MTA Absurdity

If anything ever deserved that MTA Absurdity tag I like to stick on posts, this is it.

According to news stories released on Tuesday, New York City Transit is holding back on a planned anti-groping ad campaign because officials fear it will encourage more deviant behavior than it would combat. That’s right; the MTA feels that by attempting to raise awareness of a serious issue they will serve only to encourage it.

Patrick Gallahue, transit reporter at the New York Post, has more about this odd story:

City transit officials have prepared a campaign to combat deviants who grope or molest women on the subway – but have been sitting on it because of fears the ads could actually encourage sickos.

The New York City Transit campaign was set into motion after a study last year by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer found that 10 percent of women surveyed reported having been sexually abused in the subway and 63 percent claimed to have been sexually harassed.

Stringer recommended a public awareness campaign, which NYC Transit quietly prepared. The agency made it as far as developing mock-ups, which never went to print. Sources said the agency held off on launching the campaign out of fear it could actually provoke deviant behavior.

As Jossip notes, wouldn’t the same logic preclude the MTA from releasing anti-terror ads? By urging people to combat suspicious subway behavior, we could be encouraging it. By trying to fight litter, might the MTA’s latest ad campaign simply remind people to litter even more frequently in the subways?

Subway assaults and groping is clearly a serious problem in the subways. The MTA shouldn’t belittle these concerns by refusing to run these ads and for such a flimsy reason. Just stick ’em up in the subways; groping incidents won’t increase.

Poster image from the MBTA’s anti-groping campaign in the Boston T.

With the number of delays caused by track files mounting by the year, New York City Transit is stepping up awareness efforts aimed at combating litter in the subways.

The new public service campaign — built around a fake newspaper this time instead of a real one — uses the Subway Gazette, a creation of NYC Transit, to stress the point that service delays caused by litter are completely preventable. In the ad, a rider of the 42nd St. Shuttle is seen reading the ad, and we the viewer just so happened to be engaged in that age-old subway tradition: We’re reading the newspaper over that paper’s owner’s shoulder.

The text of the Subway Gazette article is fairly technical. Using much of the same information contained in NYC Transit’s press release, the article is designed to draw attention to the mounting problem of track litter. As per the MTA:

The initial run highlights all of the problems that can arise when careless customers discard of trash improperly. When riders fail to hit that easy lay-up into platform trash receptacles, trash often ends up on the platform and then gets blown onto the roadbed by passing trains. Once on the tracks, trash can help spark track fires or clog drains along the roadbed and that can lead to flooding. Smoke conditions and flooding can and do lead to delays in train service and, in the case of fires, they can be downright dangerous.

The poster itself says, “Litter causes track fires. That’s bad news. Please put newspapers and other refuse in trash cans.” Seemingly in conjunction with this poster, the automated announcements on the newer subway cars have ramped up their anti-trash messages as well.

But with this campaign, many are wondering just how effective NYC Transit’s “Your Litter” ad campaign has been. As Sewell Chan noted on City Room, the MTA has been pushing this message since January, and track fires caused by litter are on the rise yet again. In fact, these types of delays have skyrocketed by 73 percent since 2003.

If the MTA is very concerned with these track-fire problems — and they are a legitimate problem — I have a solution that goes beyond PSAs and touches down in the realm of the draconian. Down in Washington, D.C., the WMATA does not allow eating or drinking in the Metro. They were able to implement and effectively enforce these rules through a few high-profile and unpopular incidents, including one involving a teenage girl and a basket of French Fries. It was an unpleasant PR nightmare, but it worked. No longer do people eat or drink on the Metro.

If the MTA and the NYPD were to collaborate on a litter-based sting — not involving 12-year-old girls — people would start to get the message. The MTA would take its flack for a few days, but how is that any different from the rest of the week? If it meant less litter, cleaner subways and track beds safe from the threat of smoke and fire, it would be tough to turn that offer down.

When last we checked in on the MTA’s escalator problem in May, a few local New York papers had documented rampant elevator outages throughout the subway system, and The New York Times had issued a stunning indictment of the MTA’s escalators and elevators. The Straphangers Campaign jumped on the bandwagon, urging New York City Transit to audit their escalators.

While the MTA shouldered much of the blame for the escalator outages, as the news came out, reporters discovered that a lot of the fault fell on the supposed operators of these escalators: the owners of the buildings. You see, when the MTA and private developers get together on real estate deals above subway stations, the MTA stipulates that the management companies are responsible for maintaining the subway entrances and the methods of egress. That includes escalators as stations such as, oh, Union Square.

That Union Square escalators — next to the Food Emporium on 14th St. — were the proverbial eye of this perfect storm. The escalators have long been out of service, and the people in charge of Zeckendorf Towers are supposed to be maintaining it. But as Curbed told us in April, the Buildings Department shut down the escalators last summer, and the Zeckendorfs have opted to do nothing about it. Until today.

This afternoon, Curbed posted the below photo:

That’s right; the Zeckendorfs are doing something. They’re taking what should be a perfectly functional escalator or at the very least a staircase and turning it into an entombed nothing all because they don’t want to invest the money to fix it. At the very least, they could turn the escalators, as one Curbed commenter suggests, back into a staircase. Then, straphangers wouldn’t be faced with a giant slide.

As far as I know, the MTA could probably file a breach of contract complaint. The management company is, after all, supposed to maintain and not close their escalators. Otherwise, we’d have a regular, full-sized entrance at the one of the subway system’s most popular stations. But then again, that would be a proactive solution to something plaguing the system.

And in a way, isn’t this symptomatic of the overarching problems plaguing the MTA? When faced with a problem in which even the law is on their side, the MTA hasn’t responded as they should. When these escalators when out of service, the MTA should have used their leverage to force the Zeckendorf Towers management to fix it. Instead, these escalators are just permanently out of service, another sign of an agency — this one private — taking the MTA for a ride.

I’ve had a busy few days at the good ol’, bill-payin’ day job. So I had no chance to draw your attention to a lovely story yesterday morning in the New York Post proclaiming subway delays up 44 percent. Now, on the one hand, that’s a shocking number, but on the other hand, as anyone who ever rides the subways on a regular basis could tell you, this is about as big a “duh” story as one could find these days.

According to this nifty graphic, track work — with 4,117 citations — is the leading cause of train delays, and that number has nearly doubled from 2007’s 2,093 delays. While people holding doors — the number two cause — will always be a subway scourge, this news reflects nothing but the latest facts about the MTA. As budgets sag, construction projects get held up and that elusive state of good repair slips away.

The story in the Post doesn’t get into the why of construction-related delays. It similar features some rote comments from MTA officials unhappy with their numbers and unhappy with what Board member Mark Lebow termed a “lack of supervision of what goes on underground.” Outrageous as these numbers might be, breaking news it ain’t.

Thursday will long be a day that David Mack tries to forget.

It started out with a ridiculous and clueless comment about the potential end of the MTA Board perks. Mack decided to share his belief that he, an MTA Board member tasked with improving public transportation, is inconvenienced by public transit and would cut back on his five to ten trips a year on LIRR if he were to lose his free ride privilege. This is, of course, came from the mouth of a multimillionaire real estate developer.

As shocked transit advocates and various officials picked up the story, Mack’s comments and the fact that the MTA Board would potentially vote down MTA Chair Dale Hemmerdinger’s proposal to curb the perks program snowballed. During the day, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, already on record as skeptical of the legality of the perks, announced his intentions to take the MTA Board to court to force a resolution to this issue. Gov. David Patterson chimed in as well, expressing his deep disappointment and anger with the MTA Board over this issue.

And then, Mack caved in. He released the following statement (via The Daily Politics):

“I regret that my comments yesterday did not reflect my commitment to the MTA and the work it does to provide the best public transportation system in the United States. My colleagues on the board are dedicated to keeping fares low, services efficient and continue to look for ways to make improvements to the system. I am proud to serve on this board, and I support Chairman Hemmerdinger and his policies. I plan to vote next week in support of changing our policies so that free passes for our transportation systems are used only by current board members, who are on official MTA business.”

So what happened? Well, clearly some combination of Patterson’s extreme displeasure and Cuomo’s legal maneuverings caused Mack to have a change of heart. But at this point, I’m not inclined to believe the sincerity of the words coming of his mouth, and I don’t believe he’s serving the MTA Board in good faith. I don’t see how we can trust him to be one of the key people in charge of transit policy for the nearly 18,000,000 Metropolitan Area residents relying on the MTA for their transit needs.

In the end, this problem runs deeper than Mack. In fact, loyal SAS reader Boris, in a comment here yesterday, nailed it: “It is appropriate for a for-profit corporation to have rich people on its board, because they know something about money and help the company make more of it. But the point of the MTA, as only a few of the MTA board members understand, apparently, is not to make money, but to provide transit services. This is the problem here.”

One day, something will give. The MTA Board needs an overhaul, but I don’t think Gov. Patterson is in a position to begin a takeover. Perhaps the pro-transit forces on the board — the knowledgeable people who have faith in transit and aren’t Pataki-era kickback appointees — can force out some of the board members who have less than pure motives for holding their board seats. None of this, however, will happen overnight.

For now, we’ll just have to be satisfied with the end of E-ZPass-gate and watch as the MTA Board votes down their own free perks. I hope Mr. Mack can manage those train fares once every five and a half weeks.