While New Jersey Transit’s response to Sandy left much to be desired, the MTA seems to have earned itself some praise in the eyes of a generally skeptical public. According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, 75 percent of New Yorkers rated the MTA’s overall response to Sandy as “good” or “excellent.” Utility companies, on the other hand, earned just a 37 percent approval rating in the poll.
As the MTA spend a considerable amount of time working to restore service shortly after many of their tunnels were flooded and rail yards inundated, the authority kept the public informed through a wide array of social and traditional media outlets. Customers knew what was going on and why and had a solid sense of the timeline of service restorations. It has been a rare moment of good will directed toward the MTA, but we’ll have to see how long that lasts. Fares are set to go up on March 1.
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Were the other 25% republicans/tea-party/libertarian folks who oppose/hate the MTA on principle?
Who the hell knows.
What was the sample size of this poll. Regardless the MTA no doubt ran circles around Con Edison & LIPA & don’t get me started with NJT’s incompitence.
Conspiracy theorists who say things like “they restored service to Manhattan, sure, but us poor folk in the Rockaways? of course they don’t care about us!” I heard that many, many times.
I know power/internet were out over there, but have those conspiracy theorists not seen what happened to the tracks between Howard Beach and the Rockaways?
Manhattan is the transfer center of the city and region and its economic engine too
I don’t live there but I say it should get first priority.
And it has an enormous percentage of the area’s population. One substation restoration in Manhattan is more valuable than 10 substation restorations on Long Island, in terms of sheer number of people served…. similar logic applies to the subway.
I don’t know how the electric utilities could have done much better under such circumstances.
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But yes, the MTA management and labor team deserves top marks from everyone in the city, state, and region. Fairly perfect strategy and execution pre storm ( take notes NJ Transit ) during storm and post storm.
Apart from that, they were useless.
– Con Ed could have preemptively protected its substations: and by preemptively, I mean several years ago. The flood risk has been known for years. They did the best they could once the storm was announced, but that’s not the same thing.
– Similar criticisms apply to LIPA, but LIPA also lacked a competent system for providing information to customers. (ConEd was actually pretty good at that.)
The MTA definitely comes in first place when it comes to quickest recovery from superstorm Sandy. NJT & LIPA sucked big time and I expect more heads will roll for their ineptness. I have some new respect for the people working for the MTA.
The MTA definitely took the right approach after Irene, especially compared to NJT: they treated the storm as a warning rather than a reason to be lazy next time.