It’s hard these days to miss Mayor Bloomberg’s call to reform the MTA. His brochures land in my mailbox, his ads on my TV. His plan — details here — has become a ubiquitous attempt to tap into populist unrest with the MTA. Nothing he offers is too ground-breaking; much, such as the F express, is old hat; and all of it requires more money than the transit agency has.
Yesterday, John Petro of the Drum Major Institute for Urban Policy, took Bloomberg to task for exactly that last problem. While the mayor can call for MTA reforms until he is blue in the face, if he doesn’t give the MTA more money to enact these reforms, his calls will come off as nothing more than the pandering of a politician.
Noting that the mayor doesn’t really have enough control over the MTA or its Board to effect the changes in his proposal, Petro highlights the one thing the mayor does control: the city’s substantial capital budget. He writes:
The capital budget is huge–$60 billion dollars over ten years. It includes a wide range of different city capital needs, like school construction and rehabilitation, expansion and repair of the sewer and water systems, and housing preservation and development. It also includes money for mass transit, but not nearly enough.
The Mayor’s capital budget allocates a measly $60 million a year toward mass transit. This equals about one percent of the MTA’s capital budget, which is much less than the city has allocated to the MTA in the past. Historically, the city’s contributions equaled about ten percent of the MTA’s capital budget.
The MTA has said that it needs about $100 million every year from the city to support the transit system’s program of rehabilitation and expansion. Why is the Mayor shortchanging the city’s mass transit system? If the Mayor is keen to improve mass transit in New York City, he should begin by making a larger commitment from the city’s huge capital budget.
From 2005-2009, the city was contributing much more to the MTA. But that money went towards the #7 line extension, a project that will be a huge boon for real estate developer Related Companies. The #7 line will be extended to the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s far west side, where Related Companies has plans to build office and condo towers. (This is the same Related Companies that refuses to pay living wages at the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment in the Bronx). Meanwhile, communities in the outer boroughs continue to deal with rapid population increases and inadequate levels of service.
I’ve argued before that Albany and the federal government need to step up to the plate to fund long-term investments in the city’s mass transit system. For New York City to meet its full potential, we need to expand and improve our current levels of mass transit service. The federal government has prioritized highway and road projects over transit projects, and the Mayor, as well as the state’s Congressional delegation, need to lobby Congress for a more significant contribution to New York City’s mass transit system. After all, New York is the center of the largest metropolitan economy in the country and mass transit is the backbone of that economy. But the Mayor also needs to get his priorities in order. The city will be devoting $8.9 billion to roads and bridges over the next ten years, but less than one-tenth that amount to transit. In a city where most people don’t drive, these priorities seem out of whack.
No further comments, your honor.
11 comments
Bloomberg has had 2 “legal” terms to help transit in NYC and he has done nothing. He refuses to have the city pay there fair share but the average person doesn’t know this. They just know what Bloomy talks in his never ending barage of tv ads.
It’s not fair to say “nothing.” The one area where Bloomberg has made a difference when it comes to transit is getting NYCDOT and MTA on the same page when it comes to Select Bus Service. No way projects like 34th Street transitway and Hylan Blvd. even get on the drawing board without DOT support.
The 34th Street transitway isn’t where SBS money is the most needed. There’s already decent east-west service in Midtown, provided by the 7, S, and L. The real problem is uptown. It would be much more useful to invest the money in SBS on 125th and/or 86th.
The 34th St transitway does serve the purpose of getting people over to the huge medical complexes on the far east side around there more quickly, but yes, SBS and dedicated rights of way are so needed on 86th St. Bunching and traffic delays on the M86 are bad enough to make schedules (and frequently the bus) useless.
I always knew that bloomberg’s campaign was a bunch of lies the second I laid my eyes on them. These constant ads (“tell the mta no more excuses!!!”) are a joke. No more excuses, huh? I wonder what’s bloomberg’s excuse for not properly funding mass transit, not to mention why he didn’t ask the mta to implement these in the first few years he had. I would love to have someone call him out on this.
What scares me though is that people will see these ads and actually think that bloomberg really can do something with the mta. This is beyond frightening, because you know that those who aren’t aware with the mta will just assume that bloomberg can fix it. I could be wrong, as everyone I spoke to about this isn’t buying it.
Well, to be fair, his congestion pricing proposal would have funded the MTA.
But yes, there’s really no excuse for the underfunding – Police officers or not.
That’s still not money from the mayor’s discretionary spending fund though. The congestion pricing plan would generate new revenue that would be siphoned to the MTA. Petro is talking about a $60 billion of which a minuscule amount goes to the MTA.
But Bloomberg’s CP plan failed, largely due to his incompetence as a politician. Silver explained that there were only 15-20 votes for it in the Assembly, the same Assembly that would later vote in favor of the Ravitch plan when Bloomberg was silent.
Let’s also not forget that the money being paid toward maintenance and repair of the free bridges would have been re-directed towards the MTA should the Ravitch plan have been adopted in its entirety. Thank you again, Carl Kruger.
For me, this puts things into a totally new light. While over at Streetsblog and other places they spend most of the time bashing the state and federal government, only recently has there been talk about the city’s share. It is more than ironic that the city thinks in the same car-oriented way as other levels of government.
But how can we explain Bloomberg’s fundamental paradox: support for bike lanes and parking-heavy shopping malls, for CP and against regular transit funding, simultaneously?
It’s quite easy to explain, once you stop thinking of Bloomberg as an idealist and start thinking of him as a megalomaniac who does things either to make a name for himself (CP, bike lanes) or to satisfy developer friends of his (exclusively funding the 7 extension, upzoning, Atlantic Yards).