Benjamin Kabak

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the launch party for the Riders Alliance without providing too many more details about the organization. Pete Donohue profiled their efforts, but as a board member of the organization, I can speak more to their goals. It is a new transit advocacy group that should fill in the gaps left by the others in the field.

Essentially, the Riders Alliance is an organization with an aim of organizing transit riders into political blocks. As many people from one neighborhood want similar transit improvements, the Riders Alliance is focused on garnering grassroots support by organizing riders to pressure elected officials on funding and the MTA on service patterns. Eventually, if the organization can build enough popular support, its endgoal involves long-term solutions to New York City’s transit problems.

One of the Riders Alliance’s early efforts involves the G train. I think the G train gets a bad rap amongst its riders, but it certainly has its problems. Generally, the G train arrives on time and serves as a vital link between neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, but it doesn’t run particularly frequently. The short cars lead to crowded rush hour conditions, and its riders all want more service and better connections to other routes. In a sense, then, it’s ripe for a grassroots organizing effort, and that’s just what the Riders Alliance is doing.

As The Brooklyn Paper noted, the Riders Alliance is calling for better G train service. The group is working with residents to call for more frequent service and out-of-system transfers between the J/M/Z at Hewes St. The MTA isn’t so keen to give on these issues. Here’s the essential debate:

Members of the Riders Alliance claim the MTA is shooting itself in the foot by refusing to run G trains more reliably, allow free above-ground transfers to nearby lines, or add more rolling stock to the diminutive four-car line. “If they make the changes, the increased ridership will bring in the money that will justify the changes,” said Dustin Joyce, who claims the transit authority’s lack of interest in the line is hindering the growth of G-dependent neighborhoods including Greenpoint, Fort Greene, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, among others. “They could attract a lot more development in those neighborhoods if they had reliable transit.”

Infrastructure and transportation experts including New York University adjunct professor Sarah Kaufman say the MTA must do everything it can to lure more riders rather than let lousy service ride. “In other cities, transit companies are almost begging people to take transit instead of driving,” said Kaufman. “In New York City, trains are at capacity during rush hour, but that’s not true in the outer boroughs. There is room to attract more people into public transit in the outer boroughs and keep them out of traffic.”

But the MTA refutes the paradox and says it won’t budge until more riders flock to the much-maligned line. “We schedule service to match ridership,” said agency spokesman Charles Seaton, who added that the MTA has already made concessions G train riders when it dropped its own initiative to eliminate five beloved stops in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, and Kensington earlier this year.

The Brooklyn Paper calls it a catch-22, and it’s one I’m inclined to believe. The G train has such a negative reputation amongst potential riders who live along the line that many will do all they can to avoid taking it. I’m no exception as a few weeks ago, I opted to take the 7 from Long Island City to Grand Central and the 4 to Brooklyn rather than take the G back to Park Slope. I didn’t want to risk a 10- or 15-minute wait late on a Friday night.

Picking up on this idea, Cap’n Transit notes that the G extension to Church Ave. has seemingly driven ridership and urges the MTA to at least give increased service a try. The only thing they have to lose is money, and they could gain it all back from increased ridership. It’s worth a try.

Ultimately, increased service — and a free transfer I barely discussed here — are simple fixes with which the MTA, if properly funded, could experiment. The MTA should be in the business of maximizing ridership but instead is in the business of maximizing economic efficiency as best it can while carrying billions in debt. A rider advocacy group with the right aim and the right focus could fix these problems, and the G train provides a perfect test run for the Riders Alliance as it launches an ambitious effort to re-imagine the city’s transit advocacy work.

A quick glance through local headlines these days may lead any long-time New Yorker to think the city has landed in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” With a mayoral election 11 months away, the name of one Joe Lhota has garnered a lot of ink as a potential Republican candidate. What kind of world do we live in where the head of the MTA, New York City’s much hated (in the court of public opinion) transit agency, can float a balloon of running for mayor?

Even as these rumors have swirled, Lhota himself hasn’t said much of anything. He did mention to The Daily News that he’s talked about it with his wife, and he’s said he’ll make a decision on whether or not to run in the coming weeks. Beyond that, though, his silence has seemingly frustrated reporters, as New York Magazine’s Andy Martin intimated last night.

There is, of course, a reason for that silence, and that reason hasn’t been a part of the early articles. Joe Lhota is essentially barred by law from talking about running for mayor. Section 3-C of the Public Officers Law — a new section added by the Public Employee Ethics Reform Act of 2007 — prohibits Lhota, as the head of a state agency, from running for office, and the restrictions are even broader. Take a look at the plain text:

No commissioner, executive director or other head of any state agency…shall seek nomination or election to any compensated federal, state or local public office, or shall become a candidate for such office, unless such individual first resigns from his or her public employment, or requests and is granted by their appointing authority a leave of absence without pay. Such resignation or leave must commence before such individual engages in any campaign activities, including but not limited to, announcing a candidacy, circulating petitions, soliciting contributions, distributing literature, or taking any other action to actively promote oneself as a candidate for elective office.

The key part here is that last phrase. “Taking any other action to actively promote oneself as a candidate for elective office” is incredibly broad, and even acknowledging to the News, as Lhota did yesterday, that he’s thinking about it skirts that line. So of course, Lhota can’t comment on his thought process, especially if he’s leaning in the direction of running.

That still doesn’t answer the question though of whether or not he should run. I’ve come out against his candidacy, not on ideological grounds, but on transit grounds. The MTA has run through six Chairman/CEOs/Executive Directors since 2006, and a Lhota departure would just add to the instability at the top. He has a good mind for transit and can get things done. The MTA needs someone like that to lead for a few years.

Politically, he’d have to overcome being known as the head of the MTA — not quite a selling point in electoral politics — and he’d have to make a name for himself amidst a field of well-known, if not the most inspiring, Democratic candidates. That’s no small task, and it’s a challenge Lhota would have to face after leaving the MTA.

So as we sit here today on December 7, Joe Lhota isn’t running for mayor because he’s still running the MTA, and he can’t do both at once. If he steps down, we’ll know what his short-term political future will be, and the MTA will, once again, be up for grabs.

As the MTA and transit community at large begin to examine how best to move forward with protecting the system, somehow plugging the tunnels will take center stage during the debate. The MTA saw first-hand during Hurricane Sandy that a storm surge of 13 feet will swamp eight subway tunnels and two road tunnels between Manhattan and the land mass known as Long Island. Protecting that infrastructure from future flooding is of utmost importance, but even doing so raises some delicate issues.

During my Problem Solvers discussion on Wednesday night, MTA Bridges & Tunnels President James Ferrara spoke about protecting the infrastructure but as part of a larger conversation the city needs to have. During our panel discussion, Ferrara seemed a bit more skeptical than I am that another storm will arrive. He understands that it’s very costly to harden transportation infrastructure and seemed to believe that we shouldn’t do so for storms that happen once every 100 years. Of course, we’ve now had two hurricanes in two years along with a variety of other weird weather patterns, and the oceans are getting warmer.

But protecting the Montague St. Tunnel or the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel from future flooding isn’t as easy as installing a plug or dropping doors across the tunnel entrances. As Tom Abudllah, Transit’s Chief Environmental Engineer, said during my talk, the water has to go somewhere. If you seal off the tunnels, the water goes into the stations, and if you seal off the stations, well, then the water winds up all over the place at street level.

This realization played itself out in the media earlier this week when Joe Lhota started talking about shoring up the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. “I had one very prominent real estate builder who owns buildings in lower Manhattan—actually all over the city—thank me for allowing the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel to be used as a drainage ditch. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the comment,” he said to Capital New York’s Dana Rubinstein. “The fact of the matter is, if I plug it up, we plug it up, the MTA plugs it up—if God forbid this happens again, the surge is the same or even higher, the water will go elsewhere.”

In Lower Manhattan, “elsewhere” means into buildings that house multi-national corporations and into expensive housing that’s popped up downtown over the past ten years. Bill Rudin was the real estate scion who thanked Lhota, and the two engaged in a weird sort of back-and-forth over Lhota’s comments. That’s pretty much besides the point.

Ferrara spoke to this issue on Wednesday night at the Transit Museum, and he noted that we can’t just talk about protecting tunnels in a vacuum. It has to be part of a larger community discussion about protecting areas, neighborhoods, regions from the impact of flooding, storm surges and rising tides. This discussion has the potential to devolve into inaction though. Residents will come to appreciate having the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and other infrastructure as “drains” while those in charge of the infrastructure need to find a way to protect it. Someone will have to step into moderate, and our elected officials haven’t shown much leadership on, well, anything. It’s probably naive to expect them to find the ability to solve this more complex problem.

Ultimately, we have to remember that fixing these vulnerabilities isn’t as simple as unilateral MTA action. It’s never that simple, and the water doesn’t just disappear. So sooner rather than later, we’ll see this prickly process begin. Will real estate interests dominate transit? If history is any guide, it’s going to be an uphill battle to protect those tunnels.