After this week’s PACB approval, construction on Phase 1 of Moynihan Station will begin in October. With a tortured history that rivals many of New York City’s late-20th Century transit expansion plans, a firm start date for the project is good news indeed. Phase 1 is a $267-million expansion plan for Penn Station, and it is expected to be completed by 2016. When the $1.5-billion Phase 2 will get off the ground is anyone’s guess, but when the project is finally completed, New Yorkers will enjoy a much airier and roomier commuter rail hub, evocative of the old Penn Station. Issues concerning track capacity into and out of New York City will not be addressed.
Could a station agent — barred from leaving the booth — have prevented this robbery? (Photo via Campaign to Take Back Our Transit System)
After engaging in some political theater last week when it hosted court-mandated public hearings, the MTA Board is set to vote on the proposal to axe 240 station agents and shutter dozens of booths throughout the system. As John Mancini at New York 1 reports today, the board is a foregone conclusion, and the authority will also vote to approve a proposal to raise the fares as planned in 2011.
Already, transit activists and union supporters are up in arms over the two developments, and both groups have reason to be. The union is trying to save jobs while transit activists fear that the double whammy of service cuts in June and fare hikes in January will lead to more animosity from a public deeply skeptical of the MTA. “Last month, we had the deepest service cuts in a generation and now we’re being asked to pay more as riders for our subways and buses. It’s just not fair. It’s not mass transit if the masses can’t afford it,” Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives said to NY1.
While we could debate White’s assertion that the masses can’t afford it, his point is a good one. We are being asked to pay more for less. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over station agents. Or at least that’s what the TWU wants subway riders to believe. In an article in this week’s Downtown Express, John Bayles goes in depth into the station agent/subway safety argument. It’s one I’ve rehashed on numerous occasions, but Bayles’ article has some revealing statements from public officials and city politicians.
City Council representative Margaret Chin wants to keep station agents so they can help evacuate Lower Manhattan in the event of another once-a-decade terrorist attack. “In the tragic event of another attack in our community, these workers would be crucial in directing passengers to safety. Closing the booths at the Fulton St./Broadway-Nassau and Wall Street stops is particularly worrisome,” she said at one of the public hearings. “These areas of Lower Manhattan remain prime terror targets, with the subways themselves a likely target. Imagine the grizzly scenario: hundreds of passengers stranded in the subway stops, with no cell phone service — and now no means of communicating with authorities.”
Chin ignores the fact that every station will have at least one worker at all times and that emergency personnel will still be dispatched to the stations in the event of a disaster. It sounds good, though, to play into public fears over personal safety.
John Samuelsen, who makes well over $100,000 a year as president of the TWU with close to another $20,000 in other compensation, chose another approach. He attacked the MTA Board member’s personal wealth and the CEO’s salary. “It is a travesty that Jay Walder and the other fat cats on the board are sitting on this money,” he said, referring to money going toward capital construction and other union jobs. Unfortunately for Samuelsen and the TWU, those jobs aren’t from his union, and so he could care less if the authority needs that money to keep the trains running.
The shuttering of the booths is a foregone conclusion though. The MTA Board is going to vote on it on Wednesday, and in Albany, Sheldon Silver, speaker of the Assembly, said he would not pass the legislation requiring that the MTA keep the booths open for three years. He recognized that such an unfunded mandate would not serve the overall good of straphangers. “I am concerned that this legislation would force the MTA to make up lost savings through deeper service cuts or a higher fare,” he said. “The simple fact is New Yorkers cannot afford another fare hike or more cuts in service.”
So the debate rolls on. Some people think station agents who are barred from leaving their booths serve a safety function. Others recognize that the MTA is up a creek without a paddle. No matter the temporary cost savings, the truth is that the subways will cost more, and straphangers will enjoy more crowded trains that run less frequently with fewer workers in the system. For that, we have only Albany to blame.
The New York State Public Authorities Control Board has approved Phase 1 of the Moynihan Station project. The vote today is a significant step forward as four years ago, the same board blocked then-Governor Pataki’s plan for the station. With a significant amount of federal funds in place and plans for the station complex broken up into the cheaper Phase 1 and the most costly Phase 2, the early work can go forward while the state scrounges up the dollars for the $1.5 billion Penn Station expansion.
Phase 1 of the Moynihan Station plan is a $267 million cosmetic and infrastructure project. It involves building two entrances to Penn Station, dropping 13 new “vertical access points” to the platforms, and widening some underground concourses. The Empire State Development Corporation had signed off on it in March.
As the MTA struggles to find a reliable source of dedicated revenue and the city remains choked by traffic, higher-ups in the Bloomberg Administration appear to be putting out feelers again on a potential congestion pricing plan. Stephen Goldsmith, the new Deputy Mayor for Operations, sat down for a chat with NY1 this week, and during the interview, he spoke at length about the future of congestion pricing.
While he isn’t sure if the New York political climate in Albany would pass a congestion measure, Goldsmith understands the need for traffic pricing and the costs driving exerts on society. “The issue is,” he said, “you’ve got a limited number of transportation mechanisms and different ways to get around — Both how you get around and where you are driving or what subway you are taking or what bus you are on. How New Yorkers use those resources will have to be very efficient for the infrastructure to maintain the number of people, and congestion pricing causes people to think differently about how they consume those roads and consume those bridges. So it’s a very important signal to the populace.”
If Bloomberg wanted to make one last play for congestion pricing in the final years of his reign as mayor, after the upcoming election would be a fine time to do so. Those in Albany whose support is required wouldn’t be fighting a campaign, but even still, congestion pricing with revenues dedicated to the MTA has the support of the majority of New Yorkers. The measure also passed the City Council two years ago and would do so again. The time might be right for another push.
Until November, the MTA will be piloting a PayPass program, piloting a contactless fare payment method that involves using the chip inside most major credit cards to pay the fare. The authority is trying to move beyond a proprietary MetroCard system to something that allows for faster boarding and a more economically efficient fare collection effort. One benefit though — real-time tracking of bus locations — has flown below the radar.
The idea is, upon further reflection, both obvious and simple. The MTA will be collecting reams of instantaneous fare payment data as bus riders use their PayPass cards to swipe onto buses. (In fact, because the MTA has eschewed pre-boarding fare payment options for decades, they could collect this information now.) With the fare information comes the location and timing of the bus. If the bus knows it’s at, say, 104th St. and 5th Ave. and the fare processing system knows that people have just entered that bus, it’s possible to figure out how far away the bus is from any given point further on down the route.
According to Matthew Schuerman of WNYC, the MTA hopes to use that information to bring bus-tracking technology to its riders. While the MetroCard technology relies upon reading data off of a magnetic strip, the PayPass technology, says Schuerman, requires a modem and internet connection to function properly. He explains the authority’s plans:
Later this year, the MTA will begin taking the data from one of those routes and send it back to riders that request it, via text messages or the web browser on their cell phones. “If we are successful in implementing this program we will drastically reduce the cost and time needed to track our 6000-bus fleet,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said…
One drawback: the new approach will only tell riders where the bus is, in terms of distance or number of bus stops, but not when the bus will arrive. Ortiz says the MTA will open up its data so that software developers in the private sector can create smart phone apps.
“We will welcome the efforts of developers to help develop a robust prediction system that can deal with very difficult traffic and real world conditions associated with taking a bus throughout the city,” Ortiz said. “But right now we are not going to let the difficulty of making these predictions keep us from moving forward with what we can do now.”
The MTA, according to the report, views this as a cheaper alternative to the bus arrival boards currently in place at eight stops along 34th St. The MTA claims bringing that technology to bus shelters throughout the city could cost at least $140 million and would take a half a decade or more to roll out. Needless to say, the money isn’t there for such a project.
So the agency is looking for different solutions to a problem that has long since been solved around the globe. In a sense, the authority is taking Roadify’s bus-tracking approach and automating it with proprietary data. They’ll be doing the software development in conjunction with OpenPlans, the organization behind StreetsBlog that has been instrumental in pushing the MTA toward a policy of open information. It won the $265,000 contract to create a low-cost bus tracking solution.
Despite the promise of an upcoming pilot along one of the PayPass bus routes later this year, a few concerns circle the project. If the MTA is using credit card data to track buses, the authority will have to ensure that individuals’ privacy interests are protected. Furthermore, while this tracking program is low cost, it’s also low tech. OpenPlans will be making it available as a text message service with no mobile app component, and it will, as Schuerman noted, tell riders only how far away the bus is in terms of distance and not time. Still, for an agency known more for spinning its technological wheels than moving forward, this is a long-awaited step in the right direction.
As the MTA Board prepares to receive a proposal for the 2011 budget and upcoming fare hikes, the agency could pull its funding for Long Island Bus, Newsday reports today. Alfonso Castillo reports:
According to transit advocates and Metropolitan Transportation Authority sources, the MTA, as part of its preliminary 2011 budget, will demand that Nassau County and/or New York State come up with $40 million more to keep Long Island Bus running.
Without the MTA’s subsidies, which account for nearly a third of the overall LI Bus budget, the system “would literally be obliterated to almost nothing,” said Ryan Lynch, spokesman for the nonprofit Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which advocates for regional bus service.
The MTA already axed 11 Long Island Bus lines this year to save $1.6 million toward its $800-million deficit. Transit advocates say without the $40 million the MTA had been paying toward the system, LI Bus could afford to operate only a small number of its 47 current lines…
Nassau County, which owns LI Bus, pays just $9.1 million toward the agency’s $133 million budget. The state pays around $44 million, and the MTA and fare-paying customers pick up the rest of the tab. The Suffolk County Transit bus system received no financial aid from the MTA.
Out on the Island, transit advocates fear for the future of this vital service that keeps tens of thousands of cars off the roads. If these cuts go through and if the state and county do not foot the bill, entire bus routes could be lost. “[The cuts] would be a couple of routes here and there,” Lynch said. “It really raises the question as to whether Nassau County is even going to have a bus system anymore.”
Mitchell Pally, a Long Island representative on the MTA Board, hedged his bets. “The relationship between the MTA and Nassau County is continuing to be re-evaluated by both sides,” he said. “The ability to be able to come to an agreement is very, very important to everyone.”
While the Nassau County Executive slammed the MTA and the “job-killing payroll tax,” the truth remains that the MTA is paying far more to operate this service than Nassau County or the state of New York. Without operating assistance of higher fares, the service will not be feasible, and someone must step in to save it.
When the MTA cut bus service in Brooklyn, they restructured existing lines in such a way that often combined parts of two routes into one. For example, the B69, which used to run south along Prospect Park West and north along 8th Ave., now runs north and south along 7th Ave., sharing a road with the B67. By implementing this service change, the MTA could down on the frequency of both buses while ostensibly maintaining service levels on the busiest corridors — that is, 7th Ave. — of those routes. On paper the plan works, but on practice, it has ran into some problems.
As Ben Kochman in The Brooklyn Paper details today, the buses have been arriving not at all and then in bunches. Oftentimes, riders wait up to 10 minutes between buses during rush hour before both a B67 and a B69 show up at the same time. During the off-peak hours, with each bus set to come every 30 minutes, instead of four evenly spaced buses every 15 minutes, the bunching has led to very long wait times. I too have noticed this peculiarity as I’ve walked along 7th Ave.
For its part, the MTA cited “scheduling snags” in the weeks after the cuts as well as the vagaries of traffic, always an easy fallback for bus bunching excuses. A spokesperson said the authority will try to adjust bus times accordingly as the fallout from the service cuts just keeps on coming.
Reduced service on the Bx20 have left many Bronx residents paying two fares for their commutes.
As most straphangers come to terms with longer wait times and fewer seats on our post-service cut commutes, a few commuters who live in the harder-to-reach areas of New York City are finding life particularly tough in the post-cut environment. These are the people who once enjoyed bus service to the nearest subway but now must take a subway and a bus or two buses to reach a route that gets them to work. These are the people who have sufferd through service cuts only to be greeted with a de facto fare hike.
For the vast majority of those who are dependent upon the MTA, the fare hikes have resulted in less pleasant rides. As NY1 details today, the MTA’s new load guidelines have meant fewer, more crowded trains, and riders accustomed to a sit are finding themselves out of luck. “Forget about that,” Olmon Hairston said. “What seat? You have to be very strategic and find maybe the very back of the train or the very front of the train and position yourself in such a way so you can jockey for position.”
Those bemoaning about seats are the lucky ones. For many in the outer boroughs, the cost of travel just went up. Some riders have to pay two fares to cover the same distance. Clyde Haberman, with an assist from frequent SAS commenter Allan Rosen, explains the dual fare:
Allan Rosen, who worked for the authority for many years, called my attention to a little-discussed aspect of changes that led to the closing or altering of dozens of bus routes. Some New Yorkers may now be forced to pay double to get from Point A to Point B. They have in effect been placed in two-fare zones.
Until recently, for example, people traveling in Brooklyn from Bushwick to Crown Heights might have taken the B52 bus along Gates Avenue and transferred at Franklin Avenue to the B48, heading south toward Empire Boulevard. But the southbound B48 no longer goes that far. To get where they want, riders who transfer from the B52 to the B48 must switch again at Fulton Street to the B49, running on Bedford Avenue.
That means three buses. For those with per-ride MetroCards, that second transfer costs them an extra $2.25. Similar situations exist on other routes. Are vast numbers of riders affected? Probably not. “But the point isn’t how many people,” Mr. Rosen said. “It’s the fact that it’s unfair and no one should have to suffer like this.”
To a lesser extent, the same problem exists in Riverdale. Bronx residents no longer enjoy the Bx20 and now must either transfer to the Bx7 and pay again to board the A in Manhattan or take the bus to the 1 train to the A train, a rather lengthy trip from Riverdale.
Although few have solutions for this two-fare problem, watchdogs and other transit advocates are not happy with this turn of events. “It’s bad enough somebody has to transfer two times to get where they need to go. They shouldn’t have to pay two fares,” William Henderson, executive director of the MTA Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, said to New York 1.
For now, some of those riders can switch to unlimited ride MetroCards, but even that, based upon recent rumors, is a temporary solution. When the MTA implements a 90-ride cap on the cards early next year, the two-fare ride, a remnant of the pre-MetroCard days, will again become a reality. It is, as Haberman said, transit death by a thousand cuts.
Today, I hopped onto a J train at Chambers St. and took it to Broad St. to run an errand at lunch time. Even though the cavernous Chambers St. is in bad need of a rehab, I thought nothing of waiting on a mostly empty platform for a train I wouldn’t have dared ride alone (were I old enough) 20 years ago. The subways, as long-time New Yorkers are wont to say, have come a long way in a few decades and are no longer as closely associated with crime and a lack of safety as they once were.
New York’s subway renaissance has had two driving factors: capital investment pushing the system toward a state of better repair and more fare-payment and unlimited ride options that encourage ridership at all hours. By making the subways relatively cheaper for everyone and improving travel conditions and safety, suddenly, mass transit saw its ridership in New York City climb to near-record heights. Although a recent recession has slowed the ridership growth, the subways are safer and generally more reliable today than they have been in decades.
Yet, a storm is brewing as the MTA wants to scale back on unlimited ride MetroCards. While we don’t yet know how a 90-ride cap on 30-day cards will change ridership, the move hearkens back to another era, one when people weren’t keen on paying for every ride. At their Metropolis blog, the Wall Street Journal
A little less than a month after the Taxi and Limousine Commission revealed its plan to replace lost bus routes with dollar vans, the agency has unveiled five routes in Brooklyn and Queens that will serve as pilots for a potential citywide program. The TLC announced on Friday that they will soon be accepting solicitations for bids for passenger van service that covers routes once served by the B23, B71 and B39 in Brooklyn and the Q74 and Q79 in Queens. Specific drop-off and pick-up locations will be determined before the service is put in place on or around August 16.
Per the press release, the TLC plans for these rides to have a flat fare of $2 with clear DOT signage — perhaps old bus shelter? — demarcating route stops. The vans will carry between six and 20 passengers and will be licensed by the TLC with insurance requirements akin to current regulations for van and livery service providers.
“The TLC’s action today paves the road for a new form of service that we believe will be of great benefit to people affected by the MTA’s service reductions,” David Yassky, TLC commission, said. “One of the great advantages of having a comprehensive transportation network as we do in New York City is that it sometimes has the flexibility to serve people in new and better ways that never before existed, and this van program is a perfect example of this.”