MTA Absurdity

At 14th St., the new signs express how many feel about the MTA’s upcoming service cuts. (Photo courtesy of Twitter user @kc2hmv)

Back in March, as the MTA announced the impending end of the short-lived V train, we remembered its origins in what was at the time a rather innocuous post. The comments to that post predicted the future though, and this week, the MTA is finally realizing what happens when Internet humor and sign changes mix.

As we discussed the V train, we started pondering how the new signs would read. As I said then, “The [new] FML combination at 6th Ave. and 14th St. is my favorite.” Because the MTA groups its subway bullets via trunk line on all of its signage — hence, ACE BDFM at West 4th St. — the signs at 14th St. where the L stops at 6th Ave. would all read FML, or Internet shorthand for, well, you know.

“Oh man, FML is priceless,” frequent SAS commenter AK said in March. “It is particularly apt for those poor souls on the 1,2,3, who get off at 14th believing there is an easy transfer only to find out that the transfer requires a 1100-foot walk. FML indeed.”

This little bit of online humor was all well and good in March, but apparently, no one was paying attention at the MTA. Over the weekend, as the new bullets went up at 14th St., the Sixth Ave. local/BMT Canarsie line combo signs all read FML. Immediately, New York City-based blogs, those bastions of maturity, had a field day with Transit’s profanity-laden gaffe. Take a peak at City Room or CNet or the Huffington Post or The Village Voice or Guest of a Guest or DNA Info. Ha. Ha. Ha.

By the end of the day, the MTA had already promised to change the sign. Apparently, juvenile Internet humor that relatively few riders will understand runs policy over at Transit. “As soon as we became aware of it, we were going to change it,” Charles Seaton, an agency spokesman, said to The Times. “We thought there was a certain population out there who might recognize it, even though we didn’t, obviously.”

Transit claims the costs will be low because the new signs will simply involve rearranging cheap vinyl stickers. Generally, the L will move to one side or another, and the signs will either say LFM one one line or feature two rows of bullets with the L under FM. The FML fiasco will be lost to transit lore. What makes this whole saga particularly absurd, though, is the fact that, according to Transit, the blogger outrage forced them to make the change. No rider had complained; a few had probably chuckled; but only the blogs had noticed, said Seaton. When the Internet denizens of New York picked up on something that was, three months ago, a faux pas waiting to happen, a change had to be made. If only Albany would respond that quickly to New Yorkers’ demands about their transit system, then perhaps we wouldn’t be suffering through service changes at all.

While we’re on the subject….

Since we’re nitpicking Transit’s new approach to signage by public fiat and the trials and travails of the new Sixth Ave.-bound M train, I wanted to take a minute to bring up something that’s been bugging me about the new map. Take a look at this section:

Now, as I noted above, the MTA’s practice in the past has been to group subway bullets at train stations and on the maps by trunk line. It helps riders understand which platforms they want and where particular subway routes go. But when the MTA released the new map a few weeks ago, the six stations the M will soon share with the J and Z violated that convention. Instead of listing the trains as the J/Z/M with the two Nassua St. routes grouped together, the old J/M/Z alphabetic listing ruled the day. It should not.

Either the M should be on the other side of the lines from the J/Z bullets or the M should precede or follow the brown lines. Anything else is just inconsistent. Or as the mapmakers might say, FML.

A well-placed vest can deter a parking ticket. (Photo via the Daily News)

Over the last few years, a handful of politicians and livable streets advocates have tried to pressure the NYPD into cracking down on parking placard abuse. Too often do people believe they can illegally by flashing some official-looking document. Whether those documents are legit or homemade, the drivers often should not be using the placards in such a manner, and pedestrians and those looking for legal parking spots lose out.

Today, the Daily News reports that MTA employees have gotten in on the act by placing their vests in their car windshields in order to signal to parking enforcers. Of course, it takes two to tango, and the parking enforcement agents shouldn’t allow a simple vest to deter them from writing up an illegally parked car. That hasn’t, however, stopped too many enforcement agents from turning a blind eye. Joe Kemp has more:

Just because you work for the government doesn’t mean you get to park for free, but try telling that to one Queens neighborhood.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees that use their orange safety vests to dodge parking fees in municipal lots have long aggravated motorists fighting for a space on a busy Astoria block. And the bright-colored apparel, which bear the MTA logo, on the dashboards of parked vehicles help avoid hefty fines from traffic agents, locals said.

But the free ride may soon be over. A city councilman is calling for the city to start ticketing the illegally parked cars. “The city is taking placards away from people who legitimately need them,” said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria). “While their agents are overlooking orange vests in the windshield, which is completely unfair.”

It is at least somewhat comforting to see a politician speaking out against this practice, but Vallone is hardly being pro-pedestrian. He just wants those who have legitimate placards to have a place to use them. In my opinion, the city should rescind every placard and begin reissuing them with far more stringent criteria, but that’s neither here nor there right now.

For its part, the MTA said this practice of using vests for parking should be stopped. “We do not condone this practice of using the vests as a parking placard,” Deirdre Parker, a Transit spokesperson, said to the News. “Anyone who does this should be ticketed like anyone else who violates the law.”

The walls of the new South Ferry station, shown here in December 2008, have sprung a leak. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

As the MTA Inspector General yesterday took the authority to task for glossing over its contracting evaluation guidelines, today, we see a prime example of work gone wrong underground. The new South Ferry terminal on the 1 line — a $527 million that has been open for less than a year — has sprung a leak, and according to reports, shoddy waterproofing by the project’s contractors as well as some design failures on behalf of the MTA are to blame.

According to amNew York’s Heather Haddon, the station is already showing an age well beyond its years, and her piece has a photo prove it. She reports of water-stained platform and mezzanine walls as well as tiles falling after the grouting has been corroded. Bad engineering, she says, is to blame. Reports Haddon:

The contractor, Schiavone Construction of Secaucus, botched the waterproofing for the station, which is located deep under the water table, according to the MTA’s independent engineer. For its part, Schiavone claimed that the MTA had flubbed the project’s design. An independent dispute board ruled last year that both parties were at fault and must share costs for the remediation…

Schiavone did not return a request for comment. Next month, the MTA will grout and add new tiles to the station with $3 million, which came from the contractor as part of the settlement, agency spokesman Kevin Ortiz said. The grouting should cure the problem, he said…

But the leaking could continue, as workers will basically fill in joint cracks instead of reengineering the station with better waterproofing technology, Henderson said.

Ortiz further clarified the agency’s approach to this problem to me in an email this afternoon. “We are monitoring the level of seasonal infiltration and will begin any necessary repairs in March during scheduled General Orders to avoid utilizing funds from the settlement for the diversions and to limit the impact on service,” he said.

For the MTA, water damage has been a source of aesthetic issues at numerous stations throughout the system. The walls on the downtown 2/5 platform, for instance, at 149th St./Grand Concourse station have long carried the scars of damage from water dripping out of corroded platforms. In other areas, wall tilings bulge from the pressure of bad waterproofing. Here, a $527 million project that was delayed due to a gap between the trains and the platform and has been plagued with some problems is the latest to carry those scars. Even the newest crown jewels can’t escape the problems of system more than 100 years old.

In complementary released yesterday, the MTA Inspector General exposed how contractors hired by the MTA are often given better evaluations than their work suggests so that the agency can maintain business ties with these bidders. For its part, agency heads say the MTA will follow the IG’s recommendations in an effort to improve its business practices.

The reports — available as PDF files here and here — find that the All-Agency Contractor Evaluation program, set up to “screen vendors will poor performance histories,” has not fulfilled that role. The fault, says Barry Kluger, is due in part to managers who are looking to curry favor with the MTA’s long-term clients. Wrote the IG:

Our interviews with managers responsible for implementing NYC Transit’s capital program provided an explanation for these deficiencies: an institutional reluctance, for a variety of reasons, to rate contractors’ work as Unsatisfactory, even when such ratings are the most appropriate.

One particularly disturbing reason given by many of these managers is that they felt pressure to upgrade ratings of Unsatisfactory to prevent important agency contractors from being precluded from bidding on future work – even though under the rules such ratings do not automatically preclude such bidding. In these cases, the managers sometimes allowed what they perceived to be agency “business decisions” to override their true assessments of contractor performance. By doing so, though, they effectively usurped the power and duty of MTA’s General Counsel, Executive Director and Board to adequately review and properly accept or reject contract awards in the future.

The examples in the reports are not unexpected. As Michael Grynbaum, who covered these findings for The Times, highlights, “managers at the Long Island Rail Road waited more than nine months to grade one vendor, DMJM & Harris, as unsatisfactory, after the firm’s work on a 2005 environmental consulting contract was deemed deficient. In the interim, that vendor received five more contracts worth nearly $25 million from New York City Transit, Metro-North Railroad, and the authority’s bridges and tunnels division; none of those other agencies were aware of any problems with the firm.”

Another egregious example of questionable ratings involves Siemens, the company originally selected to update subway signaling technology. Writes Grynbaum: “Under official guidelines, Siemens should have received an unsatisfactory rating. But a top official at New York City Transit instructed managers to instead assign a rating of “marginal,” a higher mark, because of business considerations.” We all get the point.

In response, the MTA has agreed to implement a series of measures designed to better evaluate and assess contractor performance and better oversee those issuing the ratings. “Too often we have let our contractors slide when they fail to perform, and that is why we have accepted the I.G.’s recommendations and are working to implement them,” Jay Walder, MTA CEO and Chairman, said.

For Walder, this report is but the tip of the iceberg of the inefficiencies he plans to combat. It’s a rather in-the-box example of how the MTA’s business practices are run with less oversight than they should have, and it’s a prime way Walder can restore both transparency and accountability to the agency’s contracting. I don’t want to be too cynical about Kluger’s findings or Walder’s commitment to improving the way the agency conducts business, but this is indicative of the organizational problems Walder must solve.