-old Triboro RX proposal, I was surprised. If it survives a gubernatorial election this year, your garden-variety NIMBY opposition and a lengthy review and planning process, the renamed Interborough Express — a 14-mile circumferential route that will connect Bay Ridge to Jackson Heights using an existing freight rail corridor — will become a welcome addition to the city’s transit-scape. But the break-neck pace that started with an out-of-the-blue announcement during her January 5 state-of-the-state speech and continued two weeks later with the release of the MTA’s feasibility study and the start of the environmental review process threw me for a loop.

Why? Because I had simply forgotten the MTA had previously announced plans to study the route. I forgot that they had already cut out the Bronx portion. I forgot it had attracted some support from a handful of New York Assembly representatives. The feasibility study was so out of mind, I didn’t even include it in my transportation to-do list for the new governor last summer. When I looked back at the timing of the MTA’s original announcement, the world could be forgiven for forgetting. The next day, Andy Byford announced his resignation and a few weeks after that, the pandemic descended upon us. The Triboro plan was one of the last bits of normal from 2020, and the feasibility study faded into that Before Times feeling.

But enough about me; let’s talk about the IBX. We’re definitely maybe kinda sorta getting it eventually as Hochul announced last month that the MTA had determined it is indeed physically feasible to add passenger to the freight line. “Infrastructure is all about connection, and with the Interborough Express we can connect people to their family and friends while also improving their quality of life,” the governor said. “The Interborough Express will connect Brooklyn and Queens, not only shaving time off commutes but also making it easier to connect to subway lines across the route. With the completion of the feasibility study, we can move forward to the next phase of this project and bring us one step closer to making the Interborough Express a reality for New Yorkers.”

The IBX will connect with 17 subway lines and the LIRR.

But what will the Interborough Express be? To learn that, we turn to the Feasibility Study and Alternatives Analysis, a flashy, 28-page PDF that builds on the work the RPA has published on their three-borough proposal, most recently in its Fourth Regional Plan a few years ago. In that document, we learn that the new two-borough plan could be conventional rail, a new light rail or bus rapid transit. At this point, you may be wondering, “Why not Triboro? What happened the Bronx?” Well, as we learned in 2020 and as the MTA briefly notes in the new report, including the Bronx extension would require significant expansion across the Hell Gate Bridge, and due to cost and feasibility concerns, it’s not in the cards for now. Turning the Interborough Express into the Triboro line will be another generation’s problem to solve.

Even without this third borough, the MTA believes that 74,000 to 88,000 passengers per day, depending on the mode, would make use of this circumferential line that begins to fix the Manhattan-centric nature of the subways. It may have made sense in 1922 for nearly all subways to feed into Manhattan south of 60th Street, but in 2022, the need for better connections through the so-called far-flung neighborhoods of the so-called Outer Boroughs could not be more obvious. The 14-mile passenger route would connect with 17 subway lines and the LIRR in Brooklyn and Queens while providing a high-speed, frequent transit service for areas of the city currently heavily reliant on private automobiles for commuting. It makes use of an existing right-of-way, and if the stars align, it’s a project that could be completed by the end of the decade. The MTA hasn’t put a price tag on the alternatives, but MTA CEO and Chair Janno Lieber told reporters the project would be in the “single-digit billions” (which means the Interborough Express can be yours for the low, low price of $9,999,999,999 or less).

What this not-ten-billion will buy us remains to be seen, but the MTA has narrowed down the options to three: conventional rail sharing tracks with the preexisting freight service, light rail or bus rapid transit. Due to FRA requirements, the light rail and BRT options would have to run on rights-of-way physically separated from the freight service. For most of the route, these two options would exist next to the freight tracks but certain segments would have to run on newly-built viaducts above the Bay Bridge Branch corridor or on city streets.

The conventional rail option is most similar to London’s Overground or Paris’ RER. Trains would look similar to subways, could operate every five minutes and may even interoperate with the LIRR (though the MTA cautions this would be “very complex and expensive”). Ridership is estimated at 84,500 per day, but on the downside, end-to-end travel time for conventional rail is 45 minutes.

From a ridership perspective, the study seems to favor light rail, projecting 39-minute travel time and nearly 88,000 riders. Stations could be built at street level and “smaller LRT vehicles are able to navigate tighter curves and steeper gradients, which in turn reduce the amount of private land that needs to be taken.” But LRT is also the costliest due to the need to build out full physical separation from the freight tracks. The third option — bus rapid transit — would be the “lowest-cost alternative to build” with the “most operational flexibility.” But to meet the projected BRT ridership of 74,000, the MTA would have to run buses every 2.5 minutes during peak hours. The MTA cites “traffic and service reliability impacts” as potential challenges, and I generally favor either of the two fixed-rail options instead.

A cross-section of the ROW reveals how the different modes would share space with the freight lines. Due to FRA requirements, light rail and buses can’t share track and limited dedicated viaducts or surface streets would be incorporated into the route.

With the feasibility study completed, and three alternatives tabbed for further review, the MTA at the direction of the governor will move this project into the environmental review phase. Never mind that the agency hasn’t released a 20-year needs assessment since the mid-2010s; never mind that funding remains a mystery. With the governor behind this project serving as its champion, it will move forward. That’s just the way the politics of transit expansion operate.

So next up are some public meetings, and as the line runs through Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Borough Park, Kensington, Midwood, Flatbush, Flatlands, New Lots, Brownsville, East New York, Bushwick, Ridgewood, Middle Village, Maspeth, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, those public meetings should be varied. As the study noted, “up to seven out of ten people served will be from communities of color, approximately one-half will come from households with no cars, and approximately one-third will be living in households at or below 150% of the Federal Poverty Line.” While every elected official from these neighborhoods voiced support, Queens Assembly Rep. Cathy Nolan (and some of her more NIMBY-esque constituents) worried about noise though I believe they’re worried about the wrong ROW, focusing their comments on the Montauk Line rather than the route of the IBX.

With key representatives, including council member Bob Holden, on board, political opposition to the IBX is unlikely to materialize from Brooklyn and Queens, but Bronx representatives at clamoring for a piece of the pie. They feel perennial left out of the transit expansion discussion and for good reason. But Hochul wants to move fast, and if we take the MTA at even 40 percent of its word, the connection over the Hell Gate Bridge seriously complicates the project. The beauty of the Interborough Express is that it builds on a pre-existing right of way without the need for complicated construction. At-grade stations are easy; re-arranging the Hell Gate Bridge isn’t. A complicated, lengthy project isn’t in the cards politically, and the Bronx will have to wait.

The Bay Ridge Branch (left) as seen from the Fort Hamilton N train station. Will these tracks one day see passenger service? (Photo: (Marc A. Hermann / MTA on flickr)

The biggest wild card may be Hochul’s reelection, but as of now, she’s sailing to her own term and at least four years during which she can use the power of her office to push through this project. In fact, Hochul even managed to get Rep. Jerry Nadler on board. The long-time Congressman had long opposed passenger use for the Bay Ridge Branch as he has spent decades pushing for a freight tunnel under the New York Harbor. As part of the Interborough Express plan, Hochul announced, the Port Authority will examine how the Cross Harbor Rail Freight project will work with the Interborough Express.

“The Interborough Express is an important project that has the potential to expand transit access to underserved neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. This project can and should co-exist with the Cross Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel project which would finally connect the New York metropolitan region to the national freight rail grid by removing trucks from our streets and diverting them to the underutilized rail network,” Nadler said in a statement. “We can and should use the Bay Ridge line to move both people and goods, and I am confident that we can advance both the Cross Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel and the Interborough Express together.”

So where does that leave New York City? This is the most real and concrete step the Triboro/IBX proposal has taken in its decades-long history, and it moves the project from the theoretical pages of the RPA to the real process begun by the MTA. So long as Hochul is the governor and wants to push this through, the project has the transit champion it needs to succeed. At 2 Broadway, there’s even a dream of finishing it by 2030 as the MTA eyes another round of big-ticket transit expansion projects.

I have one final suggestion thought. It could use a catchier name than one that reminds the world of an intestinal ailment. Is the Brooklyn-Queens Express taken? I hear the BQX is an awfully catchy acronym.

For a deep dive into the ins and outs of the challenges that await the Interborough Express and a view of the AECOM report on which the MTA’s alternatives analysis was based, head on over to Streetsblog and read through Dave Colon’s analysis. Alon Levy was disappointed in the narrow scope of the alternatives analysis but finds much to like in the speed at which Hochul is pursuing the project. I agree with Alon on both points.

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Fare HikesMTA PoliticsService Cuts

Service cuts, fare hikes ‘off the table for now’ due to COVID relief money

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 17, 2021
MTA transit fares will not increase for the the foreseeable future., the governor announced earlier this week. (Photo: MTA / Jessie Mislavsky)

In a boon for riders, the MTA is ending 2021 much as it began the year: by delaying a planned fare hike for at least six months and putting off planned service cuts indefinitely. The news, first announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul and later clarified by MTA Acting Chair and CEO Janno Lieber, will come as welcome news as subway riders continue to return to the system and came about due to various federal COVID relief bills.

Hochul first announced the pause on Monday before flying to DC to joint President Joe Biden for the signing ceremony of the infrastructure bill, and she made it sound as though the BIF was the cause of the pause. She said:

We’ve done the numbers. And as a result of the money we’ll be receiving from the president signing the bill today, I’ll be witnessing this. We anticipate that there’ll be no fare hikes for the MTA. So therefore, those of you who are commuters on the MTA and have been anxious about how much this is going to go up, especially in this era of inflation, when it just seems when you’re just trying to get your head above water and come out from under a long dark period of the pandemic, and you might get a little bit more money in your paycheck, that the cost of living from gasoline to the cost of turkeys in another week and a half, this is really affecting people’s ability to just put food on their table. And I’m really excited to say that we will not have to raise the fairs or have any service cuts. The service cuts that were planned for 2023 and 2024 are now off the table for MTA commuters.

The MTA later clarified that the delay in any fare hikes and the indefinite postponement of service cuts is due more to COVID relief bills rather than the recent infrastructure deal, but either way, riders are the ones who stand to benefit. In comments on Monday to reporters during the MTA Board committee meetings, Lieber added context to Hochul’s promise. The MTA will delay any consideration of fare hikes for at least six months, if not longer, and the service cuts are no longer part of the agency’s budget projections. “We are not planning to reinstitute those hearings and that process,” Lieber said of the fare hikes, once planned for 2021. “For now, fare hikes are off the table; service cuts are off the table…We do not want to discourage people from coming back by raising the fares.”

For the budget wonks among us, Lieber explained how the various COVID and infrastructure bills allowed the MTA to halt these harmful cost increases and service reductions. Effectively, since the BIF enables the MTA to receive more money directly, the agency does not have to borrow as much to fund its capital plan. The debt payments associated with capital borrowing are applied to the operating budget so more direct funding means less deficit funding. Additionally, a few days ago, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut finally reached agreement on COVID relief funding for transit, and the MTA no longer has to borrow against future revenues to ensure cash flow remains consistent. Thus, the agency had the financial leeway to hold off on fare hikes for now and defer service cuts for the next few years.

Reading the political tea leaves allows us to catch a glimpse of when the agency may reconsider fare hikes, and it’s very unlikely to be during 2022. Lieber told reporters that fare hikes could be implemented “in theory” over the summer or in October, but that would align fare hikes with votes in a hotly-contested gubernatorial primary or general election next year. Hochul, fighting for a term of her own, is not going to permit the MTA to raise fares before she secures her seat, and Lieber and the MTA are more than willing to go along with their boss’ plan. “We are,” Lieber said, “taking fare hikes off the table for at least six months and maybe well beyond that.”

What happens beyond the election in 2022 is anyone’s guess. MTA leadership has not been shy in noting that the COVID relief money is driving this policy. “The deficit is looming because of COVID when the Washington money runs out,” Lieber said, and he wants the legislature to come up with a funding plan that isn’t as heavily reliant on ridership as the MTA’s current projections. After all, COVID took a huge bite out of ridership, and the MTA — which must balance its budget by law — doesn’t want to cut service or raise fares as it works to rebuild its rider base. Currently, weekday ridership is around 55-58% of what it was before the pandemic, and the agency does not expect another big bump until early January when more commuters return to their offices. Thus, ridership revenue will continue to lag as it has since March 2020, and the state, the MTA says, should find more equitable ways to fund transit that do not fall so heavily on the wallets of passengers.

That’s a discussion that will have to unfold over the next few months and years. For now, as the MTA freezes fares, I ask is this good policy? And is this good politics? By freezing fares, the MTA is foregoing approximately $200 million in additional revenue that could be used to further pay down past debts or finance operations. As the money isn’t a 1-for-1 replacement from the feds, the MTA, through a decision by the Governor, is foregoing this added revenue. In a vacuum, this may not be great policy, but it’s very good politics.

While you or I may ride the subways regularly, the MTA still must work to convince New Yorkers to come back to transit. Those missing 40% of riders — which can amount to 2 or 2.5 million swipes every day — won’t come back by themselves, and the MTA will have to work for it. As many riders remain essential workers who never left the system and others look at various options, the MTA is wise to keep fares down, as they were earlier this year when they delayed the fare hike in January. The agency isn’t about to reduce fares as some cities have done, but not raising the rates at a time when service isn’t better and riders need to have faith in the subway is good politics.

It’s also good personal politics for a politician to avoid fare raises during an election year. While the MTA was founded to remove politics from fare decisions, we saw during Andrew Cuomo’s reign just how easy it is to politicize transit. If Hochul wants to do us all a favor by keeping fares where they are for another year, I won’t look this gift horse any more closely in the mouth than I already have.

And so the fares remain the same. More importantly, the service cuts, which would exacerbate a death spiral, remain off the table, and the MTA continues along, bending to the will of the governor who is in control and allow the public some measure of relief as New York continues its late-COVID rebound.

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OMNY

OMNY set to usher in the age of fare-capping in NYC

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 11, 2021
The OMNY card will replace the Metrocard, though the fewer people who have one, the better. (Via the MTA)

During the pandemic, the way I’ve paid for transit trips in New York City has undergone a seismic change. I haven’t used a Metrocard since the second half of 2020 when the MTA completed the OMNY rollout in the subway and on buses near me in Brooklyn. I don’t suffer the frustration of “please swipe again” and instead tap in on every ride using my phone. Since I’m not commuting regularly, I no longer need a monthly Metrocard, and since I’m paying for each ride individually, I’m happy to use the latest and greatest in payment technology to tap in on every ride.

At some point — maybe in January when I head back to my office a few days a week — this might change, and I’ll have to revert back to Metrocards of yore. If I’m taking enough transit rides, I’ll have to think about whether an unlimited card makes sense. I’ll have to map out my planned trips to see if I’m going to make it back to 12 rides per week or 47 riders per month, the current breakeven points for a 7- or 30-day card respectively.

But what if I didn’t have to think about it? Enter OMNY and enter fare capping.

In our age of instant tech gratification, the MTA’s OMNY rollout has seemed almost glacial. The new fare payment system, in the works for the better part of a decade, was officially announced in 2017 and rollout began in 2019, around the time I interviewed Al Putre for a podcast episode on OMNY. It will still be another 20 months before the Metrocard makes its final swipe in July of 2023, and yet, by MTA standards, this project is zooming along. All subways and buses are now OMNY-equipped, and as the MTA records 25% of fares paid via the new contactless tap system, the proprietary OMNY card made its debut last month for those who don’t have or don’t want to use their own payment cards. But that’s only the beginning, and the MTA is finally starting to talk about one of the biggest benefits of OMNY: the potential to implement fare-capping.

“For the MTA,” Janno Lieber, the agency’s current acting chair and CEO, said following last month’s board meeting, “the technology behind OMNY gives us ways to imagine fare structures in ways we haven’t really thought of just yet. This is a big, big moment. Folks recall that when we changed from tokens to Metrocard, that changed everything, not just how we collected fares but it give life to the monthly and unlimited fares that ended up being a financial plus in the long run. OMNY offers us the same opportunity to rethink fares.” This will, Lieber subsequently confirmed, include fare-capping.

For the uninitiated, the concept of fare-capping is a simple one. If you take a certain number of paid rides in a given time period, once you reach the cap, every subsequent ride is free. Basically, if you hit the pay-per-ride cost equivalent of a time-based pass, you no longer get charged for additional trips during that time period. The Tube in London has implemented a daily cap reached on a rider’s fourth ride and weekly caps (which run from Monday to Sunday) generally reached on the 16th ride.

Fare-capping is intended to take the guesswork out of buying a transit pass but more importantly, it opens up transit and time-based passes for those who may not be able to afford an initial outlay of $127 each month for that 30-day card. (Transit Center has written more on how fare-capping promotes transit equity and use.) Lieber spoke with NBC New York about these benefits. “If you ride a certain number of rides, at some point the algorithm will tell you the best deal for you is to have an unlimited,” he said. “[OMNY] will give you the benefit of that.”

Fare-capping has always been one of the promises of OMNY, and in a Tweet a few weeks ago, NYC Transit let slip the future potential. Since then, politicians and advocates have come out in favor of the move. The Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA spoke glowingly in a statement and urged the board to move fast: “Pairing OMNY with fare capping is the perfect match: it’s a marriage between technology and equitable fare policy. It will encourage people to get back onboard, and the more they ride, the sooner they’ll do it for free. Giving all riders the opportunity to, in essence, get a monthly or weekly transit pass without having to upfront costs will level the playing field and allow people of every income ability to take advantage of the benefits of unlimited access to the subways and buses.”

In the State Senate, Andrew Gounardes isn’t waiting around for the MTA to act on its own. He recently introduced a bill mandating that OMNY include a fare capping system, garnering praise from transit advocates. “It’s an unfortunate truth that while commuters who can afford to pay $127 a month upfront are rewarded with unlimited rides, lower-income transit riders who can’t front the cash often end up paying for more expensive single-fare rides each month,” Jaqi Cohen of Tri-State Transportation Campaign said. “Fare capping would ensure that all riders have access to the same unlimited fare option, whether they could afford to pay upfront or not.”

Of course this doesn’t mean fare-capping is coming to NYC tomorrow or next month, but the promise is there. The MTA Board is going to work with Transit staffers to understand how the system could be implemented and come up with a proposal that works for the agency and its bottom line and the riders. The questions to be answered include assessments of the time period, whether rolling or fixed to the calendar, and the dollar value of the cap.

“Anything we do,” Lieber said, “involves reprogramming all those vending machines in the stations and working on the software and all of that, and we have not made a final decision exactly how this will work. And the board gets to decide. I don’t want to create expectations. We’re still studying this. We’re going to have to figure it out.”

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PANYNJ

Laguardia AirTrain on ‘pause’ as Hochul gears up to pull the plug on Cuomo-era vanity project

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on October 14, 2021
The Laguardia AirTrain, a pet project of Andrew Cuomo’s, is now on life support as the Port Authority begins a new review.

The much-maligned Laguardia AirTrain may be on its last legs as the Port Authority has paused work on the project following an order by Governor Kathy Hochul to re-examine the plan. The decision doesn’t quite kill former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s crowning symbolism of his top-down, ‘me-first-and-only’ approach to transit planning, but facing lawsuits and criticism on all sides, the days are clearly numbered for the Willets Point-based backwards airtrain, as they should be.

This week’s pause had been in the works since Hochul took over. Sensing blood in the water, a strange coalition of East Elmhurst residents, environmentalists and transit advocates as well as all local politicians had banded together to press the new governor to halt the old governor’s flawed project, and the new governor sort of obliged.

Following seven weeks of lobbying by Queens politicians, Hochul announced, well, something on October 4. In a statement, she asked the Port Authority to look into “alternative mass transit solutions.” It wasn’t a pause, but it wasn’t a ringing endorsement of the AirTrain. She said:

“New Yorkers deserve world-class transportation to world-class airports. I have asked the Port Authority to thoroughly examine alternative mass transit solutions for reducing car traffic and increasing connectivity to LaGuardia Airport. We must ensure that our transportation projects are bold, visionary, and serve the needs of New Yorkers. I remain committed to working expeditiously to rebuild our infrastructure for the 21st century and to create jobs – not just at LaGuardia, but at all of our airports and transit hubs across New York.”

For a week or so, it wasn’t clear what Hochul’s ask meant. Was she canceling the AirTrain? Was she permitting it to move forward? Rick Cotton, head of the Port Authority, indicated that his agency planned to keep pushing forward on the AirTrain, and the project seemed to exist in a political limbo until the Port Authority released its own unattributed statement this week, just a few days before a deadline to respond to the Riverkeeper lawsuit, announcing the pause:

“At Governor Hochul’s request, the Port Authority is undertaking a thorough review of potential alternative mass transit options to LaGuardia Airport. The agency will work in close consultation with independent experts and stakeholders, and will complete its work as expeditiously as possible, consistent with the need for the review to be thorough and rigorous. During the review, the Port Authority will pause further action with respect to the LaGuardia AirTrain project.”

The AirTrain isn’t dead, but it’s pining for the Fjords. I’d be shocked if another minute of work happens to advance the Willets Point plan, and it seems the projects myriad opponents have won. Though what they’ve won remains to be seen, and the next few steps will determine if this is a real victory or just a Pyrrhic one.

As readers of my site know, I will not mourn the death of the AirTrain. As I wrote back in 2015, it was a bad project from the start, one with murky origins no one could pinpoint. One day, the Governor showed up a meeting and demanded the Port Authority and MTA find a way to justify the Willets Point plan even as analysis showed that it would save few people any time at all. It wasn’t worth the original $500 million budget, a figure the Port Authority later admitted they made up to placate Cuomo, and it certainly isn’t worth the current $2.1 billion price tag. To justify the project, the Port Authority rigged the alternatives analysis and environment impact statements to heavily favor only Cuomo’s plan rather than more useful subway connections or a simpler dedicated bus lane. When Riverkeeper, Guardians of Flushing Bay and the Ditmars Boulevard Block Association sued over the obviously flawed environmental studies, the writing was on the wall.

At the same time, numerous politicians used the void created by Cuomo’s resignation to finally speak out against the project. We can debate the political courage (or lack thereof) of waiting until Cuomo was out of office to jump, but once he left, jump they did. Those politicians who had been critics while Cuomo was still in power welcomed the new allies, but the upcoming fight over what’s next is a harder one that will fray the tenuous peace behind neighborhood groups that stray toward NIMBYism and transit advocates who want to see a real solution.

So far, in fact, that’s all that we’ve won: The right to keep fighting. It took six years from conception until the AirTrain was nearly ready for ground-breaking, and that was with a strong-willed governor willing to strong-arm the project through. That’s one of the reasons why the RPA, for instance, pushed against canceling the AirTrain even while knowing about the project’s dubious transit value.

Now, the governor will have to find a better plan and overcome skepticism in Queens. For example, New York State Senator Michael Gianaris objected to an extension of the N train back in the early 2000s while promoting the Willets Point plan then but now rightly objects to the Willets Point plan. He told Gotham Gazette’s Ben Max that he is open to the idea of a Laguardia subway extension over the Grand Central Parkway (skip to minute 42 of this podcast), but a plan that avoids temporary neighborhood disruptions won’t add subway access to residential and commercial areas without it. To me, that’s the wrong to right here.

The best way forward involves a combination of outcomes. In the immediate future, providing a dedicated bus connection from Jackson Heights and a dedicated bus lane through Laguardia would pay dividends while political leaders lay the groundwork for a subway connection to the airport, one that improves access through East Elmhurst and connects Laguardia to the subway. It won’t be an easy fight, and it will require coalition-building and a governor willing to fight the NIMBYs who will emerge. But it’s the right way forward.

I put canceling the AirTrain as number four on Hochul’s transit to do list, and she’s on the verge of doing it. But the second part is not letting this opportunity go to waste. If nothing comes of this other than six years of planning and no new plan for a better rail connection, all of this will have been for naught, and we’ll be in the same position we were two decades ago when the city scraped the N train extension, only this time we’ll have a nicer Laguardia no more accessible than it is today.

It’s a fate Hochul says she wants to avoid. ““We will offer world-class mass transit opportunities to get from LaGuardia to the city. I’ll get that done,” the governor promised on Wednesday, “but I want to take some breathing room to assess what’s been done in the past, what ideas were rejected and how we ended up with AirTrain in the first place.”

The next round of actions will speak louder than her words.

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MTA Politics

#HochulsMTA: A Transportation To-Do List for the New Governor

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on August 29, 2021
Kathy Hochul took the subway from midtown to Harlem earlier this month because it was the quickest way to go, her comms team said. (Photo via Bryan Lesswing)

With Andrew Cuomo out of the picture and his infrastructure legacy receding with him, our attention turns to Kathy Hochul. The new governor hails from Buffalo and is the first Upstater to live in the Executive Mansion since the 1920s. This may be a blessing for the NYC region as Hochul doesn’t come with a long history of, say, MTA animosity or the auto-centric policies of some suburban politicians.

After years of heavy-handed, ego-driven interference with MTA operations from Cuomo, New Yorkers are looking for signs from Hochul that change is on the way, and so far, the new governor has been saying all the right things. “The MTA is going to be far more liberated,” Hochul said to NY1’s Errol Louis during Thursday’s Inside City Hall. “I will not be filling positions with political allies because there’s a lot of talent out there and I want a diverse population, representing the riders, which is a diverse population.”

But words are just promises that need to be fulfilled. It’s only the first week of the Hochul Administration during the doldrums of August, and the new governor is still getting her sea legs. Plus, Hochul may be only a steward for the next year. She’ll be in office for only 12 months before facing a wide-open primary next year, and the jockeying for a four-year term may limit her power. So with politics in New York very much up in the air, Hochul’s first actions on transportation are still to come.

In the meantime, I have my own thoughts on what she could do. So without further ado, a ‘to do’ list for the new governor.

  1. Pledge MTA Leadership Stability

To say turnover was high at the MTA during Gov. Cuomo’s time in office is an understatement. I put together a list of all the people to serve as either MTA head or New York City Transit President during the ten years, seven months and 23 days of Cuomo Administration, and you can see why leadership continuity and righting the MTA’s ship have often felt impossible over the past decade.

MTA Chair & CEONew York City Transit President
Janno Lieber (Acting)Craig Cipriano (Interim)
Pat FoyeSarah Feinberg (Interim)
Fernando Ferrer (Interim)Andy Byford
Joe LhotaPhil Eng (Acting)
Fernando Ferrer (Interim)Tim Mulligan (Acting)
Tom PrendergastDarryl Irick (Interim)
Fernando Ferrer (Interim)Ronnie Hakim
Joe LhotaJames Ferrara (Interim)
Jay Walder (nominated by Paterson)Carmen Bianco
Tom Prendergast (nominated by Paterson)

The MTA has careened from one leader to the next with few spending enough time to implement reform or long-term strategic planning. For her part, Hochul should commit to stability atop the MTA. She should swiftly move to install Janno Lieber as the permanent head of the MTA, as she has indicated she is likely to do, and she should consider Alon Levy’s advice in hunting for agency heads: Look outside the U.S. for leadership; consult with Andy Byford on potential NYC Transit presidents; and give a good, long look to candidates outside of the Anglosphere.

Again, she’s saying the right things. In an interview with The New York Times, Hochul discussed her relationship with the MTA and struck a different chord than Cuomo’s heavy-handed interference. “Authority doesn’t have to be concentrated in me when I’m hiring outstanding professionals who know their jobs,” she said, in a veiled reference to the failed Byford-Cuomo relationship. “I will be there if there’s something that’s not following what I want. But I also know that day to day, they’re the ones that have to be accountable. Accountable to the riders, accountable to me. But I also know that granting more freedom allows them to rise.”

But even here, Hochul may not be able to bring the stability the MTA needs to chart a multi-year course. She almost immediately has to face an election campaign, and while she will enjoy an incumbency advantage, she’s going to have to beat more well-known candidates to earn her own term. If she loses, the next governor will likely want to appoint his or her own MTA heads, thus continuing this leadership upheaval in the short term. Anyone who fits Levy’s bill or may be inclined to take on the task of leading New York City Transit may not want to do so until the gubernatorial election is settled. Still, if Hochul can commit to stability and a proper relationship with her MTA heads, that’s a step in the right direction.

  1. Clean House at the MTA Board: Get Rid of the Cuomo Holdovers
The MTA Board will be much better off when Larry Schwartz and other Cuomo holdovers are removed.

While we all acknowledge the governor of New York controls the MTA and can do with the agency as he pleases, the way Andrew Cuomo interacted with his own MTA heads sometimes sounds unbelievable. Cuomo would name his own agency heads and then appoint Board members whose main responsibilities involved inserting themselves into day-to-day MTA operations, essentially as the Governor’s enforcers/spies to undermine the agency heads. The worst of this was the Larry Schwartz/Andy Byford dynamic, and it led to animosity among MTA leaders and fear among the rank-and-file that the governor’s right-hand man would show up with demands out of left field, usually unreasonable.

The next MTA Board meeting isn’t until late September, and not a single one of Cuomo’s appointees should still be on the Board for that meeting. Already, Linda Lacewell, Cuomo’s former head of the Department of Financial Services, stepped down from the Board when she resigned from her position, but Cuomo’s other appointees remain. Jamey Barbars (one of the few Cuomo Board appointees with actual transportation experience), Haeda Milhaltses and Robert Mujica have said nothing, but Schwartz has defiantly said he’ll stay on the Board until Hochul kicks him off.

Claiming he did nothing wrong (despite being named in Tish James’ report numerous times and separately being accused of threatening county leaders to support Cuomo or risk their vaccine supply), Schwartz told The Post he will not leave “on my own.”

“I’ve been looking for over two years to get off, so I’m not looking to stay on,” he said. “But I will do the right thing. If they feel I can be a help short term, or long term, we can talk about it. I’ll do whatever the new administration wants. They’re aware.”

Schwartz has constantly used his Board position to bolster Cuomo and undermine those willing to show an ounce of independence so the claim he’s been looking to leave for two years doesn’t pass the smell test. Either way, he may soon get his wish.

“I’m committed to ensuring that the people named in the attorney general’s report will no longer serve in my administration,” Hochul said when asked last week about MTA Board holdovers. “I’ve asked for a 45-day period. Some individuals will be gone sooner than that. Many have already been removed or left on their own because they knew they were not going to be in my administration…I’ll be naming a whole slate of new people to fill those soon-to-be vacant positions and make sure entities like the MTA are free from interference, from political influences and also to make sure we have the best talent. So I would just say, stay tuned.”

Stay tuned we will, but if Schwartz and Co. are at next month’s MTA Board meeting, something will have gone horribly wrong.

  1. Speed up congestion pricing

The MTA recently announced a rather lengthy review process for congestion pricing that could delay implementation of the fee for nearly two years. The agency first must conduct public hearings, scheduled to begin in September, prepare the Environmental Analysis and then bid out the infrastructure required to toll Manhattan’s Central Business District. Meanwhile, congestion has made New York City worst-in-the-nation traffic grind to a halt, affecting air quality, productivity and safety. The Mayor’s advise was to “improvise,” and congestion pricing is a key hope to untangling the roads while funding the MTA’s capital plan.

Another two-year delay after the initial two-year delay represents a failure to respond to the crises of climate change, gridlock and MTA funding. Here, Hochul’s hands may be tied, and congestion pricing could become a hot button issue among suburban primary voters next year. But the new governor has vowed to do what she can to speed up the process, and she can use her bully pulpit to push the MTA and feds on reducing the timeline for review. It’s absurd on its face for an environmental review process for something clearly designed to help the environment to take two years. The mayor has made noises about the lengthy timeline, and advocates are pushing hard for a shorter timeline. But Hochul has not yet taken any steps to exercise the power she has.

“The mayor and I spoke about congestion pricing…We had a very good conversation and there are certain legal requirements in place that have to be followed,” Hochul said earlier this month while still Lieutenant Governor.” I have supported congestion pricing. But in terms of the timing, I have to follow what’s in place right now, but it’s very much on my mind. I’m also meeting with the MTA to find out our financial situation to see how long we can go without the money we anticipate from congestion pricing.”

  1. Ditch the LGA AirTrain

My views on the backwards Laguardia AirTrain are well documented: It’s a project with no transit utility pushed through because Gov. Cuomo came up with the idea, and the EIS appears to have been heavily weighted, perhaps illegally so, to ensure the Willets Point connection was the only viable option. At the least, Hochul should halt the AirTrain project and order a review to assess the level of Cuomo’s political interference into the environmental review process. At best, Hochul should push for a true transit connection that extends the subway from Astoria to give a subway desert a station while providing a useful connection to the airport.

So far, Hochul has been mum on this project. She supported it as Lieutenant Governor but has yet to address it since taking her new job. Many advocates have urged her to reassess the project while the RPA continues to ignore the transit analysis in favor of Looking Strong On Infrastructure. I do not have high hopes here that we’ll end up with a better connection to Laguardia Airport, but Hochul could rescue this project from becoming a $2 billion boondoggle.

  1. Untangle the Gateway/Penn Station South mess Cuomo created.

Throughout the Trump years, Cuomo spent a lot of time and energy arguing for the feds to pony up their share of the dollars for the Gateway Tunnel. The agreement forged in the waning months of the Obama Administration would have had New Jersey and New York each paying a third with the feds picking up the final part of the tab. But Trump stonewalled the deal and never intended to pass an infrastructure bill. So Cuomo could hammer him on Gateway while scoring political points in true blue New York.

Once Biden took over and Gateway with its steep price tag suddenly become that much closer to a reality, Cuomo mysteriously pulled an about-face. He started making noises about halting Gateway or not contributing New York’s share to the project, much to the confusion of, well, everyone. As I wrote last week, this type of political shenanigans was typical Cuomo, and Hochul can walk it back pretty easily. Recommit New York to Gateway, and figure out if Cuomo’s Vornado hand-out at Penn Station South has any merit. These projects should get the level of attention they deserve under a Hochul administration paying lip service to giving the experts a say but could fall to political gridlock as well. This is the toughest of the tasks Hochul has to face and may fall victim to the looming primary season.

So that’s that. The top five for the incoming governor will fill up her plate for the remainder of her term. It’s a chance for a new start for New York’s beleaguered transportation and transit policy makers, and as the post-Cuomo Era dawns, for the love of all that’s holy, please add some seats to Moynihan Station.

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MTA PoliticsPublic Transit Policy

A Robert Moses Wannabe: Inside the Transportation Legacy of Gov. Andrew Cuomo

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on August 22, 2021
Gov. Andrew Cuomo celebrated the opening of the Second Ave. Subway during a flashy New Years Eve party as 2016 turned in 2017.

In a little over 24 hours, Andrew Cuomo’s reign over New York State will officially be over. Call it whatever kind of reign you want – a reign of terror, a reign of narcissism, a reign of exhaustion – but whatever name it gets, it’s over. At 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, August 24, #CuomosMTA becomes #HochulsMTA, and all of the problems Andrew Cuomo, through the sheer force of his aggressive control over the state, swept away will become Kathy Hochul’s. An MTA struggling to emerge out of the pandemic, bleeding talent and with yet another round of interim leaders will be Hochul’s to sort out as Cuomo exits stage left.

As he leaves, I wanted to assess his transportation legacy and the effect he had on the New York City region in particular. Cuomo has spent the last few years talking non-stop about infrastructure in New York. He clearly viewed it as a way to show how Government with a strong executive leader can Get Things Done, and he was nothing if not a strong executive. He fancied himself a modern-day Robert Moses, warts and all, but came across more as the Bad Robert Moses who refused to listen to experts or dissent and did only what he wanted rather than the Good Robert Moses.

In more recent year, as Cuomo took a more vested interest in transportation policy, it was impossible to divorce the personality of Andrew Cuomo from the politics and the policy. What Andrew Cuomo wanted Andrew Cuomo got, and he couldn’t stand any potential challengers to his iron rule. If you worked from Cuomo, you had to make him look good, and if you highlighted flaws in past approaches and tried to fix them, well, that made Andrew Cuomo look bad and you became a political liability. Leaders were dismissed; agencies and environmental impact studies manipulated to deliver on Cuomo’s desired proposals. He was in charge, and his voice was the first and only one that counted. This quasi-dictatorial approach may not be inherently bad unless Cuomo’s ideas were bad. So were they?

In a news piece assessing Cuomo’s infrastructure legacy, Michael Herzenberg of NY1 spoke with Mitchell Moss, and the NYU professor showered praise on the outgoing governor. “There hasn’t been a governor who has done as much to improve, modernize and strengthen the state in probably 50 to 80 years,” Moss said. “He took on jobs that had been ignored.”

Moss meant this as praise, but to me, it’s damning praise at best. Cuomo is able to say he did the most because his predecessors all did so little. While it’s true that, for instance, Laguardia Airport is nicer now than it was ten years ago, a better airport simply helps a small number of people exiting and entering New York City have a more pleasant experience. It does nothing for Cuomo’s constituents waiting 30 minutes for a bus that crawls through city streets or a subway that hasn’t grown much since the 1930s.

And airports were easy. Cuomo exploited his ability to direct airport money back into airports to act like Robert Moses. He didn’t have to wage a political fight for limited transit funding or swat down NIMBY concerns over lengthy construction timelines. He simply reinvested money that could be used only for airports back into those airports. It was a political coup, and when faced with tougher transportation decisions – as with the Willets Point AirTrain – he backed options that will save no one any time rather than improving transit through underserved areas because the political fight would have been tougher. Is that leadership or cowardice?

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Pat Foye, then head of the Port Authority, celebrated the Laguardia groundbreaking in 2016.

So sure, Cuomo deserves credit for forging ahead on Laguardia Airport, but when you look at the AirTrain path – and the political pressure, if not corruption applied during the EIS process – it’s hard not to be disappointed. That doesn’t even begin to grapple with the question of whether we should be promoting air travel at the time of climate change or whether keeping Laguardia open in the first place was even a good idea. New York City has a nicer airport, one that isn’t the laughingstock of the country, and that’s probably the best thing one can say about Cuomo’s transportation legacy.

Outside of the airports, I view Cuomo’s infrastructure and transportation legacy through five other lenses. It’s hard not to start with Andy Byford and the subways, but to understand that dynamic, it’s best to start with the Second Ave. Subway. Launched in earnest during the Pataki Administration and commenced during the early days of the Spitzer Administration, Andrew Cuomo had the good fortune of being in office when construction wrapped. He didn’t have to do the heavy lifting on the planning or on the funding to earn credit for opening the subway. He just had to show up for his own New Years Eve party.

But the Second Ave. Subway was a Cuomo speciality and a Cuomo mess all rolled into one. Until it became clear that the MTA was not going to finish the Upper East Side subway extension without heavy-handed political intervention, Cuomo seemed disinterested in MTA politics. He never rode the subways before the extension had opened and hardly has since then, using it as a bogeyman and a punching bag instead. For its part, in the early part of the Cuomo years, the MTA was struggling to rebuild after the damage from Superstorm Sandy, and Cuomo was very hands off for better or worse. With the MTA blowing deadline after deadline and construction stretching into the infinite future, Cuomo slowly realized he had a transportation policy nightmare on his hands, and he had to step in heavy and hard.

As meticulously detailed in Philip Plotch’s book The Last Subway, Cuomo made the MTA “finish” the Second Ave. Subway by December 31, 2016, no matter the cost, and the costs were high. Using the leadership style we’ve come to know lately – yell loudly and demand the world – Cuomo forced the MTA to divert operations resources to the Second Ave. Subway construction effort, and subway reliability tanked. The governor enjoyed his champagne toast – EXCELSIOR screamed the new subway station – but the schlubs of New York City had to deal with signal malfunctions and subway delays exacerbated by the governor, the very man in charge of making sure the subway was supposed to run.

Andrew Cuomo and Andy Byford toured the 9th Ave. Subway station in Brooklyn in April 2018. It was one of the few times the two would be seen together in public.

The collapse of subway service due to Cuomo’s machinations under Second Avenue led Albany to look to Toronto for a new leader. Enter Andy Byford. This saga we know through and through. Byford was the most respected and most competent leader to guide New York City Transit in a generation. Importantly, he knew how to recognize talent within the bureaucracy and get the most out of people he worked with. He also didn’t need Cuomo’s patronage, and after two years, the relationship between the two men soured. Cuomo couldn’t stomach Byford getting praised in a William Finnegan article in The New Yorker. For his part, Cuomo tried to minimize Byford by stacking senior management above him with yes men, refusing to elevate Byford within the MTA, and pursuing an MTA reorganization plan with the main goal of sidelining the New York City Transit president.

In the end, it became personal. When Byford quit for good in January of 2020, he blamed Cuomo in an interview with Marcia Kramer that had the misfortunate of airing a few days before the pandemic settled in. Cuomo tried to co-opt Byford’s Fast Forward plan, but he wasn’t fooling MTA watchers. Cuomo ultimately could not led the experts he picked solve the problems he caused. It’s a legacy New York City will be trying to escape for years, if not decades.

And what of everything else? What of congestion pricing? Moynihan Station? The Gateway Tunnel? Penn Station South? How do we apportion credit for things that haven’t happened and may not?

Congestion pricing is the perfect Cuomo project. He came to it with his back to the wall and the MTA’s needs evident. He never really understood how congestion itself is a major problem for New York City and viewed it only as a revenue generator for transit. But as he leaves office, we still don’t have congestion pricing, and the MTA – Cuomo’s MTA – says we’ll be waiting two more years before implementation is complete. Ultimately, Cuomo was content to take credit for passing congestion pricing while the Trump DOT stonewalled it. Now, he never has to deal with the tougher politics of implementation. It’s the perfect Cuomo “accomplishment.”

Moynihan Station, Gateway and Penn South all fall into this same political morass. We have a nicer station for Amtrak now, but that’s all we have. Cuomo spent ten years not addressing the trans-Hudson capacity problems, and despite agreeing to fund Gateway during the end of the Obama administration and subsequently complaining about Trump’s stonewalling of the project, Cuomo recently started throwing a whole bunch of cold water onto the Gateway Tunnel itself, to much confusion among the city’s transportation experts. I don’t even really know how to make sense of this. Cuomo spoke a lot about Gateway, did nothing to advance, and then, when given an opening to start the project, seemed to want to stop it. He didn’t think of first; it wasn’t going to open any time sooner; and ultimately, it didn’t suit his needs. This is the personality from which it is impossible to divorce policy or accomplishments.

In 2017, Cuomo launched “New York Harbor of Lights” but the $106 million LED bulbs have sat in storage for years.

I know I’m forgetting projects that fell by the wayside. I haven’t talked about the $106 million LED lights for NYC bridges that remain in a storage locker; the Kosciusko Bridge rebuild that ignored concepts of induced demand (let alone climate change); the $30 million Cuomo demanded be spent on blue and yellow tiles for the Battery Tunnel. It all just bleeds together in the end, a tortured legacy of doing things that don’t matter without improving anyone’s commute.

Is your commute better today than it was in 2009? Is anyone’s other than those who drive across the new Tappan Zee Bridge, the one monument to Cuomo in New York that still bears the family name for now? On one level, replacing the old bridge had to happen before it collapsed, but on the other, it’s a sprawl-inducing, car monstrosity without promised transit provisioning that was plagued by its own construction scandals. It looked good, and Cuomo had a chance to drive his mom across the new span as it opened. A flashy new span for cars without substance was ultimately what it was all about. If that’s the best we can say about the governor credited as doing the most in five or eight decades, what kind of legacy is that anyway? And which Robert Moses was he exactly – the one everyone praised or the one everyone ultimately just wanted to see leave?

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MTA Politics

Lieber replaces Foye, Feinberg departs Transit as N.Y. Senate fails to act on Cuomo MTA plan

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on August 1, 2021
Janno Lieber now leads the MTA as its interim CEO and Chair.

Uncertainty and political paralysis has gripped the MTA since early June, and making heads or tails of the situation hasn’t been easy. The story unfolded when an Andrew Cuomo ploy late in the legislative session to split the MTA CEO and Chair role into two faltered late in in the face of a New York State Senate unwilling to do the governor’s Eleventh Hour bidding. In its aftermath, Janno Lieber is now the interim MTA CEO and Chair as Pat Foye moved to the New York State Economic Development Corporation. Sarah Feinberg, who had been serving as NYC Transit’s interim president since Andy Byford left last February, has left her post too, and a transit agency struggling to make it through the pandemic has to face yet another period of leadership turnover and tumult.

The latest machinations arose in early June when Cuomo announced a new plan for MTA leadership. Foye was to leave at the end of July (as he did) and replacing him would be a two-headed leadership team. Feinberg would move from Interim NYC Transit President to Chair of the MTA while Lieber, then the head of MTA Construction & Development, was pegged to be the CEO of the entire agency. The governor’s press release spoke of it as a done deal, but there was one problem: Cuomo couldn’t split the MTA leadership role into two without Senate approval, and the Senate wasn’t keen to rush through what many viewed as another gubernatorial power grab.

The back-and-forth began immediately with various deals on and off the table and an aborted attempt in the Senate to vote on Cuomo’s plan during the waning hours of the legislative session in June. When the Senate adjourned, Cuomo’s plan hadn’t been approved, and the Senate never reconvened in July to hold a special session to take up the measure. In effect, the Senate vetoed Cuomo’s plan.

It wasn’t immediately clear why Cuomo’s plan faltered or what the future holds for it, and I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this. At first, it seemed as though the bill died when Cuomo tried to remove the CEO from the purview of Senate approval. As first conceived, the Senate would vote on only the (unpaid) Chair role and have no ability to approve the person tasked with running the $17 billion transit agency. When the Senate and labor leaders objected, Cuomo’s team revised the bill to allow the Senate to approve both the CEO and the Chair nominees, but this too went nowhere.

From various conversations with State Senate sources, I have learned that a variety of factors were at play. Some lawmakers simply did not want to do a damaged Governor’s last-minute bidding. They felt that major changes at the MTA required a more public airing than a rushed vote as the legislative session expired and weren’t keen to approve personnel moves put forward by a governor currently under Senate investigation.

Others raised some concerns with Feinberg’s nomination specifically, noting that a spring press release with her name on it included a reference a variety of mayoral candidates who had been supportive of the MTA’s call for more police officers in the subway system. The MTA has acknowledged they intended the reference to be on background, and agency officials have said it was inserted without Feinberg’s knowledge while she was out of town. Still, a few State Senators viewed this as a political step too far for an agency that is supposed to be outside the realm of city electoral politics.

That said, no one I spoke with said this alone was the main reason Cuomo’s bill or Feinberg’s nomination died. Some State Senators were keen to question Feinberg generally about her time at the MTA (though they obviously have not yet gotten the chance to do so). Furthermore, Feinberg has offered multiple times to brief State Senators interested in speaking with her, and she and Lieber have offered to appear at public hearings on Cuomo’s plan. The Senate, on the whole as a legislative oversight body, has not yet taken either of them up on these offers.

It’s also not clear why Foye went along with the governor’s plan (or why he was asked to). Sources I spoke with indicated that Foye had been happy as the head of the MTA and that leaving wasn’t his idea. But as a loyal member of Cuomo’s inner circle, Foye seemed to understand that the personnel shuffle was, in part, about leadership structures and in part keeping a narrowing circle of confidants close at hand. Foye, some believe, went along with the move because not rocking that boat is Pat Foye’s nature.

Others close to the matter believe the brewing mess around Penn Station is the driving force behind both Foye’s departure and the newly-proposed power structure. I haven’t found any who disagree with that assessment either.

Meanwhile, the MTA had hoped the Senate would give the bill a proper hearing in July and the governor reiterated those hopes in the press release he sent out this week about Lieber’s new role. The new bill and Feinberg’s nomination, the Governor noted in the present tense, “awaits approval from the State Senate.”

Even without immediate action on the horizon, Feinberg echoed Cuomo’s optimism. “As we wait for the State Senate to return to session,” she said, “the Governor, Janno and I agree that this is the best path forward to provide stability and continuity of leadership at the MTA. While I am disappointed in the Senate’s delay in taking up deliberations of our nominations, I have no doubt Janno will do a tremendous job in the acting role.”

Yet, Albany is in no rush to respond, and the MTA must move forward. So Feinberg is out, replaced by Craig Cipriano, current head of buses, on an interim basis, and Lieber is in the interim head of the entire shebang. For an agency with a huge budget deficit struggling through the pandemic, leadership turnover and another round of interim leaders, even if familiar faces and old pros, adds another level of uncertainty to an uncertain time. The MTA needs firm direction and leadership. Instead, it is embroiled in yet another political brouhaha.

Despite the castle intrigue element to this story, I have found myself asking whether Cuomo’s plan is really all that bad. Richard Ravitch, in 2009, proposed one CEO and Chair role instead of two as two seemed to lead to a diffuse power structure. But as some within the MTA had told me, these are two roles with a lot of responsibility, and asking one person to lead the MTA Board while also serving as operation head of an agency with over 70,000 employees is a tall task.

“For three years now, I’ve been advocating that that job should be split,” Feinberg said to NY1’s Dan Rivoli. “It should be a CEO and a board chair, and the reason is this: It’s a multibillion-dollar agency. It’s a 72,000-person workforce. On its best day, it is big, it is unwieldy, and it is multiple challenges on every front.”

Plenty of transit agencies have bifurcated power structures, and there is no real right answer here. I ultimately think The LIRR Today’s point in the tweet embedded below is the right one: It doesn’t matter because we all know Andrew Cuomo – or whoever is governor of New York – is the ultimate power atop the MTA.

So what comes next for the MTA and for its interim leadership? At this point, the immediate future is clear: Janno Lieber will be the interim head of the agency, a position he can hold for up to six months, and Sarah Feinberg will not become the first woman to head the MTA Board. New York City Transit will have its second interim president since Byford left 17 months ago, and the agency will continue to muddle through the endless pandemic, hoping ridership and leadership stabilize soon. I’ll give Byford, who spoke to Rivoli last week, the last word for now.

“I’m sure it will work out, but it’s certainly not ideal from where I sit,” Byford said from his perch in London. “The danger it brings is that it encourages, if not deliberately, it kind of encourages short-term thinking because you know that maybe you don’t have the long-term tenure that a substanstive person would have…My advice would be, get through the politics and make a decision because the MTA is such an important part of New York,” he said.

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East Side Access Project

Inside East Side Access, 18 months before the new terminal opens

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 7, 2021
  • Andrew Cuomo leads the scrum atop East Side Access’ 182-foot escalators. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Gov. Andrew Cuomo surveys the down escalator underneath 45th St. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Looking down the escalators. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Going up. The 182-foot escalators will be the longest in the MTA’s system. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Inside East Side Access, the passageways are reminiscent of the TWA Flight Center. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Major construction on East Side Access has been completed, but finishes and system testing are yet to be done. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Looking south toward a dead end underneath Park Ave. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Tunnels are dug; tracks are laid; but walls remain bare with 18 months before passengers arrive. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • A view down the tracks. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Signage points the way to street level, anchoring commuters on the Manhattan street grid above. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • East Side Access in progress. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • An arched passageway underneath Grand Central but above the LIRR’s new tracks. With bright walls and familiar marvel, the new station is evocative of Grand Central itself. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Much work remains to be completed. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • East Side Access will connect commuters directly with the subways. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
  • Ceci n’est past une departure board. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

The last time I had been down into the East Side Access cavern far beneath Grand Central Terminal feels like eons ago. It was 2015, a time when New Yorkers commuted daily to their midtown offices, and the cavern was very much just that — a large, dark, very unfinished, damp cave that barely resembled a train station.

I took a trip down to the LIRR’s new midtown home two weeks ago, and after six years, I can confidently confirm there is a new Long Island Rail Road terminal deep in the ground below Grand Central. New York has successfully built a train station underneath another train station. The occasion for the trip was celebratory as Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his MTA had just announced that morning, though not for the first time, that the 350,000 square foot terminal will open on time by the end of 2022. It seemed oddly fitting for this long-delayed project that’s taken 20 years and $12 billion to construct that it’s big announcement came amidst a pandemic that has shaken commuting patterns to their very core and has left the future of Midtown Manhattan up in the air, but regardless of the oddities of the times, the Long Island Rail Road will serve the East Side in 18 months or so.

Prior to the press tour of the new terminal, Cuomo hosted one of his famous/infamous pandemic press conference. This was the first one I’ve had the opportunity to sit through, and the Governor spoke a lot, often extemporaneously, making news here and there (particularly about the Gateway Tunnel), and he spoke at length about the challenges of completing East Side Access. “Thanks to the hard work of the so many people, major construction on this transformative project is now complete and we are proud to announce East Side Access will open up next year,” Cuomo said, “significantly cutting travel times and easing the commute into Manhattan for countless travelers. I’ve been through a lot of difficult infrastructure projects during my time in government, and while this project may have been one the most difficult to get accomplished, its completion will have a huge impact on New York’s economy and vibrancy for generations to come and serve as yet another example of what New Yorkers can do when we put our minds to something.”

Cuomo said a lot of eyebrow-raising statements, including claims that the project had stalled out prior to his personal review of it in 2018, and he never mentioned the follow-up L train-inspired review he ordered in April of 2019. He also vowed that the projected 160,000 passengers per day – a relatively paltry total for the billions spent – would be back in their offices by the end of 2022. Maybe he’s right; maybe the world will clamor for the commute and the companionship of the office after 15 months (and counting) of an isolating pandemic. Or maybe the ultimate irony of the East Side Access project will be an opening into a changed world and a changed New York, where we spent countless billions on an under-used deep-bore dead-end terminal underneath Grand Central that never should have been built in the first place. We won’t know this future for a few more years, but this project will never realize full bang for its buck.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo chats with reporters during a tour of the East Side Access project. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Cuomo’s promise to open the station next year come hell or high water set off some familiar alarm bells. When he last made this promise for Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway, he opened the subway before systems testing had been complete, and he drove the opening date by diverting massive MTA resources away from subway maintenance. The subway crisis, which lead to the Subway Action Plan and Andy Byford’s Fast Forward plan, grew out of Cuomo’s push to open the Second Ave. Subway, and Cuomo then later tried to take credit for solutions to the crisis he created. Will this drive to open East Side Access — in a similar state of completion — lead to a repeat of recent history? I’m holding my breath. Neither the city nor the MTA can afford that fate at this moment.

But outside of these concerns and my own long-documented skepticism toward this project and the way the cavern beneath a Metro-North terminal not under capacity highlights the lack of inter-agency cooperation with the MTA, I wanted to offer a few observations about the terminal now that I’ve seen it in its near-finished state. It is, first and foremost, very much an Andrew Cuomo Transit Project. While EXCELSIOR isn’t yet plastered all over the place, the main focus on East Side Access is about getting into and out of New York City, and it does very little to improve getting around NYC. Janno Lieber, the head of MTA Construction & Development, could not answer if the agency planned to further rationalize fares to allow Queens commuters rationally-priced access to LIRR. Cuomo himself spoke at length about how East Side Access will free up space at Penn Station for Penn Station Access, another commuter rail-based project designed to facilitate easier access into and out of NYC (though one with more benefits to Bronx commuters than East Side Access will, on Day One, deliver to Queens).

Thus, the only state-funded project finished under Cuomo’s watch to increase transit capacity in NYC will be Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway (and maybe Phase 2 if Cuomo gets another two terms and it moves forward). Meanwhile, the state has spent or will spend billions on Moynihan Station and the Penn Station South/Empire Station complex, the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, the airport overhauls and new AirTrain and both East Side and Penn Station Access. New York City, with its transit system run by Andrew Cuomo, continues to get the short shrift.

On the physical side, the most evident element of East Side Access is how deep it is. During the press conference, Cuomo tried to sell the depth as a marvel. The new terminal will, he bragged, have 17 high-rise escalators, each 182 feet in length to bring commuters up from 140 feet below Grand Central to the surface. With entrances along Park and Madison Avenues up to around 48th Street, East Side commuters won’t be as far from their offices as they could be, but the depth adds time. The escalators weren’t on during the press tours, but officials said the rides will take 2 minutes at a stand still. These will be the MTA’s deepest escalators, which could spell trouble for an agency with a shaky track record when it comes to escalator maintenance.

Will all of these ticket windows ever be fully staffed? (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

The station feels deep in other ways as well. The visual design of the station is very reminiscent of Grand Central itself with similar typefaces and marble used throughout. In an era of OMNY and digital ticketing, there is, for some reason, a massive ticket hall, but I can’t imagine all of the windows ever being staffed. Still, despite bright lights and arching ceilings, the station feels deep. The ceilings are lower than they would be, and there is no sense of place or direction that far underground. When completed the station will feature ample directions, including street signs, to anchor travelers on the Manhattan street grid. Still, it will be bright and clean in the vein of Grand Central when it opens. It’s very deep. Long escalators and low ceilings, despite a generally pleasant, if sterile, aesthetic.

And finally, East Side Access will be another transit mall — which is fine, though it also relies on a return of pre-pandemic commute volumes. The MTA plans to lease out 25 new retail spaces in the terminal, which will give NYC it’s fifth train station/mall and fourth new one this century. Unlike the Grand Central retail spaces, which are a part of the street level attraction, the new retail spaces will be deeper underground and out of the way. Some will be in the passageways at the top of the 182-foot escalators and some will be in the halls connecting to 1 Vanderbilt. But these spaces will be geared far more toward LIRR commuters than the malls in the PATH Oculus, Grand Central itself or Moynihan Station are.

All of this leads me to wonder how East Side Access will work and what it means for it to work? It’s nearly unique among massive train stations and will rely heavily on a return to the old in an era of the new. It’s a project conceptualized in the 1960s, designed in the 1990s and opened, if on time, in 2022.

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MTA PoliticsNew York City Transit

Gov. Cuomo, in charge of the MTA, announces May 17th return of 24/7 subway service

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on May 4, 2021

This sign will become a collector’s item as the overnight subway shutdown will end on May 17, Gov. Cuomo announced Monday. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Just over a year to the date since Gov. Andrew Cuomo barred passengers from late-night subways, the man in charge of the MTA announced the return of 24/7 subway service. The trains, which kept running all night every night for the last year, will see the return of passengers between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on May 17th when outdoor dining curfews and pandemic-related capacity limits wind down. It’s welcome news for essential workers who saw their late-night commute times spike and costs increase while they just tried to keep NYC running throughout a pandemic, and it’s a sign that life may be returning to normal sooner rather than later.

For many transit advocates and enthusiasts, the news comes with a great sigh of relief as worry had spread that the governor would use the pandemic shutdown to end 24/7 subway service once and for all. After all, the governor had signaled for years through his MTA Board loyalists that 24/7 passenger service was a luxury for New York rather than the necessity we know it is, and MTA officials had once said the subways were “going to stay closed overnight…at least through the pandemic.”

But once the governor rolled back the four-hour shutdown to two a few weeks ago, we knew logistics and political pressure would eventually win out. The MTA simply cannot park all of its trains securely and kept running empty subways each night throughout the pandemic. Once Senator Chuck Schumer joined the fray, calling this weekend for the return of 24/7 service, it was all but inevitable that Cuomo would cave.

In announcing the restoration of service, Cuomo again trumped the disinfecting regime and baselessly hinted that the subways were responsible for the spread of COVID, his long-time cover for a policy driven by media coverage of homeless New Yorkers sprawled across subway seats and a safety crisis during the worst few weeks of the initial wave of the pandemic.

“COVID-19 is on the decline in New York City and across New York State, and as we shift our focus to rebuilding our economy, helping businesses and putting people back to work, it’s time to bring the subway back to full capacity,” the governor said, taking responsibility for the MTA he controls. “We reduced subway service more than a year ago to disinfect our trains and combat the rising tide of COVID cases, and we’re going to restore 24-hour service as New York gets back on the right track. This expansion will help working people, businesses and families get back to normal as the city reopens and reimagines itself for a new future.”

Despite a heavy security presence, the governor claimed Monday that he felt on safe during his last subway ride on June 8, 2020. (Photo via governorandrewcuomo on flickr)

Yet, the governor also went off script in some head-scratching ways. The governor, who has not ridden the subway since June 8 when he took a 7 train four stops from Court Square to Grand Central, claimed he felt physically unsafe on the subway (despite being surrounded by numerous cops and adoring fans). “As you know, I am a New Yorker. I am smart. I am New York tough. Don’t lie to me and don’t play me as a fool. I’m on the subway. It’s safe. Oh, really? Have you been on the subway? Because I have. And I was scared. Tell your child to ride subway, it’s safe. I’m not telling my child to ride the subway, because I’m afraid for my child,” Cuomo said.

I’ll get into the ins and outs of the ongoing conversation about safety in the subway in an upcoming post, but it’s all part of his feud with the mayor. The numbers show major felonies in the trains are up only slightly but transit workers are getting assaulted at alarming rates and misdemeanors and harassment over goes under- or unreported. MTA officials and Cuomo aides have talked up concerns about subway security while city cops have stressed the massive decrease in crime since last April and the relative safety of the system. The governor, who controls the MTA, should not be adding to the fearmongering, especially as he trumpets New York’s reopening and a return of passengers to overnight subways.

But the governor couldn’t resist plying the subway shutdown as another part of his infamous feuds with the mayor. Bill de Blasio had called for a resumption of normal life in New York City by July 1, but the governor has decided mid-May is the appropriate timeline. The mayor didn’t put up much of a fight on “Inside City Hall” on Monday night, suggesting that his July 1 date was as much a move to goad the governor into acting faster as it was a hard deadline driven by public health figures. But the fight over 24/7 service has its origins in the de Blasio-Cuomo battle as the mayor urged the MTA last April to close terminal stations for easier treatment (and removal) of homeless New Yorkers from the subway before the governor took a sledgehammer to the idea and ended overnight service from 1-5 a.m. entirely.

MTA officials have pledged to continue to clean trains overnight and support mental health services in the subway. Interim NYC Transit President Sarah Feinberg went on the radio yesterday evening and continued the theme. Riders, she said, “continue to worry about crime and harassment in the system because we’re not where we need to be on that yet and so until my customers and my workforce are saying, ‘We feel really good, we feel as safe as we could possibly feel,’ I’m going to continue to bang the drum on it ” This response is all part of the complicated politics MTA officials have been trying to maneuver lately, and I’m confident this won’t be the end of the various debates about homelessness in the subways, the reality and the perceptions of safety or the way the governor uses the MTA as a pawn in his political games against the mayor.

So did anyone learn anything during the 12 months without passenger service? We learned that a lot of New Yorkers were continually surprised to learn that the trains kept running but without anyone on them. We learned repeatedly that Bill de Blasio viewed overnight subway service as a luxury for party-goers and denizens of New York City’s late-night scene rather than as an essential means of travel for late-shift workers who often live far from the city’s job centers but kept New York going through its darkest days this past year. We learned that homelessness drives the conversation but not in ways that produce positive change (as subway bathrooms remain closed and Moynihan Station has no public seating). We learned that the city and state haven’t taken steps to address some of the root causes of why people choose to live in the subways or how to get them more secure housing. And we learned that while the MTA was able to accomplish some work on a slightly accelerated timescale, denying passenger service throughout the system as a whole does very little to increase construction productivity.

We should also learn for the sake of New York City’s future that the governor shouldn’t have the power to simply turn off the subways overnight with flimsy reasoning and no real way to cajole him to turn it back on for over a year, short of his losing influence due to the impact of duel scandals breaking as the vaccine effort ramped up. Yet, as life returns to normal, these lessons will fade, and the overnight subway shutdown will become one of those things we remember now and then about the COVID-19 pandemic that will recede into New York City history. It should be a cautionary tale about politicians who misunderstand the fundamental role transit plays in the city’s success. For now, though, in two weeks, the subway, in all its overnight glory, is back. It’s a welcome step forward indeed.

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