MTA Absurdity

Remember the tale from last week of Aaron Goldberg? He was the man ticketed on a Select Bus Service bus because he had no proof of payment due to the MTA’s faulty equipment. Today, NY1 has a follow up, and Goldberg’s tale, at the least, has a happy ending: His ticket was dismissed.

However, Goldberg is just one in a sea of people battling the Transit Adjudication Bureau, and as NY1 notes in its report, others were not so lucky. Goldberg had a TV news station on its side, but others went to their TAB hearings only to find out they had to produce even more evidence. To make matters worse, the evidence is usually available only from the MTA, the organization prosecuting these people in the first place. “I am going to have to wait for them to send another appointment in the mail. Then they’re going to give me the paperwork to send to transit, which is going to take me a month to get. It’s frustrating,” Sharone Lott, another summons victim, said.

NY1 also spoke with civil liberties attorneys who echoed what I’ve heard before: There are serious doubts about the legalities of the TAB. From evidentiary standards to open access to the timeliness of the procedure, lawyers are working to create a more balanced adjudication process that better fits the U.S. judicial system. “Don’t get a summons, because you don’t want to be going down to that place, because once you go down there, you’re probably not going to understand what’s going on,” Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the NYCLU, said. “The deck is going to be stacked against you, and it’s just a very dark and mysterious process.”

There’s no job security quite like working for the MTA. Take, for instance, this tale from today’s Daily News. Edward Meehan, an express bus driver on Staten Island who lives in New Jersey, just earned himself his 15th suspension for violating MTA rules. This time, the authority placed on leave without pay when he used his express bus as, in the words of Pete Donohue and Kerry Wills, “as a private lounge to meet a lady friend while on duty.” His previous suspensions were for speeding, running red lights and various other traffic infractions.

Meehan claims nothing illicit happened in the bus. He says he’s happily married and was just meeting his friend to talk. But he isn’t denying that he said his X22 was delayed an hour because of traffic. He also filed for overtime pay for the time he spent sitting in his bus with his lady friend. “He claims they were just talking,” one source said. “He said he was going through a hard time and she’s a friend.” According to a report by Barry Kluger, the MTA Inspector General, Meehan met with this woman in his bus at least three times in April.

The MTA will now try to fire Meehan, but they have gone down this road before. In 2008, after the MTA moved to fire him for “gross negligence” following numerous speeding incidents, an arbitrator reduced the penalty to 25 days without pay. That’s a slap on the wrists, and it certainly makes me think that there’s no job security quite like having a gig with the authority.

For years, the MTA has struggled with its escalators. At stations that are deep underground, the moving staircases — which operate for 24 hours and take quite a beating — break regularly, and when they do, repairs are often slow to come. Today, we arrive at 181st St. where one of the the lengthy escalators has been broken since February. Then earlier this week, the second escalator broke, and suddenly straphangers had to hike up and down the staircases.

For residents of the area, broken escalators in Washington Heights are, in fact, the norm. NY1 reports that the MTA says these escalators work less than half of the time. “I moved to this neighborhood in 2006, and it’s been going on since,” one subway rider said. The first escalator was repaired fairly quickly, but the one out since February remains entombed in a wooden box.

The MTA offered up an array of excuses. As Tina Redwine reports, “MTA officials said the problem with the 181st Street escalator is that workers needed to disassemble heavy equipment, one piece weighing up to 2500 pounds, in order to send the escalator out for repair. Then it has to be reinstalled and tested.” It will be another 10 weeks at least, and the authority said that this timeline is “not good enough.” Still, as we’ve seen at Lexington at 53rd St. and countless stations around the system, broken escalators are the norm far more often than they should be.

Did you hear the one about the chain-link fence company submitting bogus work claims? That’s the focus of Pete Donohue’s column today, and the story is an odd one. Apparently, the MTA contracted with Long Island-based the American Chain Link & Construction company in the “early 2000s” to provide fencing around various transit properties. The company submitted invoice “devoid of any backup documentation to explain what expenses the company had incurred for such things as materials, equipment rentals and labor, according to the inspector general’s office” and got paid anyway.

At some point, the MTA Inspector General got wind of the fraud and began investigating. Only 14 of 100 invoices had enough detail to allow the IG to examine the work, and all but one of those were deemed fraudulent. Suffolk County authorities claim the lack of documentation meant they could pinpoint only $31,000 in fraudulent charges while the case settled for a guilty plea and the forfeiture of $60,000 the MTA still owes American. Donohue even mentions that “bus managers in the same transit agency, meanwhile, routinely challenged American’s bills and paid less than what the company initially sought.” What a strange story.

An MTA Bus manager is facing disciplinary charges for steering nearing $2 million worth of bus supplies contracts to businesses owned by his family, The New York Post reported this weekend. Dean Carbonaro, a bus manager who The Post says chews on cigars and watches “Jerry Springer” while at work at a Bronx bus depot, has approved parts contracts for well above market value so that his family could benefit, an investigation revealed. “Obviously, this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated. Employees can’t seek to benefit family or friends from any of their work activities,” Barry Kluger, inspector general, said.

According to those who work at Carbonaro’s Zarega Maintenance Facility, the boss would instruct his workers to replace bus panels even if the vehicles were in working order. “Shop foremen would say they didn’t need the panels, but Carbonaro told them to put them on. They couldn’t believe it,” one mechanic said to The Post. For its part, the MTA simply said Carbonaro has been “served with disciplinary charges.” I wonder what he would have to do to lose his job.

Today’s injured passenger lawsuit is brought to you by the letter G. Meet Jonathan Lynn. Last August, he attempted to board a G train at Classon Ave. only to find that the doors were shutting. He made that mad dash down the platform, stuck his arm into an open door and found himself being dragged by the train. After suffering a series of horrific injuries, including multiple arm fractures, he is suing the MTA and the train’s operators.

In the Daily News article, Lynn at first claims the train’s operator waved him along, but he later seems to contradict that statement. “I didn’t think it was real. [I thought] the door’s going to open, he’s going to stop, he’s going to hear me,” Lynn said. “I bounced off one of the pillars, hit my head and that’s the extent of my memory.”

If it sounds fishy to you, it certainly does to me. I’m guessing Lynn tried to board a train right as it was closing, the conductor failed to see him in time and the driver started the train. As a poll attached to The Daily News article shows, already people are overreacting to an injury that is likely partially the fault of the victim as well. People will rabble for more safety precautions; politicians will wring their hands; and the case will settle. The lesson here: Just wait for the next train. It’s never that far away.

When Mayor Bloomberg two weeks ago announced that there aren’t very many panhandlers left in the subway, he drew the ire of, well, most straphangers and homeless advocates across New York. Panhandling, as anyone who rides the subway knows, is alive and well underground. Beggars, musicians, kids selling candy: you name it, and it’s there. Yesterday, though, MTA head Jay Walder tried to clarify Bloomberg’s comments, and his point is a valid one.

While speaking with reporters after yesterday’s MTA Board, Walder addressed panhandling. He noted that “panhandlers are certainly something that you do see in the system” but allowed for a decrease in numbers lately. “When you compare the situations that you see in the subway today with the situations that some of us will remember from a number of years ago, I think the conditions in the subway today are very, very different,” he said. “I think the N.Y.P.D. has done an excellent job at being able to control and try to deal with this. I would not say that it has been eliminated; I think that is certainly not the case. But I don’t think equally that you can compare what we see today to what you might have seen 30 years ago on the subway.”

It’s tough to deny that panhandling and the presence of homeless people in the subway is has decreased lately, but it’s certainly a problem. Homeless people living in stations create unsafe conditions, and panhandlers of varying degree are a near-daily sight in the subway. As the system is open, cheap and warm, those without reliable shelters will continue to seek safety and change underground. Until the city provides better options, panhandling will be a fact of life underground no matter what the mayor says.