In the aftermath of the December snow storm that left the New York City subways paralyzed, Transit has shaken up its subway management structure, the Daily News reported yesterday. The line managers will have even less say over day-to-day deployment as Transit attempts to centralize its command structure. “We were seeing some breakdown in coordination and the pinnacle of that inefficiency was the December snowstorm,” Tom Prendergast, Transit president, said.
According to Pete Donohue, the reorganization, to be announced today, will complete a year-long effort to eliminate the line manager program. “Supporters of the Line General Managers Program said privately they were being scapegoated for blizzard response problems when top brass failed to sound the highest-level alert in time,” he wrote.
Rider advocates said they were sad to see the line manager program go. In a way, it helped give a face to the massive MTA bureaucracy. Instead, adding a layer of management to a management-heavy organization never seemed to attain that potential. “I am sorry to see them go,” Gene Russianoff said. “I thought there was lots of potential for competition among the subway lines, and it was great having a name, face and contact info of a human being in charge of a line.”
3 comments
This is ridculous. Top management never declared the emergency they should have because they were all too busy swilling egg nog instead. In addition to shouldering the blame for this, they are also to blame for the lack of snow removal equipment (as further evidenced by the 1910esque photo of a hundred hearty backs digging out the tracks). At least under the Line Management program lights that were out at Grand Central for years were finally fixed. A small but substantial victory.
I would’ve brought the same argument to the table as Al D, but then I realized something. The current MTA administration has been looking for every reason to get rid of the Line Manager program. They finally found their reason. I am not sad for the General Managers because they aren’t being blamed really. None of them are losing their jobs as their all being reassigned.
I just really feel bad for losing the program. There’s nothing like knowing you could receive a survey on a yearly basis and know that a line manager was going to look it over and work on making some adjustments based on that survey. Or just knowing that there is someone accountable for when things are going wrong. Now that the program is over, I say send all complaints to the President of NYCT!
The LGM program was eliminated because it made no sense – the old (pre-Roberts) organization made more sense. After all, the subway system isn’t a collection of independent lines that don’t interact in any way – lines share trackage, share cars, share signals, share stations, etc. (If a signal needs to be repaired, I want a signal expert repairing it, not a 3 line expert.)
Snowstorm response was given as an example of where the old organization worked better, not as justification. I saw the memo. The Daily News got this wrong.
The aim of the Roberts LGM program was not simply to have a name, face and contact info of a human being – it was far more than a customer service initiative. It was a complete reorganization of the Department of Subways. And it was one which promoted competition rather than cooperation between lines. You can still write a letter to NYCT about a problem on the Q – if it’s a problem you had in a station, it will be sent to the Division of Stations; if it’s a problem you had with a car, it will be sent to the Division of Car Equipment; if it’s a problem you had with the service itself, it will be sent to the people in Rapid Transit Operations who deal with the Q.