Over the past few days, amidst an MTA crisis, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has again grabbed the mic to be the public face of an agency in trouble. This follows a trend established during Superstorm Sandy and one we’ve seen over the first few years of Cuomo’s tenure. He’ll issue the press releases and be on the air when someone needs to take charge, but he otherwise hasn’t embraced transit at all.
A telling moment came on Monday morning, in fact, when Cuomo was making the rounds on the local TV and cable news morning shows. One anchor asked Cuomo when he last took the train, and Cuomo, who has lived in Westchester for years and worked in an office the city as Attorney General, declined to answer. It was essentially a tacit admission that Cuomo hasn’t take the train in years. He should be ashamed. He’s the governor of the most transit-rich state in the country, and millions of his constituents depend upon subways, the LIRR and Metro-North every day. I don’t expect him to ride the 6 every day as Bloomberg does, but a trip now and then on a train would do him good.
Cuomo’s apathy, if not, as in the case of the Tappan Zee, outright hostility, does not bode well for anywhere else in the country, and following on the governor’s dismissal of a traffic pricing plan, that’s the argue Alex Pareene pursues in a piece at Salon. “The congestion pricing argument,” Pareene writes, “has always taken place, rhetorically, in a bizarre alternate universe where everyone drives, and where every citizen deserves to be able to drive without bearing anything close to the cost of that driving on the city’s infrastructure and atmosphere.”
He extends this discussion to the general approach to transit in the area:
Cuomo isn’t at all unusual. In New York state, as in the country as a whole, more resources continue to be spent on drivers and roads than buses and trains. One transit blogger has calculated that, according to how Albany allocates transportation money, “every driver is worth as much as 4.5 transit riders.” And while Mayor Bloomberg’s administration has a generally very good record on transit, there’s always been a strange tension between Bloomberg’s pedestrian and bicycle-friendly Department of Transportation and his NYPD, which has a bizarrely antagonistic relationship with bicyclists and which rarely — as in almost never — prosecutes reckless driving, speeding, or accidents leading to the death of pedestrians.
This should be the most transit-friendly government in the country. A majority of New York citizens rely on public transit for their livelihoods. The city and state are run by Democrats, many of them among the most liberal in the nation. Our incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, ran as a left-wing populist. But incoming Mayor Bill de Blasio is a driver. Andrew Cuomo has been a driver, or had drivers, his entire life. There are certain richer Manhattanites, accustomed to walking, for whom anti-car policies improve their quality of life, but for most of the political class, everyone they know and interact with owns a car. Finding a steady and sufficient revenue source for the local transit system, one that can’t be raided for other purposes and that doesn’t rely too heavily on burdening its users with hefty fare increases, should be an urgent priority for local politicians, but most of them simply don’t care.
We already have a political system in this country that, nationally, heavily favors the interests of the rural and the suburban over the urban. Many state legislatures have similar biases. But when, even in New York, politicians ignore transit, because they don’t know or interact with or receive checks from people who rely on it every day, there’s almost no hope for cheap, efficient mass transit options anywhere.
Pareene’s last observation — that New York politicians “don’t know or interact with or receive checks from people” whose lives are dependent on transit — is a stunning one. In a city in which everyone takes and needs transit, those who fight for the system aren’t elected to City Hall or Albany. There are always a few bright spots, those legislators who understand the need, but they are few and far between.
So what’s the answer to this question? Is there one? The Straphangers Campaign has been fighting for 30 years; the Riders Alliance has been around for two. Still, there’s no indication that de Blasio will be better than Cuomo or that either will make the hard choices to fund transit. Even in a crisis three or four years ago, politicians couldn’t step up, and Eliot Spitzer, a big transit champion, self-destructed. So here we are in a city trying to find a way to fund transit in a sustainable way and continuing to face political road blocks. The fight will go on.
41 comments
What this tells me is too many politicians rely on donors who in many cases are likely wealthy and have a disdain for public transit, most likely because of their own assumptions of who rides such systems and their likely stereotyping of such people. Many of them likely see the very worst of those people and have views that I suspect date back to the 1960’s and ’70s when NYC was a much different place in general.
That to me is the real problem and why there is such a disdain towards transit in a lot of cases.
I thought it was ridiculous when Schumer and Blumenthal got up there and hijacked the NTSB briefing. They were standing up there answering questions like they knew what was going on when they didn’t have a clue.
If either one of them put half the money they’ve stolen towards rail improvements, we wouldn’t be having these problems.
Cuomo and the rest just don’t care. They don’t know anything about transit. They just have this idea that public transit is nothing more than a welfare program for the poor who can’t afford to make campaign donations anyways. When you’re wealthy and drive/get driven everywhere, you adopt a mindset that clearly anyone who doesn’t drive is a loser. That’s why Cuomo is more than happy to let the MTA crash and burn; it’s an irrelevant waste of money to him.
The problem is in NYC the actual middle class, public sector unions, people in education and in hospitals, people in private sector unions like construction and utilities actually DRIVE. Add in suburban and rural New Yorkers, most people in the state DRIVE.
You should check your numbers. Most people who live and work in New York City do not actually drive.
Where did I say most people in NYC drive? I said most people in NYS drive. Most people in LI, most people upstate, and a good percentage who are middle class in NYC drive. So its obviously the governor and state legislatures are going to deal with the majority of people who drive. Riders off public transportation have never had a majority in NY as a whole.
Most people of the middle class drive for non-commute trips when this makes more sense (bulk shopping at Costco or Target, for example.)
Most middle class New Yorkers, and some upper class ones, take the subway to commute; it’s by far the fastest method of transport on Manhattan itself.
Why do you even assume public transportation is the enemy of driving? No matter how majorities break down, nobody in NYS doesn’t benefit at least indirectly from transit.
Most middle class people here don’t drive, they use transit. The ones that do drive everywhere do so to desperately prove to others and themselves that they’re totally not poor at all and can afford to drive because they’re such winners. More than half of NYC doesn’t own a car and the vast majority of car ownership is in Staten Island and the farthest northeast part of Queens. So, 3.9 of the 5 boroughs don’t drive.
Correction: Second sentence should say “The ones in the middle class (*And in areas with any sort of transit*)…”
Folks in SI have reason to drive. Not much transit there.
Not true. I’ve actually known established, wealthy people in Manhattan who drive. There are even some people in the housing projects who drive (they have parking lots). The streets and freeways of all the boroughs are FULL of cars at almost any hour, especially rush hour.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself and your friends, and say you and your friends don’t drive. Everyone I know where who has at least teacher level income DRIVES because it is easier and more convenient.
56 percent of NY households don’t even own cars. How is it that everyone you know drives everywhere? You’ll have to forgive me if I’m skeptical of your claims, but the numbers just don’t back them up.
Dude!
Clearly he hasn’t read up on the history of railroads in New York State (it can be found in the city library) which documents the building of multiple redundant systems with tremendous Overcapacity for customers that never came. It looks like our road systems are heading down the same path, but wont be allowed to abandon routes, or be liquidated the way yhe PRR, NYC, OW, EL and NYSW were… we will be bailing out roads for the next hundred years.
As long as Cuomo still has ideas of running for president in 2016, he’s not going to upset the suburban car culture, because he sees that as a far bigger subset of voters outside of New York State than those who use mass transit and might vote for him in a presidential primary.
He takes his re-election next November as a given no matter what he does about mass transit in the city, so mass transit riders have zero clout with the governor, or at least, less in his mind than New Hampshire car drivers who would be voting in their January 2016 presidential primary, along with other early primary state voters Cuomo would have to woo.
Ah, yeah, the “what if Hillary doesn’t run” option.
He’s deluded if he thinks he has a shot. Even in New York, Hillary would massacre him in a primary.
If Hillary doesn’t run, he’s probably the front-runner. Biden will probably not run, and although Warren is running third in the polls, she hogs the liberal spot while Cuomo would get all the DLC types who’re currently supporting Clinton.
The only thing that lets him arguably be that potential front-runner at this point is the size of the state he represents and his utter lack of distinction. Without Kennedy-esque/Obama-esque charisma, that doesn’t take you very far.
If the DLC wanted someone competent, they’d woo Bloomberg. But Bloomberg is probably too Jewish to win in their precious
Real AmerikaSouth.I doubt Bloomberg would even in New York State. He has a multitude of negatives, and isn’t a political force out of NYC . There’s a reason Bloomberg didn’t run for President. He would have lost by a huge longshot. Bloomberg’s protege, Quinn, was butchered in Sept. at the polls. So if even NYC wants nothing more to do with Bloomberg, that says a lot for the rest of the nation, doesn’t it?
Losing never much bothered the DLC either. Besides the Clintons, they don’t have much electoral success to show for themselves – though Obama is not ideologically that different from them. The point of the DLC is to run muddled Democrats who lose to Republikans.
If he ran and won the Democratic nomination, Bloomberg beat any Republikan in NYS come the general election. People nationally generally credit Bloomberg with reducing crime or keeping it low (wrongly, of course), but I don’t suppose he is seen as charismatic or anything either. The only thing that seems to really bother people about him on the national level are his relatively pointless nanny state policies.
Still, like him or not, he at least is willing to be progressive on the environmental/transportation front.
Actually, on the national level people barely know who Bloomberg is . I’ve not heard people outside NYC talk much about him. He does not have the name recognition, and his last few years in NYC caused him to lose any popularity he had in his home state. Anyone who was remotely tied to Bloomberg or the Republicans lost the last mayoral race in NYC, Bloomberg’s home political city.
And you don’t win elections in the rest of the nation by campaigning on transportation issues. Most Americans have to drive cars.
It hardly matters if rednecks with double digit IQs know who Bloomberg is. Party leaders and most informed primary voters across the country know who he is, and he has the resources to reach people.
I don’t think he’d win a primary in either major party, but his name recognition or lack thereof is far from the problem.
Yet most Americans might actually be less doctrinaire about transportation than NYC voters, and certainly than NYC pols. Good transit works, and people usually tend to be happy with it.
You don’t win on transportation issues, because that is seen as more of a ‘local’ issue. Being a mayor is a completely different job from being a President: there is no partisan way to fix a sewer.
Bloomberg wouldn’t ever be able to win nationally, because it would be the easiest thing to cast him as a “typical Democrat” who hates America and tries to take away freedoms (because he has actually tried to do that at the local level, with varying degrees of success.)
The partisan way to fix a sewer is to hire the donor to your party who happens to be in the business of fixing sewers. Arguably no president in U.S. history took away more freedoms than George W. Bush, and he was elected to a second term. Barack Obama built on the legacy, however, and also won a second term.
Actually, Bloomberg reflects American political inclinations about as well as any one human being can, for better or for worse – he’s, at the very least, attractive to the entire so-called liberal and vast majority of the so-called moderate spectrum of the country. He probably could win nationally if he got on top of a ticket against a milquetoast Democrat or slobbering Republikan. He would just never get on top of a ticket because he’d never get past the primary, and running as an independent it’s unlikely he could do even as well as Ross Perot’s second run.
Bloomberg is very very well known amongst the NRA crowd.
To be fair to Cuomo, he probably sees the MTA as a place where everyone grabbed more out and put less in. So anything he puts in will immediately be taken out, leaving the agency as bad off as before — and Cuomo having to explain to whoever is made to pay.
1) The Straphangers got a huge cut in inflation-adjusted fares. If Cuomo puts more in they’ll want fare freezes and rollbacks.
2) The TWU got the pension deal in 2000 and wage increases in excess of inflation (and everyone else’s wages). If Cuomo puts more in an aribitrator will just award it to the unions.
3) The contractors vastly increased their prices on capital contracts. If Cuomo puts more in they’ll bid higher.
4) New York City stripped money from the MTA Capital Plan when the state did, in the early 1990s. DeBlasio has said the city won’t put anything in.
None of these interests are going to sacrifice anything as long as people blame Cuomo for circumstances created over 20 years. He isn’t trying to fix it. Can he?
The problem is that the constituency for this is actually quite broad. In my experience, the car constituency consists of not only the wealthy, but a very very broad swath of the lower middle and upper working classes who treat car ownership and the daily use of that car as a class marker, that they’ve made it out of the lower classes. To them, the car is a status symbol, and using that car every day, every time out of the house, even for trips of 5-10 blocks, is their way of flaunting their “wealth”.
There is a LOT of this, make no mistake.
Transit users are typically:
1) The poor, who have no choice
2) The middle to upper middle classes, who work in Manhattan and can’t afford garages, but might drive if they could
3) The moderately wealthy, for whom time is quite literally money, and time spent in traffic is time not spent making money or with family
But the aspirational middle class, as well as the very wealthy, drive. Between the two, this captures donors and a large amount of voters in NYC.
If you do have a car in metro NYC, a lot more jobs are made available to you in the outer boroughs and the suburbs. Not all jobs are in Manhattan.
Some people actually have to drive to work. Or taking going from the North Bronx to Queens. By subway its two hours. By car its 25 minutes.
And a number of middle class people like teachers, cops, firemen, civil service employees, etc DRIVE to work. So do many doctors and nurses.
That last line is sort of like using a serial rapist as an example of someone who enjoys sex with a lot of people. They drive because their unions work out contracts where the agency they work for pays them enough to drive and live in the suburbs, clogging the streets just a little more and making everyone who doesn’t drive poorer in the process.
Anecdotes aside, most people in the region are not better off using a car, and the few that are almost certainly are only better off because the car is somehow making money for them. The types of medium-low paying service jobs that predominate outside Manhattan are rarely enough to even afford a car comfortably, except maybe some vestiges of the dwindling skilled manufacturing sector.
When fingers start pointing it always surprises me that none of them are ever directed at the lack of good, smart advocacy around transit. Service, safety and system growth will all improve when the funding improves. Funding will improve when advocates start funding state legislators and then putting the screws to them to make good on the dollars their campaigns receive. That’s how this game is played.
The Straphangers have been an incredibly effective advocate on behalf of past transit riders.
One of the things that made them so successful politically is that they practiced the “art of the possible” and were willing to sacrifice then-future transit riders as part of the deal. They are present tranit riders now.
The reality is that with all the dedicate taxes, public support for mass transit in New York is enormous. The problem is that so much of the money is sucked into the past, and people don’t want to pay even more.
everyone has learned by now that if you give the MTA more money than it needs the unions will grab most of it and go on strike until they get most of the revenues
if the MTA is always out of money and gets only emergency funding you can get whatever you want from the unions
Practical politics.
Transit users in our region are concentrated in urban, liberal districts. These people are going to vote overwhelmingly Democratic no matter what, so Democratic politicians take them for granted and Republicans see no point in trying to court them.
Drivers live in contested districts, therefore politicians cater to them to earn votes.
Not so sure about that. That maybe true in NYC & lower Westchester, but a rather large chunk of LI would be considered to be conservitive. Look at Peter King as an example. Keep in mind the main rail line through his district is amung the busyest in the region.
Another area to look at would be Bergen County where transit use is high amung Commuters & until recently, it was mostly republican especially north of Rt 4.
Those conservative transit users are only using transit in a specific circumstance: rush-hour commuting to Manhattan. They have no need for programs that predominantly benefit the subway, nor for walkability initiatives that make it harder for them to drive into the city on weekends.
Peter King is an electoral aberration who could easily be replaced by a Democrat whenever he leaves that office. He is powerful and influential in national politics, which must boost him in elections, but at least a cursory look at the district maps shows you that the 2nd and 3rd districts are pretty competitive in presidential elections and lean Democrat, if anything.
In any case, conservative-liberal just misses the point. NIMBYs are liberals and the largely church-going African American voting community in NYC is pretty conservative on social issues. Bloomberg is more liberal than de Blasio – de Blasio is just less authoritarian (right-wing).
I think to a large degree, the current elite conception of transit, as little more than a transportational safety net for the poor, is generational. The youngsters are abandoning the suburbs they grew up in, for the urban center that their oldster parents abandoned. They are eventually going to crowd out everyone else — i.e. everyone who’d really rather live in the suburbs. It’s really only a matter of time.
In this context, currently an urban politician that treats transit seriously (e.g. Bloomberg) is ahead of his time and seriously outnumbered. But in the future, a politician that identifies both as a motorist and as a progressive (e.g. De Blasio) will be an anachronism.
Walt Gekko used the term “disdain”–I think that sums up our Governor’s attitude towards transit. I believe that he is of that generation which grew up with the mindset the the city was a dirty, dysfunctional place to escape to the suburbs from, and would probably get bigger thrills driving a muscle car than peering out of the fan window at the front of a R-32.
Governor Cuomo:
1) views transit as a city problem (though the city is relatively powerless to do anything about it since the MTA is a state agency which owns the subway).
2) knows most transit riders would not know enough to blame him for the lack of transit funding and calculates that he would get the majority of votes from city residents regardless.
3) like most politicians, fears bigger outcries from their car driving constituents should road infrastructure crumble the way transit does.
4) doesn’t believe fixing transit will in any way help his career goals as he seeks national office
5) envisions cutting the ribbon on opening day for the new “Governors Mario and Andrew Cuomo Bridge”, once known as the Tappan-Zee.
There should be real thought given to getting private industry involved. The subways and trains were originally build and operated with private money. There should be thought given to getting back to the original business plan. The recent reduction of upcoming fare increases indicates that this is still a political football and influenced by politics, not necessity. Running and maintaining the MTA is not just covering immediate operational costs. The reductions are very short sited. States have had successful private/public relationships for roads. Not sure why it cannot work for trains and subways.
In the year 2013, privatizing a government service generally results in bad things; usually some blatantly corrupt company coming and running service and equipment into the ground to squeeze every last cent for profit. *cough* Nassau County *cough*