The Daily News was not impressed with the Mayor’s complaints over subway delays.
When Bill de Blasio ran for mayor on a populist platform, he didn’t spend much time talking about transit. On one hand, that was by design. As the city has long ago ceded real control over MTA funding to the state, local politicians don’t feel the need to campaign on or do much to support the subway system. On the other hand, de Blasio wasn’t a subway guy. As a long-serving elected official, he drove everywhere. He didn’t — and still doesn’t — understand what the subways mean to the everyday lives of New Yorkers.
This political problem reared its head in early April when, with good intentions, de Blasio drove from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn in order to take a 20-minute subway ride designed to drum up support for federal transit funding. Yet, the Mayor took a lot of flak for his stunt because it was so blatantly just that. Instead of offering up more city money first and putting his money where his mouth was, de Blasio used a subway ride to earn some political points.
This week, the Mayor’s transit problem reared its head again in two distinct, but perhaps related, stories. First, on the day de Blasio’s team unveiled a budget that included a whopping $25 million increase in MTA capital funding — all the way up to $125 million — MTA CEO and Chairman Tom Prendergast made the case for even more funding. Relying on a recent Independent Budget Office study that garnered a lot of attention, Prendergast asked for at least $300 million annually and urged the city to contribute at least $1 billion to the next phase of the Second Ave. Subway.
Noting that “the role of the city’s mass transit system is historical and obvious,” Prendergast said today is “the right time for the City to acknowledge the need for significantly increased investment” in transit. “We believe the City must share in the cost of projects needed to ease current ridership growth and the system enhancements and expansion needed to address further growth,” the MTA chief wrote. “An example of such an investment — similar to the role played by the city in the extension of the 7 line to the west side — is the construction of the Second Avenue Subway line. We suggest the appropriate level of City investment in Second Avenue is a minimum of $1.0 billion over the five-year capital plan.”
In a subsequent exchange on Twitter between Adam Lisberg, the top MTA spokesman, and Amy Spitalnick, a top mayoral aide, Spitalnick accused the MTA of moving the goalposts. “We decided to fully meet MTA’s request. Our budget went to print. Then MTA moves the goal posts,” she said, defending the low amount. Of course, advocacy groups have called upon the city to fund at the $300 million level for months, but that again speaks to transit as a priority.
With this ongoing battle over funding as the backdrop, the Mayor on Monday “accidentally” sent an email to a Times reporter bemoaning a long subway wait. He supposedly left just 15 minutes to wait for an A or C train, travel from Canal St. to 34th St. and get somewhere on time. The Mayor, known for his tardiness, supposedly found himself waiting for over 20 minutes before dashing off the email in a huff. For what it’s worth, the mayor is always late, and there’s no record of a delay in the MTA’s text alert longs. That’s not a definitive listing of all subway problems, but New Yorkers have a long history of fudging MTA delays as excuses for tardiness. Just ask anyone who’s arrived at work 20 minutes late for an important meeting.
The Mayor’s optics problem is that in his email he noted that “we need a better system” regarding subway delay notifications and that it is “a fixable problem.” Of course it is, and all it requires is some political and economic support, but the mayor’s tardiness again pushed a real issue — transit funding — off the front pages. Meanwhile, local pols are trying to look everywhere but here for support, and the MTA may be a pawn in the ongoing de Blasio-Cuomo feud. But the truth is that populism and capitalism and economic growth in New York — from affordable housing to a vibrant and competitive job market — relies on the subway. The sooner our politicians digest this reality, the sooner we can move beyond petty tiffs and discuss real funding solutions.
64 comments
Since when can the NY Post refer to transit serfs as “us.”
“In a subsequent exchange on Twitter between Adam Lisberg, the top MTA spokesman, and Amy Spitalnick, a top mayoral aide, Spitalnick accused the MTA of moving the goalposts. “We decided to fully meet MTA’s request. Our budget went to print.”
Of course the state has already passed theirs, with no transportation funding. Perhaps the city will be able to say that in a couple of months.
Just remember that economically, this is the best of all possible world’s. The city’s economy is in a bubble, far better than can be expected in the new normal. Tax revenues are rolling in. Low interest rates are reducing the interest payments on bonds rolling over.
What happens when these things normalize? Every special interests is grabbing money off the top as fast as they can.
Absolutely. Now is the time to take these non-recurring revenues and put them into capital expenditures and similar spending. It’s idiotic to apply them to recurring and ever-expanding social programs. If one were really clever you could even cut taxes now. NYers don’t mind tax raises, and you’d give yourself room for tax increases the next time things slowed down on the revenue side.
Obviously this is an attempt at sarcasm, but can anyone translate for me? Or was Eric just rooting around psychedelic mushrooms and spouting whatever talking points he could grope for or something?
What social programs are “expanding”?
The ones that cost money.
Since you obviously don’t know the answer, why would you assume they’re expanding?
http://www.nydailynews.com/blo.....-1.1959411
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/.....nding-come
http://www1.nyc.gov/site/idnyc/index.page
For starters that’s three social programs that have increased funding. NYC ID was a way to provide immigrants and other marginalized populations with ids.
Nobody got the answer right yet.
Larry? D-:
Do you have any idea how hard it is 6odo budget math when under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms? It’s next to impossible. NYC has a budget in the area of $50 billion. Of that it writes a check for about 1/5th of 1% to the MTA, so, I’m going to take a flyer and say that the spending side is biased to the tune of roughly $49 billion on other priorities.
It’s actually in the area of $75B. Do you consider policing and education to be “social programs”? Pensions for city workers?
$75??!! Wow. So if they took 3.3% of that, they’d have a ten year pool of about $25 billion to put to the MTA.
I guess, but the discretionary budget is probably about half that.
I’ve spent 100-plus hours of my own time (so far) to make it possible for anyone to download spreadsheets comparing NY’s public spending priorities with the U.S. average, other parts of the state, NJ, other places, etc.
https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/background-and-databases-2012-census-of-governments-state-and-local-finance-data/
Note in particular the spreadsheets with comparisons of FY 1992, 2002 and 2012.
Need charts to make it easy? Here is taxes
https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/taxes-2012-census-of-governments-finance-data/
And here is a summary of spending.
https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/overview-of-state-and-local-government-expenditures-census-of-governments-data/
Rats.
WordPress says quite a few people are following the links, but only one downloaded one of the spreadsheets.
As I noted, I spent 100-plus hours of my spare time so one could read across the rows of a spreadsheet and find local government spending on each government function, and local government revenues for each source, for NYC, other parts of NY state and NJ, and selected other states and counties. For FY 1992, 2002, and 2012.
All painstakingly adjusted to be as fairly comparable as possible, and expressed as a share of the total income of residents of each area (yours, mine, theirs). To see what share of all of our budgets is taken from us and spent on what, here compared with elsewhere.
But it would seem more people are interested in hearing opinions than having the facts in front of them and developing their own.
That download would have been me. I appreciate the amount of time you put into standardizing all that data, it must have been a huge pain.
The killer is the Bureau is still saving space in its detailed files by omitting data items with zero employment/revenues/expenditures/etc.
So to line it up, you have to add the zero spot for those counties.
No problem for those with an Access database program and knowledge of how to use it. Big problem for me.
A further nightmare is those “all year” graphs (see taxes). The Bureau used to produce a set of files for each state for each data item with all years going back to the start of the dataset. Now that is only in Access. So I have to append data for individual items/years to the file I already have. So I’m only doing that for selected items/states.
https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/base/
https://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5.....ft-access/
I-mac.
The governments data includes instructions to extract database information into excel, but it didn’t work.
I tried downloading recommended software to make that possible, but that didn’t work either (I might have paid for it, however).
Open Office and LibreOffice work on Macs.
PHP or probably PERL should easily be able to read the original file and then output to a CSV or even Excel.
Macs should have either or both, or at least an easy provision to get either or both.
The reality is that I’m not that good at this stuff. Things that would take a few seconds to pick up if someone showed me are problematic for me otherwise.
But I might give these a try.
Spreadsheets I’m good at.
Show me a link to the DB you want? I can probably do it in a few minutes.
http://www2.census.gov/pub/out.....special60/
dac-rex, which is at the bottom of the list.
I could use all data items for all years for all states, for three government type codes:
1 — state and local
2 — state
3 — local — total for all local governments in the state
The Bureau used to put the data items across the columns, and the states/years down the rows. It took about eight spreadsheets — five for the revenue and expenditure columns (rex) and three for the debt/asset/cash columns.
Good luck. Don’t worry if all you get for the column and row headings is codes. I know what they mean.
At least partial success. Here is a zip of CSV files extracted from that database.
I just used mdbtools and did a little one-liner sh script:
for poo in $(mdb-tables Rex-Dac.mdb); do mdb-export Rex-Dac.mdb $poo > $poo.csv; done
Did that on a BSD box, but it should carry over pretty well to Linux and Mac alike. I think crapinthosh uses bash, like Linux, so this should still work. Pasting the above in terminal should work if you are in the same directory as the mdb file.
I say “at least partial success” because it choked on some tables, but they seemed to be expository or how-tos, but not data tables. Also, I never used Access before, so I have no idea how things are supposed to look. There are some empty files in that zip; those are the ones it choked on. I can look into it more if I missed something.
Thanks a lot. Those are the right files all right.
Unfortunately, though these files were loaded to the ftp location recently, the Census Bureau apparently did not update them past 2007. The Bureau had a lot of retirement turnover in its Governments division, and some stuff fell by the wayside.
So it looks like I have what I had. Data for all the years up to 2007. And then appending the data for individual years after that, for every state, for every data item that interests me.
They have a tool to allow data over time to be extracted, but it is the less detailed data for publications. There is less information on the revenue side. You get state aid to local government as one number, for example, not divided between transit and education. Less detail on charges for services.
Thanks again.
They seemed to cut back the amount of data they provided starting in 2010, if not before. It’s irritating. Oh well, if you want to repeat my results it should be easy enough if mdbtools installs on a Mac – it should, if it installs on FreeBSD, but I don’t know how easily. All that one-liner did was extract every table to its own CSV file with the same name as the table.
Doesn’t FRED offer some of this data? I know FRED’s tables rarely come with detailed raw data readily available….
If you are going to communicate via insult, try to get them on target. The post above yours contains comprehensible content, yours contains a small tantrum.
Whoa dude. If my response was what you call a “small tantrum,” then the better part of your posts are tl;dr tantrums! As for the fraction of your reaction that was, ahem, on target, I agree it was an insult – a barb, however, rather than a personal attack. I think I’ve seen both you and Eric and several other people barb people here before. Most lived.
However, I sincerely had no intent to hurt Eric’s feelings. If my comment did that, I apologize. I did not intend to be personal, Eric, so I hope you didn’t construe it as a personal/character attack. It was just intended as sarcasm.
Exactly. So the city is obviously flush with money from all this real estate development which will go on for a few more years until they’ve developed everything worth developing. Meanwhile the city should absolutely fund the Second Avenue Subway with the tax revenue it is getting from the real estate industry. Bloomberg used said money to extend the 7 line one station. No reason why de Blasio can’t use this money to fund phases 2-4 for the Second Avenue Subway, as well as increase the annual contribution to 300 million. I’m glad to see the MTA CEO put the pressure on de Blasio. Since de Blasio ran on a campaign for working class New Yorkers, he should be more than willing to substantially increase city contributions to the MTA.
It’s also good the city has already increased it’s contribution by 25%. A pittance, but it is a start.
IIRC, the TIF to fund the 7 line extension hasn’t worked out as envisioned, and it has had to been topped up with general funds…
That’s cause the 7 extension cost several times more than any comparable subway extension anywhere in the world…
(My bad: I said “cost” rather than “costs”, as if the spending has finished and the line is open.)
That’s because de Blasio is the classic tax and spend limousine liberal. He wants to pander to his core constituents to ensure his re-election, however, I don’t this that he’s realized yet that he’s pissing off the people being taxed along the way, also some of his base.
One add on bit of sarcasm. It’s been so long since we’ve had one, the younger folks seem to not to know what one looks likes and maybe some of the older folks have forgotten. Well, now, we’ve got the full sweep in government: Mayor, Council Speaker, Comptroller and Public Advocate.
Smart riders would know they could just hop on the C/E from Canal Street if they wanted to go to 34th Street since the A express saves almost no time on that run.
As a matter of fact, the E specifically because the C is infrequent and the A has to share tracks with the C. The E has to run about 15tph (every 4 mins) because of Queens Blvd. Express.
“The sooner our politicians digest this reality, the sooner we can move beyond petty tiffs and discuss real funding solutions.”
“Solutions,” by the way, mean deciding who is going to become worse off in what way to prevent ongoing financial followed by physical deterioration to the point of collapse. It is a euphemism.
And the hole is so deep now that even those proposing solutions only dare to allocate a small share of the pain — not enough to prevent disaster in the long run.
Why bother?
The sooner this whole thing collapses and we can start over, the better.
When anything is broken so far beyond repair, it makes no sense to do anything other than to throw it out and replace. Let the collapse happen.
When Bill de Blasio ran for mayor on a populist platform, he didn’t spend much time talking about transit. On one hand, that was by design. As the city has long ago ceded real control over MTA funding to the state, local politicians don’t feel the need to campaign on or do much to support the subway system.
But remember that when Bloomberg was running he always had a number of concrete transit proposals — he advocated for free crosstown buses in Manhattan and an F express train in Brooklyn in 2009, probably knowing that they were ideas that’d sound good to voters but go nowhere. He even put up ads in the F stations in Brooklyn touting the F express idea.
Most people don’t know that the mayor doesn’t control the MTA any more than they didn’t know that the F express idea was kind of dumb ’cause it’d skip the most popular stops. The NY Times said it was “akin to a student council nominee calling for popsicles in the school cafeteria” but I bet it won him some votes. Politicians in NYC who want to do so can take advantage of the fact that most people don’t know the intricacies of who controls things and how the system is run. De Blasio just doesn’t really care about transit.
The Mayor’s optics problem is that in his email he noted that “we need a better system” regarding subway delay notifications and that it is “a fixable problem.” Of course it is, and all it requires is some political and economic support
You’re being way too kind in your interpretation of what he wrote in the email. He was pissed that his security detail drove off without confirming that he actually got on the train, and was asking for better coordination between the MTA and his people. De Blasio wasn’t asking for more accountability from the MTA toward us peons to communicate service delays in general. He wrote: “Let’s cross-check our info with them when I take the subway,” — he’s asking for a personal confirmation from an MTA contact that the train will be running without delays every time he takes the train. He’s asking for better special treatment as mayor, because the subway system is so unreliable that he can’t depend on it like us normal folks are forced to. Nothing in the article about the email implies that he saw some bigger picture of this as an issue for regular New Yorkers beyond his own tardiness.
If the mayor had just walked across from City Hall and taken the 2/3 train from Park Place to Penn Station, at least he would have been able to look at the countdown clocks while he fumed about the train not arriving on time.
Now I know where the term “Limousine Liberal” came from.
For what it’s worth, when De Blasio said it’s a “fixable problem” what he was referring to was that his entourage was unaware of potential delays. His solution was to have the MTA and/or Police coordinate subway problems for him when he decides to use the subway–not to roll out countdown clocks for everyone.
So his “fix” isn’t for us, as we don’t have NYPD radios when we wait on platforms.
Yes exactly, the proposed fix isnt better transit, it’s a schedule planner that better takes into account these delays.
The Man Of The People is very special, you must understand.
More funding will never solve the problem until all taxpayer money is independently audited and accounted for and all leaders are truly held accountable.
What happens when you find out that all the money is going to Generation Greed’s debts and pensions?
Who do you hold accountable for that? Pataki, Silver, Bruno, Skelos, Giuliani, Bloomberg, etc?
What exactly did you do to stop the sellout of the future when we had a chance?
You will be old one day and someone will be paying for your social security and medicare. Your only way out is to die young.
A 20 minute wait for an A/C train happens frequently enough that the MTA wouldn’t report that as a delay.
Yup! I’ve had many touch and go trips on the A, dealing with long waits, while trying to get a train to make a flight at JFK.
And De Blasio was traveling around noon when this happened. Outside of rush hour, the trains run so infrequently on the schedule to begin with that a small delay can easily cause a 20 minute wait for a train.
The MTA doesn’t think this is too much of an issue. The only reason they run more trains during the rush is that the trains would become too packed and platforms dangerously crowded. They don’t see more frequent service as a benefit in and of itself.
Weekday daytime service headways don’t seem to exceed 12m very often, so Bill would probably have had to be standing at Lefferts to experience a 20m delay.
10m headways can seem like an eternity, but that rate of service probably meets demand. The A Train almost shouldn’t be local/express except at rush hour. :-\
NYC spend 75 billion dollars on everything except transportation. DeBlasio will be the worst Mayor in recent history including his Vision Zero policies. He doesn’t care about our longer commutes. He doesn’t care about commuters. He listens to the “bikes will save the world people.” I ride a bike too but we need to share the roadways, railways and our waterways and not take away transit options for our people. Is it fair that motorist are responsible for their bad behavior but not pedestrians and bicyclist for breaking the traffic laws? Is this equality?
Why are the outer boroughs excluded from railway expansion and we have to pay for Manhattan only transit expansion? Half of Manhattan will get more railway service and the outer boroughs will pay for it with taxes, fines, more congestion and less opportunities. What’s up with that? “One City plan” is baloney. Join our group and fight for subway and commuter railway expansion in the outer boroughs.
Philip McManus, Queens Public Transit Committee, PhilAMcManus@gmail.com, 718-679-5309
Vision zero is just as important as getting to work. You know, the place you need to be alive to reach.
Increased bicycle usage share means less people on other modes. It makes sense to promote it.
And more people citywide benefit from mass transportation improvements in the core of the city than outskirts. Though important, they are secondary for the region.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. It could mean more usage of transit. Cyclists probably use a lot of transit for trips they can’t cycle for.
What transit options are being taken away?
Furthermore there are benefits of the SAS to outer borough NYers, even with only Phases I and II, including but not limited to
– Reduced crowding and improved reliability of IRT Lex services, a big up for Bronx IRT riders coming down south.
– Restoration of the N express along Bway (possible since the Q would no longer switch to the local tracks at 34th), speeding up commute times for Brooklyn N riders to Midtown
– Room for restoration of the W thanks the rerouting of the Q away from the 60th St Tunnel and subsequent N express restoration. With the N and Q both running express, the R and W would provide Bway local service all the way down to Whitehall, increasing service to Lower Manhattan and the Staten Island Ferry.
– Upon completion of Phase II, the Q at 125th as an alternative to 59th as a transfer point for BMT Bway service (reducing congestion at said station for Queens riders)
– Also upon completion of Phase II, a more seamless transfer from the southbound IRT Lex to the IND 6 Av via 125 St and 63 St, as opposed to a) the open air 59th 63rd F transfer and b) the labyrinth that is 51st 53rd/Lex.
Yes, SAS construction is located entirely within Manhattan’s boundaries, but one cannot ignore the wider impacts in improving commutes to and from the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn and give a truly informed opinion on the matter. This expansion of service excludes no one.
the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island*
Phase 2 isn’t funded yet and they’re not even done with phase 1…. Who knows when it will open….
….But yeah phase 2 will be benefit everyone….
Yep. Even if it’s assumed that only Phase I ever gets built, my first three bullets still hold up.
NIMBY’s in Queens shot down transit expansion in the borough. Giuliani would have extended the N train to Astoria, NIMBY’s didn’t want that. So now Cuomo will build an Airtrain along the industrial shore to connect to the Flushing line and the LIRR.
There was a proposal once to build the 63rd street tunnel as a new subway under Northern Blvd. Nimby’s hated that. Some people in Queens would rather have a trailway than reactivate the Rockaway Beach LIRR. The E-train to Parsons and Archer was supposed to be extended further along in Southeast Queens along the LIRR right away. But there was community opposition.
Manhattan on the other hand was happy to see the 7 line extended to 34th and 11th and is happy to see that phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway is opening up next year. They will be happy to get phases 2-4 whenever that comes.
Queens to be honest did get some mass transit improvements. The E and J trains to Parson’s and Archer stop at Suptin Blvd. Every since that opened up in the 80s you no longer had to do a walk from Hillside Avenue on the E and F to go to the LIRR (in the 70s you could have walked from the J on Jamaica Avenue to the LIRR). Now one can take the E or J directly to the LIRR, or to the Airstrain to JFK. This is an improvement.
Capacity on the Queens Blvd line was increased by the 63rd Street tunnel. Once this tunnels was connected to the Queens Blvd line, they were able to increase the number of trains coming from Manhattan to the Queens Blvd line. This tremendously helped with crowding.
The 7 line is being retrofitted with CBTC, so instead of running the 7 trains every six minutes they will be able to run them every 2 minutes. Queens is still going to get an Airtrain to LGA.
So Queens has gotten it’s share of transit improvements, despite Nimbys.
Ben, something fishy is going on with your site. I kept being redirected to an ad server when trying to view this page on my phone. Automatically opened up to a download of match.com (the dating site)!
Yes, I’ve seen the same thing. There’s something redirecting me to spam/malware when I visit this page on my phone.
“de Blasio ran for mayor on a populist platform…On the other hand, de Blasio wasn’t a subway guy.” I thought we had a name for that — limousine liberal. Or in his case, limousine communist?
Limo?
He is driven around in a hulking armored Suburban with not less than 4 guards armed with 17 shot semi-automatics, extra-lethal hollowpoints and an attitude. When it was pointed out that his vehicle is commonly seen speeding (after he himself ordered a ticket blitz to enforce a speed limit slowdown to 25mph) and running red lights, he flipped it off, saying that it’s up to the driver, who is his employee and whom he gives the orders to.
Well, de Blasio ran on a platform of “two cities” and he meant it. The city he lives in, and all the rest of the 7,999,999 folks who call NYC home. Proud to say I didn’t vote for this one-term moron who is single-handedly trashing this once great town. God, will somebody from Queens or Staten Island run for mayor so we don’t have to put up with these limousine liberals any more?
Moron?
He’s putting a he|| of a scru-ing on everyone with an above-board job in NYC and helping to incite the same nationwide. I’d say he’s pretty sharp, like a skell’s pocket razor. Evil, obviously, but he’s managed to drag the city down a little despite his navel-gazing. If it’s a hot summer, we may see his plans bearing more fruit.