For only the second time since 1978, New York faces a state-wide election without a Cuomo running for office. It’s an opportunity for the state to move past the tedium of the Andrew Cuomo years and the imperial governance of one man who would broker no dissent and often failed to encourage or allow hand-picked experts who may have known better to lead. While the current race between Kathy Hochul and Lee Zeldin may not represent the best the Empire State can offer, when it comes to transit, there is only choice in this race, and that choice is Kathy Hochul.
Hochul is an unlikely transit-focused candidate. She’s a Buffalo native, chosen to be Cuomo’s Lieutenant Governor as a sop to upstate voters, and she found herself thrust into the position when Cuomo resigned in 2021. On the transit front, she had to untangle an unstable mess left to her by her predecessor, and she’s succeeded in ways that make me believe she’ll be a stabilizing force for transit in the NYC region and a driver of growth as well.
As governor, Hochul has done what Cuomo failed to do: First, she brought stability to the upper echelons of MTA leadership. While Cuomo presided over a revolving door of agency CEOs and presidents, Hochul chose Janno Lieber, a dedicated, smart and competent official to lead the MTA without her interference. She has given him her support to lead the agency, make decisions regarding transit personnel and growth, and empowered him to change the conversation regarding transit funding, treating the system as a public service rather than a political piñata constantly facing budget cuts and fare hikes. On safety, upon the rest of Mayor Eric Adams, Hochul helped deploy extra MTA police officers to areas where the NYPD could not staff the transit division quickly enough, and the move paid dividends with the MTA itself touting recent declines in crime. In the past, New York Governors were loathe to work with city officials and often used the MTA as a political chit, holding transit riders hostage.
Outside of the day-to-day operations of the MTA, Hochul has shown a willingness to plan carefully and listen to people who know more than she does. She ditched Cuomo’s useless Backwards AirTrain, and instead of demanding experts bend to her whims, in championing the Interborough Express, she listened to planners who have meticulously crafted a case for a circumferential subway line, a true game-changer for disconnected parts of Brooklyn and Queens. On congestion pricing – a program that will unclog Manhattan streets while generating the revenue needed to launch the MTA’s $50 billion capital plan – she has taken political heat while continuing to support the traffic fee. Thanks to stonewalling at the federal level, congestion pricing may not be moving as fast as many New Yorkers had hoped, but Hochul has stood firm in the face of political calls to cut the fee.
Opposing Hochul is Lee Zeldin, a Long Island State Senator-turned-Congressional representative, who has no transit plan and has a documented history of hostility toward transit. While in the State Senate, he opposed the Payroll Mobility Tax, a measure that staved off the MTA’s fiscal collapse in 2010, and as a candidate, he has offered no vision for transit. He has spoken about stopping congestion pricing and claims, without basis in fact, that more fare enforcement can generate enough revenue for the MTA to plug all of its budget holes. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the issue can explain why fare enforcement alone, which itself costs significant money, cannot solve the MTA’s financial woes, and with the MTA facing a multi-billion-dollar fiscal cliff over the next few years, a governor with no plan to support transit is a governor inviting a crushing crisis for New York State and New York City. (Jose Martinez of The Cityfurther explored how a Zeldin administration could spell doom for the MTA.)
Even on crime, the issue on which Zeldin is trying to stake his campaign, he hasn’t offered a vision for improved safety. He talks about deposing a duly elected District Attorney and declaring a “state of emergency,” which is symbolic at best. But he has not provided concrete details how he will handle the mental health crisis driving much of the crime or how he will improve the shelter system so fewer New Yorkers are sleeping in the subways (itself not a crime, but a clear driver of the way many New Yorkers perceive public order). Hochul has ushered in new homelessness response teams and the rapid deployment of cops throughout the subways over the past few weeks has shown early success. The MTA recently announced a day with over 3.7 million riders and just four major felonies throughout the system, all robberies and all resulting in arrests.
With early voting behind us, this endorsement is arriving late in the game. I have a newborn at home and have been focusing on my daughter lately. But for many, the day to vote is Tuesday, and if you are thinking about the future of transit investment, transit expansion and transit’s economic health in New York State, the only candidate worth your vote is Kathy Hochul.
MTA transit fares will not increase for the the foreseeable future., the governor announced earlier this week. (Photo: MTA / Jessie Mislavsky)
In a boon for riders, the MTA is ending 2021 much as it began the year: by delaying a planned fare hike for at least six months and putting off planned service cuts indefinitely. The news, first announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul and later clarified by MTA Acting Chair and CEO Janno Lieber, will come as welcome news as subway riders continue to return to the system and came about due to various federal COVID relief bills.
Hochul first announced the pause on Monday before flying to DC to joint President Joe Biden for the signing ceremony of the infrastructure bill, and she made it sound as though the BIF was the cause of the pause. She said:
We’ve done the numbers. And as a result of the money we’ll be receiving from the president signing the bill today, I’ll be witnessing this. We anticipate that there’ll be no fare hikes for the MTA. So therefore, those of you who are commuters on the MTA and have been anxious about how much this is going to go up, especially in this era of inflation, when it just seems when you’re just trying to get your head above water and come out from under a long dark period of the pandemic, and you might get a little bit more money in your paycheck, that the cost of living from gasoline to the cost of turkeys in another week and a half, this is really affecting people’s ability to just put food on their table. And I’m really excited to say that we will not have to raise the fairs or have any service cuts. The service cuts that were planned for 2023 and 2024 are now off the table for MTA commuters.
The MTA later clarified that the delay in any fare hikes and the indefinite postponement of service cuts is due more to COVID relief bills rather than the recent infrastructure deal, but either way, riders are the ones who stand to benefit. In comments on Monday to reporters during the MTA Board committee meetings, Lieber added context to Hochul’s promise. The MTA will delay any consideration of fare hikes for at least six months, if not longer, and the service cuts are no longer part of the agency’s budget projections. “We are not planning to reinstitute those hearings and that process,” Lieber said of the fare hikes, once planned for 2021. “For now, fare hikes are off the table; service cuts are off the table…We do not want to discourage people from coming back by raising the fares.”
For the budget wonks among us, Lieber explained how the various COVID and infrastructure bills allowed the MTA to halt these harmful cost increases and service reductions. Effectively, since the BIF enables the MTA to receive more money directly, the agency does not have to borrow as much to fund its capital plan. The debt payments associated with capital borrowing are applied to the operating budget so more direct funding means less deficit funding. Additionally, a few days ago, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut finally reached agreement on COVID relief funding for transit, and the MTA no longer has to borrow against future revenues to ensure cash flow remains consistent. Thus, the agency had the financial leeway to hold off on fare hikes for now and defer service cuts for the next few years.
Reading the political tea leaves allows us to catch a glimpse of when the agency may reconsider fare hikes, and it’s very unlikely to be during 2022. Lieber told reporters that fare hikes could be implemented “in theory” over the summer or in October, but that would align fare hikes with votes in a hotly-contested gubernatorial primary or general election next year. Hochul, fighting for a term of her own, is not going to permit the MTA to raise fares before she secures her seat, and Lieber and the MTA are more than willing to go along with their boss’ plan. “We are,” Lieber said, “taking fare hikes off the table for at least six months and maybe well beyond that.”
What happens beyond the election in 2022 is anyone’s guess. MTA leadership has not been shy in noting that the COVID relief money is driving this policy. “The deficit is looming because of COVID when the Washington money runs out,” Lieber said, and he wants the legislature to come up with a funding plan that isn’t as heavily reliant on ridership as the MTA’s current projections. After all, COVID took a huge bite out of ridership, and the MTA — which must balance its budget by law — doesn’t want to cut service or raise fares as it works to rebuild its rider base. Currently, weekday ridership is around 55-58% of what it was before the pandemic, and the agency does not expect another big bump until early January when more commuters return to their offices. Thus, ridership revenue will continue to lag as it has since March 2020, and the state, the MTA says, should find more equitable ways to fund transit that do not fall so heavily on the wallets of passengers.
That’s a discussion that will have to unfold over the next few months and years. For now, as the MTA freezes fares, I ask is this good policy? And is this good politics? By freezing fares, the MTA is foregoing approximately $200 million in additional revenue that could be used to further pay down past debts or finance operations. As the money isn’t a 1-for-1 replacement from the feds, the MTA, through a decision by the Governor, is foregoing this added revenue. In a vacuum, this may not be great policy, but it’s very good politics.
While you or I may ride the subways regularly, the MTA still must work to convince New Yorkers to come back to transit. Those missing 40% of riders — which can amount to 2 or 2.5 million swipes every day — won’t come back by themselves, and the MTA will have to work for it. As many riders remain essential workers who never left the system and others look at various options, the MTA is wise to keep fares down, as they were earlier this year when they delayed the fare hike in January. The agency isn’t about to reduce fares as some cities have done, but not raising the rates at a time when service isn’t better and riders need to have faith in the subway is good politics.
It’s also good personal politics for a politician to avoid fare raises during an election year. While the MTA was founded to remove politics from fare decisions, we saw during Andrew Cuomo’s reign just how easy it is to politicize transit. If Hochul wants to do us all a favor by keeping fares where they are for another year, I won’t look this gift horse any more closely in the mouth than I already have.
And so the fares remain the same. More importantly, the service cuts, which would exacerbate a death spiral, remain off the table, and the MTA continues along, bending to the will of the governor who is in control and allow the public some measure of relief as New York continues its late-COVID rebound.
Kathy Hochul took the subway from midtown to Harlem earlier this month because it was the quickest way to go, her comms team said. (Photo via Bryan Lesswing)
With Andrew Cuomo out of the picture and his infrastructure legacy receding with him, our attention turns to Kathy Hochul. The new governor hails from Buffalo and is the first Upstater to live in the Executive Mansion since the 1920s. This may be a blessing for the NYC region as Hochul doesn’t come with a long history of, say, MTA animosity or the auto-centric policies of some suburban politicians.
After years of heavy-handed, ego-driven interference with MTA operations from Cuomo, New Yorkers are looking for signs from Hochul that change is on the way, and so far, the new governor has been saying all the right things. “The MTA is going to be far more liberated,” Hochul said to NY1’s Errol Louis during Thursday’s Inside City Hall. “I will not be filling positions with political allies because there’s a lot of talent out there and I want a diverse population, representing the riders, which is a diverse population.”
But words are just promises that need to be fulfilled. It’s only the first week of the Hochul Administration during the doldrums of August, and the new governor is still getting her sea legs. Plus, Hochul may be only a steward for the next year. She’ll be in office for only 12 months before facing a wide-open primary next year, and the jockeying for a four-year term may limit her power. So with politics in New York very much up in the air, Hochul’s first actions on transportation are still to come.
In the meantime, I have my own thoughts on what she could do. So without further ado, a ‘to do’ list for the new governor.
Pledge MTA Leadership Stability
To say turnover was high at the MTA during Gov. Cuomo’s time in office is an understatement. I put together a list of all the people to serve as either MTA head or New York City Transit President during the ten years, seven months and 23 days of Cuomo Administration, and you can see why leadership continuity and righting the MTA’s ship have often felt impossible over the past decade.
MTA Chair & CEO
New York City Transit President
Janno Lieber (Acting)
Craig Cipriano (Interim)
Pat Foye
Sarah Feinberg (Interim)
Fernando Ferrer (Interim)
Andy Byford
Joe Lhota
Phil Eng (Acting)
Fernando Ferrer (Interim)
Tim Mulligan (Acting)
Tom Prendergast
Darryl Irick (Interim)
Fernando Ferrer (Interim)
Ronnie Hakim
Joe Lhota
James Ferrara (Interim)
Jay Walder (nominated by Paterson)
Carmen Bianco
Tom Prendergast (nominated by Paterson)
The MTA has careened from one leader to the next with few spending enough time to implement reform or long-term strategic planning. For her part, Hochul should commit to stability atop the MTA. She should swiftly move to install Janno Lieber as the permanent head of the MTA, as she has indicated she is likely to do, and she should consider Alon Levy’s advice in hunting for agency heads: Look outside the U.S. for leadership; consult with Andy Byford on potential NYC Transit presidents; and give a good, long look to candidates outside of the Anglosphere.
Again, she’s saying the right things. In an interview with The New York Times, Hochul discussed her relationship with the MTA and struck a different chord than Cuomo’s heavy-handed interference. “Authority doesn’t have to be concentrated in me when I’m hiring outstanding professionals who know their jobs,” she said, in a veiled reference to the failed Byford-Cuomo relationship. “I will be there if there’s something that’s not following what I want. But I also know that day to day, they’re the ones that have to be accountable. Accountable to the riders, accountable to me. But I also know that granting more freedom allows them to rise.”
But even here, Hochul may not be able to bring the stability the MTA needs to chart a multi-year course. She almost immediately has to face an election campaign, and while she will enjoy an incumbency advantage, she’s going to have to beat more well-known candidates to earn her own term. If she loses, the next governor will likely want to appoint his or her own MTA heads, thus continuing this leadership upheaval in the short term. Anyone who fits Levy’s bill or may be inclined to take on the task of leading New York City Transit may not want to do so until the gubernatorial election is settled. Still, if Hochul can commit to stability and a proper relationship with her MTA heads, that’s a step in the right direction.
Clean House at the MTA Board: Get Rid of the Cuomo Holdovers
The MTA Board will be much better off when Larry Schwartz and other Cuomo holdovers are removed.
While we all acknowledge the governor of New York controls the MTA and can do with the agency as he pleases, the way Andrew Cuomo interacted with his own MTA heads sometimes sounds unbelievable. Cuomo would name his own agency heads and then appoint Board members whose main responsibilities involved inserting themselves into day-to-day MTA operations, essentially as the Governor’s enforcers/spies to undermine the agency heads. The worst of this was the Larry Schwartz/Andy Byford dynamic, and it led to animosity among MTA leaders and fear among the rank-and-file that the governor’s right-hand man would show up with demands out of left field, usually unreasonable.
The next MTA Board meeting isn’t until late September, and not a single one of Cuomo’s appointees should still be on the Board for that meeting. Already, Linda Lacewell, Cuomo’s former head of the Department of Financial Services, stepped down from the Board when she resigned from her position, but Cuomo’s other appointees remain. Jamey Barbars (one of the few Cuomo Board appointees with actual transportation experience), Haeda Milhaltses and Robert Mujica have said nothing, but Schwartz has defiantly said he’ll stay on the Board until Hochul kicks him off.
Claiming he did nothing wrong (despite being named in Tish James’ report numerous times and separately being accused of threatening county leaders to support Cuomo or risk their vaccine supply), Schwartz told The Post he will not leave “on my own.”
“I’ve been looking for over two years to get off, so I’m not looking to stay on,” he said. “But I will do the right thing. If they feel I can be a help short term, or long term, we can talk about it. I’ll do whatever the new administration wants. They’re aware.”
Schwartz has constantly used his Board position to bolster Cuomo and undermine those willing to show an ounce of independence so the claim he’s been looking to leave for two years doesn’t pass the smell test. Either way, he may soon get his wish.
“I’m committed to ensuring that the people named in the attorney general’s report will no longer serve in my administration,” Hochul said when asked last week about MTA Board holdovers. “I’ve asked for a 45-day period. Some individuals will be gone sooner than that. Many have already been removed or left on their own because they knew they were not going to be in my administration…I’ll be naming a whole slate of new people to fill those soon-to-be vacant positions and make sure entities like the MTA are free from interference, from political influences and also to make sure we have the best talent. So I would just say, stay tuned.”
Stay tuned we will, but if Schwartz and Co. are at next month’s MTA Board meeting, something will have gone horribly wrong.
Speed up congestion pricing
The MTA recently announced a rather lengthy review process for congestion pricing that could delay implementation of the fee for nearly two years. The agency first must conduct public hearings, scheduled to begin in September, prepare the Environmental Analysis and then bid out the infrastructure required to toll Manhattan’s Central Business District. Meanwhile, congestion has made New York City worst-in-the-nation traffic grind to a halt, affecting air quality, productivity and safety. The Mayor’s advise was to “improvise,” and congestion pricing is a key hope to untangling the roads while funding the MTA’s capital plan.
Another two-year delay after the initial two-year delay represents a failure to respond to the crises of climate change, gridlock and MTA funding. Here, Hochul’s hands may be tied, and congestion pricing could become a hot button issue among suburban primary voters next year. But the new governor has vowed to do what she can to speed up the process, and she can use her bully pulpit to push the MTA and feds on reducing the timeline for review. It’s absurd on its face for an environmental review process for something clearly designed to help the environment to take two years. The mayor has made noises about the lengthy timeline, and advocates are pushing hard for a shorter timeline. But Hochul has not yet taken any steps to exercise the power she has.
“The mayor and I spoke about congestion pricing…We had a very good conversation and there are certain legal requirements in place that have to be followed,” Hochul said earlier this month while still Lieutenant Governor.” I have supported congestion pricing. But in terms of the timing, I have to follow what’s in place right now, but it’s very much on my mind. I’m also meeting with the MTA to find out our financial situation to see how long we can go without the money we anticipate from congestion pricing.”
Ditch the LGA AirTrain
My views on the backwards Laguardia AirTrain are well documented: It’s a project with no transit utility pushed through because Gov. Cuomo came up with the idea, and the EIS appears to have been heavily weighted, perhaps illegally so, to ensure the Willets Point connection was the only viable option. At the least, Hochul should halt the AirTrain project and order a review to assess the level of Cuomo’s political interference into the environmental review process. At best, Hochul should push for a true transit connection that extends the subway from Astoria to give a subway desert a station while providing a useful connection to the airport.
So far, Hochul has been mum on this project. She supported it as Lieutenant Governor but has yet to address it since taking her new job. Many advocates have urged her to reassess the project while the RPA continues to ignore the transit analysis in favor of Looking Strong On Infrastructure. I do not have high hopes here that we’ll end up with a better connection to Laguardia Airport, but Hochul could rescue this project from becoming a $2 billion boondoggle.
Untangle the Gateway/Penn Station South mess Cuomo created.
Throughout the Trump years, Cuomo spent a lot of time and energy arguing for the feds to pony up their share of the dollars for the Gateway Tunnel. The agreement forged in the waning months of the Obama Administration would have had New Jersey and New York each paying a third with the feds picking up the final part of the tab. But Trump stonewalled the deal and never intended to pass an infrastructure bill. So Cuomo could hammer him on Gateway while scoring political points in true blue New York.
Once Biden took over and Gateway with its steep price tag suddenly become that much closer to a reality, Cuomo mysteriously pulled an about-face. He started making noises about halting Gateway or not contributing New York’s share to the project, much to the confusion of, well, everyone. As I wrote last week, this type of political shenanigans was typical Cuomo, and Hochul can walk it back pretty easily. Recommit New York to Gateway, and figure out if Cuomo’s Vornado hand-out at Penn Station South has any merit. These projects should get the level of attention they deserve under a Hochul administration paying lip service to giving the experts a say but could fall to political gridlock as well. This is the toughest of the tasks Hochul has to face and may fall victim to the looming primary season.
So that’s that. The top five for the incoming governor will fill up her plate for the remainder of her term. It’s a chance for a new start for New York’s beleaguered transportation and transit policy makers, and as the post-Cuomo Era dawns, for the love of all that’s holy, please add some seats to Moynihan Station.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo celebrated the opening of the Second Ave. Subway during a flashy New Years Eve party as 2016 turned in 2017.
In a little over 24 hours, Andrew Cuomo’s reign over New York State will officially be over. Call it whatever kind of reign you want – a reign of terror, a reign of narcissism, a reign of exhaustion – but whatever name it gets, it’s over. At 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, August 24, #CuomosMTA becomes #HochulsMTA, and all of the problems Andrew Cuomo, through the sheer force of his aggressive control over the state, swept away will become Kathy Hochul’s. An MTA struggling to emerge out of the pandemic, bleeding talent and with yet another round of interim leaders will be Hochul’s to sort out as Cuomo exits stage left.
As he leaves, I wanted to assess his transportation legacy and the effect he had on the New York City region in particular. Cuomo has spent the last few years talking non-stop about infrastructure in New York. He clearly viewed it as a way to show how Government with a strong executive leader can Get Things Done, and he was nothing if not a strong executive. He fancied himself a modern-day Robert Moses, warts and all, but came across more as the Bad Robert Moses who refused to listen to experts or dissent and did only what he wanted rather than the Good Robert Moses.
In more recent year, as Cuomo took a more vested interest in transportation policy, it was impossible to divorce the personality of Andrew Cuomo from the politics and the policy. What Andrew Cuomo wanted Andrew Cuomo got, and he couldn’t stand any potential challengers to his iron rule. If you worked from Cuomo, you had to make him look good, and if you highlighted flaws in past approaches and tried to fix them, well, that made Andrew Cuomo look bad and you became a political liability. Leaders were dismissed; agencies and environmental impact studies manipulated to deliver on Cuomo’s desired proposals. He was in charge, and his voice was the first and only one that counted. This quasi-dictatorial approach may not be inherently bad unless Cuomo’s ideas were bad. So were they?
In a news piece assessing Cuomo’s infrastructure legacy, Michael Herzenberg of NY1 spoke with Mitchell Moss, and the NYU professor showered praise on the outgoing governor. “There hasn’t been a governor who has done as much to improve, modernize and strengthen the state in probably 50 to 80 years,” Moss said. “He took on jobs that had been ignored.”
Moss meant this as praise, but to me, it’s damning praise at best. Cuomo is able to say he did the most because his predecessors all did so little. While it’s true that, for instance, Laguardia Airport is nicer now than it was ten years ago, a better airport simply helps a small number of people exiting and entering New York City have a more pleasant experience. It does nothing for Cuomo’s constituents waiting 30 minutes for a bus that crawls through city streets or a subway that hasn’t grown much since the 1930s.
And airports were easy. Cuomo exploited his ability to direct airport money back into airports to act like Robert Moses. He didn’t have to wage a political fight for limited transit funding or swat down NIMBY concerns over lengthy construction timelines. He simply reinvested money that could be used only for airports back into those airports. It was a political coup, and when faced with tougher transportation decisions – as with the Willets Point AirTrain – he backed options that will save no one any time rather than improving transit through underserved areas because the political fight would have been tougher. Is that leadership or cowardice?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Pat Foye, then head of the Port Authority, celebrated the Laguardia groundbreaking in 2016.
So sure, Cuomo deserves credit for forging ahead on Laguardia Airport, but when you look at the AirTrain path – and the political pressure, if not corruption applied during the EIS process – it’s hard not to be disappointed. That doesn’t even begin to grapple with the question of whether we should be promoting air travel at the time of climate change or whether keeping Laguardia open in the first place was even a good idea. New York City has a nicer airport, one that isn’t the laughingstock of the country, and that’s probably the best thing one can say about Cuomo’s transportation legacy.
Outside of the airports, I view Cuomo’s infrastructure and transportation legacy through five other lenses. It’s hard not to start with Andy Byford and the subways, but to understand that dynamic, it’s best to start with the Second Ave. Subway. Launched in earnest during the Pataki Administration and commenced during the early days of the Spitzer Administration, Andrew Cuomo had the good fortune of being in office when construction wrapped. He didn’t have to do the heavy lifting on the planning or on the funding to earn credit for opening the subway. He just had to show up for his own New Years Eve party.
But the Second Ave. Subway was a Cuomo speciality and a Cuomo mess all rolled into one. Until it became clear that the MTA was not going to finish the Upper East Side subway extension without heavy-handed political intervention, Cuomo seemed disinterested in MTA politics. He never rode the subways before the extension had opened and hardly has since then, using it as a bogeyman and a punching bag instead. For its part, in the early part of the Cuomo years, the MTA was struggling to rebuild after the damage from Superstorm Sandy, and Cuomo was very hands off for better or worse. With the MTA blowing deadline after deadline and construction stretching into the infinite future, Cuomo slowly realized he had a transportation policy nightmare on his hands, and he had to step in heavy and hard.
As meticulously detailed in Philip Plotch’s book The Last Subway, Cuomo made the MTA “finish” the Second Ave. Subway by December 31, 2016, no matter the cost, and the costs were high. Using the leadership style we’ve come to know lately – yell loudly and demand the world – Cuomo forced the MTA to divert operations resources to the Second Ave. Subway construction effort, and subway reliability tanked. The governor enjoyed his champagne toast – EXCELSIOR screamed the new subway station – but the schlubs of New York City had to deal with signal malfunctions and subway delays exacerbated by the governor, the very man in charge of making sure the subway was supposed to run.
Andrew Cuomo and Andy Byford toured the 9th Ave. Subway station in Brooklyn in April 2018. It was one of the few times the two would be seen together in public.
The collapse of subway service due to Cuomo’s machinations under Second Avenue led Albany to look to Toronto for a new leader. Enter Andy Byford. This saga we know through and through. Byford was the most respected and most competent leader to guide New York City Transit in a generation. Importantly, he knew how to recognize talent within the bureaucracy and get the most out of people he worked with. He also didn’t need Cuomo’s patronage, and after two years, the relationship between the two men soured. Cuomo couldn’t stomach Byford getting praised in a William Finnegan article in The New Yorker. For his part, Cuomo tried to minimize Byford by stacking senior management above him with yes men, refusing to elevate Byford within the MTA, and pursuing an MTA reorganization plan with the main goal of sidelining the New York City Transit president.
In the end, it became personal. When Byford quit for good in January of 2020, he blamed Cuomo in an interview with Marcia Kramer that had the misfortunate of airing a few days before the pandemic settled in. Cuomo tried to co-opt Byford’s Fast Forward plan, but he wasn’t fooling MTA watchers. Cuomo ultimately could not led the experts he picked solve the problems he caused. It’s a legacy New York City will be trying to escape for years, if not decades.
And what of everything else? What of congestion pricing? Moynihan Station? The Gateway Tunnel? Penn Station South? How do we apportion credit for things that haven’t happened and may not?
Congestion pricing is the perfect Cuomo project. He came to it with his back to the wall and the MTA’s needs evident. He never really understood how congestion itself is a major problem for New York City and viewed it only as a revenue generator for transit. But as he leaves office, we still don’t have congestion pricing, and the MTA – Cuomo’s MTA – says we’ll be waiting two more years before implementation is complete. Ultimately, Cuomo was content to take credit for passing congestion pricing while the Trump DOT stonewalled it. Now, he never has to deal with the tougher politics of implementation. It’s the perfect Cuomo “accomplishment.”
Moynihan Station, Gateway and Penn South all fall into this same political morass. We have a nicer station for Amtrak now, but that’s all we have. Cuomo spent ten years not addressing the trans-Hudson capacity problems, and despite agreeing to fund Gateway during the end of the Obama administration and subsequently complaining about Trump’s stonewalling of the project, Cuomo recently started throwing a whole bunch of cold water onto the Gateway Tunnel itself, to much confusion among the city’s transportation experts. I don’t even really know how to make sense of this. Cuomo spoke a lot about Gateway, did nothing to advance, and then, when given an opening to start the project, seemed to want to stop it. He didn’t think of first; it wasn’t going to open any time sooner; and ultimately, it didn’t suit his needs. This is the personality from which it is impossible to divorce policy or accomplishments.
In 2017, Cuomo launched “New York Harbor of Lights” but the $106 million LED bulbs have sat in storage for years.
I know I’m forgetting projects that fell by the wayside. I haven’t talked about the $106 million LED lights for NYC bridges that remain in a storage locker; the Kosciusko Bridge rebuild that ignored concepts of induced demand (let alone climate change); the $30 million Cuomo demanded be spent on blue and yellow tiles for the Battery Tunnel. It all just bleeds together in the end, a tortured legacy of doing things that don’t matter without improving anyone’s commute.
Is your commute better today than it was in 2009? Is anyone’s other than those who drive across the new Tappan Zee Bridge, the one monument to Cuomo in New York that still bears the family name for now? On one level, replacing the old bridge had to happen before it collapsed, but on the other, it’s a sprawl-inducing, car monstrosity without promised transit provisioning that was plagued by its own construction scandals. It looked good, and Cuomo had a chance to drive his mom across the new span as it opened. A flashy new span for cars without substance was ultimately what it was all about. If that’s the best we can say about the governor credited as doing the most in five or eight decades, what kind of legacy is that anyway? And which Robert Moses was he exactly – the one everyone praised or the one everyone ultimately just wanted to see leave?
Janno Lieber now leads the MTA as its interim CEO and Chair.
Uncertainty and political paralysis has gripped the MTA since early June, and making heads or tails of the situation hasn’t been easy. The story unfolded when an Andrew Cuomo ploy late in the legislative session to split the MTA CEO and Chair role into two faltered late in in the face of a New York State Senate unwilling to do the governor’s Eleventh Hour bidding. In its aftermath, Janno Lieber is now the interim MTA CEO and Chair as Pat Foye moved to the New York State Economic Development Corporation. Sarah Feinberg, who had been serving as NYC Transit’s interim president since Andy Byford left last February, has left her post too, and a transit agency struggling to make it through the pandemic has to face yet another period of leadership turnover and tumult.
The latest machinations arose in early June when Cuomo announced a new plan for MTA leadership. Foye was to leave at the end of July (as he did) and replacing him would be a two-headed leadership team. Feinberg would move from Interim NYC Transit President to Chair of the MTA while Lieber, then the head of MTA Construction & Development, was pegged to be the CEO of the entire agency. The governor’s press release spoke of it as a done deal, but there was one problem: Cuomo couldn’t split the MTA leadership role into two without Senate approval, and the Senate wasn’t keen to rush through what many viewed as another gubernatorial power grab.
The back-and-forth began immediately with various deals on and off the table and an aborted attempt in the Senate to vote on Cuomo’s plan during the waning hours of the legislative session in June. When the Senate adjourned, Cuomo’s plan hadn’t been approved, and the Senate never reconvened in July to hold a special session to take up the measure. In effect, the Senate vetoed Cuomo’s plan.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Cuomo’s plan faltered or what the future holds for it, and I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this. At first, it seemed as though the bill died when Cuomo tried to remove the CEO from the purview of Senate approval. As first conceived, the Senate would vote on only the (unpaid) Chair role and have no ability to approve the person tasked with running the $17 billion transit agency. When the Senate and labor leaders objected, Cuomo’s team revised the bill to allow the Senate to approve both the CEO and the Chair nominees, but this too went nowhere.
From various conversations with State Senate sources, I have learned that a variety of factors were at play. Some lawmakers simply did not want to do a damaged Governor’s last-minute bidding. They felt that major changes at the MTA required a more public airing than a rushed vote as the legislative session expired and weren’t keen to approve personnel moves put forward by a governor currently under Senate investigation.
Others raised some concerns with Feinberg’s nomination specifically, noting that a spring press release with her name on it included a reference a variety of mayoral candidates who had been supportive of the MTA’s call for more police officers in the subway system. The MTA has acknowledged they intended the reference to be on background, and agency officials have said it was inserted without Feinberg’s knowledge while she was out of town. Still, a few State Senators viewed this as a political step too far for an agency that is supposed to be outside the realm of city electoral politics.
That said, no one I spoke with said this alone was the main reason Cuomo’s bill or Feinberg’s nomination died. Some State Senators were keen to question Feinberg generally about her time at the MTA (though they obviously have not yet gotten the chance to do so). Furthermore, Feinberg has offered multiple times to brief State Senators interested in speaking with her, and she and Lieber have offered to appear at public hearings on Cuomo’s plan. The Senate, on the whole as a legislative oversight body, has not yet taken either of them up on these offers.
It’s also not clear why Foye went along with the governor’s plan (or why he was asked to). Sources I spoke with indicated that Foye had been happy as the head of the MTA and that leaving wasn’t his idea. But as a loyal member of Cuomo’s inner circle, Foye seemed to understand that the personnel shuffle was, in part, about leadership structures and in part keeping a narrowing circle of confidants close at hand. Foye, some believe, went along with the move because not rocking that boat is Pat Foye’s nature.
Others close to the matter believe the brewing mess around Penn Station is the driving force behind both Foye’s departure and the newly-proposed power structure. I haven’t found any who disagree with that assessment either.
Cuomo is dividing the MTA’s power structure and installing all of his top loyalists to ensure that he maintains a firm grip on the MTA and ESD, which has to do with ensuring Empire Station Complex is done HIS way—in spite of significant community opposition.
Meanwhile, the MTA had hoped the Senate would give the bill a proper hearing in July and the governor reiterated those hopes in the press release he sent out this week about Lieber’s new role. The new bill and Feinberg’s nomination, the Governor noted in the present tense, “awaits approval from the State Senate.”
Even without immediate action on the horizon, Feinberg echoed Cuomo’s optimism. “As we wait for the State Senate to return to session,” she said, “the Governor, Janno and I agree that this is the best path forward to provide stability and continuity of leadership at the MTA. While I am disappointed in the Senate’s delay in taking up deliberations of our nominations, I have no doubt Janno will do a tremendous job in the acting role.”
Yet, Albany is in no rush to respond, and the MTA must move forward. So Feinberg is out, replaced by Craig Cipriano, current head of buses, on an interim basis, and Lieber is in the interim head of the entire shebang. For an agency with a huge budget deficit struggling through the pandemic, leadership turnover and another round of interim leaders, even if familiar faces and old pros, adds another level of uncertainty to an uncertain time. The MTA needs firm direction and leadership. Instead, it is embroiled in yet another political brouhaha.
Despite the castle intrigue element to this story, I have found myself asking whether Cuomo’s plan is really all that bad. Richard Ravitch, in 2009, proposed one CEO and Chair role instead of two as two seemed to lead to a diffuse power structure. But as some within the MTA had told me, these are two roles with a lot of responsibility, and asking one person to lead the MTA Board while also serving as operation head of an agency with over 70,000 employees is a tall task.
“For three years now, I’ve been advocating that that job should be split,” Feinberg said to NY1’s Dan Rivoli. “It should be a CEO and a board chair, and the reason is this: It’s a multibillion-dollar agency. It’s a 72,000-person workforce. On its best day, it is big, it is unwieldy, and it is multiple challenges on every front.”
Plenty of transit agencies have bifurcated power structures, and there is no real right answer here. I ultimately think The LIRR Today’s point in the tweet embedded below is the right one: It doesn’t matter because we all know Andrew Cuomo – or whoever is governor of New York – is the ultimate power atop the MTA.
An independent MTA is likely the best setup, but we all know that's not likely to happen. So it probably doesn't make that much of a difference if we give full control instead of continuing to pretend.
So what comes next for the MTA and for its interim leadership? At this point, the immediate future is clear: Janno Lieber will be the interim head of the agency, a position he can hold for up to six months, and Sarah Feinberg will not become the first woman to head the MTA Board. New York City Transit will have its second interim president since Byford left 17 months ago, and the agency will continue to muddle through the endless pandemic, hoping ridership and leadership stabilize soon. I’ll give Byford, who spoke to Rivoli last week, the last word for now.
“I’m sure it will work out, but it’s certainly not ideal from where I sit,” Byford said from his perch in London. “The danger it brings is that it encourages, if not deliberately, it kind of encourages short-term thinking because you know that maybe you don’t have the long-term tenure that a substanstive person would have…My advice would be, get through the politics and make a decision because the MTA is such an important part of New York,” he said.
This sign will become a collector’s item as the overnight subway shutdown will end on May 17, Gov. Cuomo announced Monday. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
Just over a year to the date since Gov. Andrew Cuomo barred passengers from late-night subways, the man in charge of the MTA announced the return of 24/7 subway service. The trains, which kept running all night every night for the last year, will see the return of passengers between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on May 17th when outdoor dining curfews and pandemic-related capacity limits wind down. It’s welcome news for essential workers who saw their late-night commute times spike and costs increase while they just tried to keep NYC running throughout a pandemic, and it’s a sign that life may be returning to normal sooner rather than later.
For many transit advocates and enthusiasts, the news comes with a great sigh of relief as worry had spread that the governor would use the pandemic shutdown to end 24/7 subway service once and for all. After all, the governor had signaled for years through his MTA Board loyalists that 24/7 passenger service was a luxury for New York rather than the necessity we know it is, and MTA officials had once said the subways were “going to stay closed overnight…at least through the pandemic.”
But once the governor rolled back the four-hour shutdown to two a few weeks ago, we knew logistics and political pressure would eventually win out. The MTA simply cannot park all of its trains securely and kept running empty subways each night throughout the pandemic. Once Senator Chuck Schumer joined the fray, calling this weekend for the return of 24/7 service, it was all but inevitable that Cuomo would cave.
In announcing the restoration of service, Cuomo again trumped the disinfecting regime and baselessly hinted that the subways were responsible for the spread of COVID, his long-time cover for a policy driven by media coverage of homeless New Yorkers sprawled across subway seats and a safety crisis during the worst few weeks of the initial wave of the pandemic.
“COVID-19 is on the decline in New York City and across New York State, and as we shift our focus to rebuilding our economy, helping businesses and putting people back to work, it’s time to bring the subway back to full capacity,” the governor said, taking responsibility for the MTA he controls. “We reduced subway service more than a year ago to disinfect our trains and combat the rising tide of COVID cases, and we’re going to restore 24-hour service as New York gets back on the right track. This expansion will help working people, businesses and families get back to normal as the city reopens and reimagines itself for a new future.”
Despite a heavy security presence, the governor claimed Monday that he felt on safe during his last subway ride on June 8, 2020. (Photo via governorandrewcuomo on flickr)
Yet, the governor also went off script in some head-scratching ways. The governor, who has not ridden the subway since June 8 when he took a 7 train four stops from Court Square to Grand Central, claimed he felt physically unsafe on the subway (despite being surrounded by numerous cops and adoring fans). “As you know, I am a New Yorker. I am smart. I am New York tough. Don’t lie to me and don’t play me as a fool. I’m on the subway. It’s safe. Oh, really? Have you been on the subway? Because I have. And I was scared. Tell your child to ride subway, it’s safe. I’m not telling my child to ride the subway, because I’m afraid for my child,” Cuomo said.
I’ll get into the ins and outs of the ongoing conversation about safety in the subway in an upcoming post, but it’s all part of his feud with the mayor. The numbers show major felonies in the trains are up only slightly but transit workers are getting assaulted at alarming rates and misdemeanors and harassment over goes under- or unreported. MTA officials and Cuomo aides have talked up concerns about subway security while city cops have stressed the massive decrease in crime since last April and the relative safety of the system. The governor, who controls the MTA, should not be adding to the fearmongering, especially as he trumpets New York’s reopening and a return of passengers to overnight subways.
But the governor couldn’t resist plying the subway shutdown as another part of his infamous feuds with the mayor. Bill de Blasio had called for a resumption of normal life in New York City by July 1, but the governor has decided mid-May is the appropriate timeline. The mayor didn’t put up much of a fight on “Inside City Hall” on Monday night, suggesting that his July 1 date was as much a move to goad the governor into acting faster as it was a hard deadline driven by public health figures. But the fight over 24/7 service has its origins in the de Blasio-Cuomo battle as the mayor urged the MTA last April to close terminal stations for easier treatment (and removal) of homeless New Yorkers from the subway before the governor took a sledgehammer to the idea and ended overnight service from 1-5 a.m. entirely.
MTA officials have pledged to continue to clean trains overnight and support mental health services in the subway. Interim NYC Transit President Sarah Feinberg went on the radio yesterday evening and continued the theme. Riders, she said, “continue to worry about crime and harassment in the system because we’re not where we need to be on that yet and so until my customers and my workforce are saying, ‘We feel really good, we feel as safe as we could possibly feel,’ I’m going to continue to bang the drum on it ” This response is all part of the complicated politics MTA officials have been trying to maneuver lately, and I’m confident this won’t be the end of the various debates about homelessness in the subways, the reality and the perceptions of safety or the way the governor uses the MTA as a pawn in his political games against the mayor.
So did anyone learn anything during the 12 months without passenger service? We learned that a lot of New Yorkers were continually surprised to learn that the trains kept running but without anyone on them. We learned repeatedly that Bill de Blasio viewed overnight subway service as a luxury for party-goers and denizens of New York City’s late-night scene rather than as an essential means of travel for late-shift workers who often live far from the city’s job centers but kept New York going through its darkest days this past year. We learned that homelessness drives the conversation but not in ways that produce positive change (as subway bathrooms remain closed and Moynihan Station has no public seating). We learned that the city and state haven’t taken steps to address some of the root causes of why people choose to live in the subways or how to get them more secure housing. And we learned that while the MTA was able to accomplish some work on a slightly accelerated timescale, denying passenger service throughout the system as a whole does very little to increase construction productivity.
We should also learn for the sake of New York City’s future that the governor shouldn’t have the power to simply turn off the subways overnight with flimsy reasoning and no real way to cajole him to turn it back on for over a year, short of his losing influence due to the impact of duel scandals breaking as the vaccine effort ramped up. Yet, as life returns to normal, these lessons will fade, and the overnight subway shutdown will become one of those things we remember now and then about the COVID-19 pandemic that will recede into New York City history. It should be a cautionary tale about politicians who misunderstand the fundamental role transit plays in the city’s success. For now, though, in two weeks, the subway, in all its overnight glory, is back. It’s a welcome step forward indeed.
The overnight shutdown will shrink by half starting next week. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)
As Frank Sinatra once said, “I want to wake up in the city that only sleeps for two hours.” Or something like that. Either way, New York City moved one step closer to returning to normal as Gov. Cuomo announced the overnight subway shutdown would be reduced to just two hours from 2 a.m. – 4 a.m. beginning next Monday.
The decision to allow passengers on trains until 2 a.m. comes as a part of a gradual restoration of overnight service, MTA officials said during the governor’s press briefing. It is not yet clear when passengers will be allowed back on to trains between 2-4 a.m., and I have qualms with tying overnight service to the restoration of the city’s nightlife and entertain industries. Though important, this framing again overlooks the essential workers who have tried to keep New York healthy and fed as best they could without the recognition they deserve or transit service they need. Still, the move is welcome relief for thousands of those essential workers who found themselves stranded by the ongoing shutdown and thousands of others returning to work.
While the transit news is undeniably good for workers as sports venues reopen and the curfew for bars and restaurants has been again extended to 11 p.m., the surprise announcement raises more than a few eyebrows. After all, MTA officials have said the 1-5 a.m. closures will last until the pandemic is over, and the pandemic is far from over. Still, with Gov. Cuomo making the announcement and sending out the press release, it is yet again clear who’s calling the subway shots.
“Thanks to the hard work of New Yorkers, COVID hospitalization and infection rates have continued to decrease, allowing us to begin re-opening different facets of the economy in a cautious, thoughtful, data-based approach,” Governor Cuomo said in a press release. “With the expansion of hours of operation for restaurants and bars, as well as the re-opening of cultural centers and sports facilities, we must ensure that both employees and patrons have transportation options to get them where they need to go, when they need to get there. Accordingly, the MTA will be expanding the overnight hours for subway service to ensure transportation is available, while still maintaining the organization’s comprehensive cleaning procedures.”
For its part, MTA officials thanked the governor for his support and indicated that the surface disinfectant procedures the agency claims necessitated the initial shutdowns will continue. “The suspension of service for two hours will enable the MTA to continue the most aggressive cleaning and disinfecting regimen that has led the subway to be the cleanest it has ever been,” MTA CEO Pat Foye said.
Interim New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg echoed those sentiments. “This approach,” she said, “allows us to enhance service for customers as New York City cautiously reopens while maintaining our concerted effort to deep clean and disinfect the system. We want to be able to provide as much service as we can without compromising on our commitment to doing everything we can to keep New Yorkers safe during the pandemic.”
You might be asking at this point what the MTA can do in two hours that it can’t do with full overnight service or why it has to continue to deny passengers service even as we know that the risk of surface-based COVID transmission are exceedingly rare. These are questions I’ve asked for months with no real answer. I’ve maintained that the MTA could continue to clear train surfaces as passengers use the system, a charge the MTA has made no real attempt to refute lately. They say it’s easier to clean without riders in the way but have never explained why it’s impossible to disinfect trains while maintaining scant overnight headways. (The ever-helpful mayor appeared on NY1’s Inside City Hall on Monday night and “demanded” the MTA keep up the sanitation theater. The agency had no plans to stop.)
The snap decision comes amidst a flurry of moves regarding the overnight shutdown. On Friday, homeless advocates filed suit, alleging that the MTA did not follow state evidentiary requirements in barring passengers from trains overnight. A few days earlier, following a hearing in which senior MTA officials admitted the overnight shutdowns were costing the MTA money, leading state legislatures had penned a letter urging the governor to restore service. But those weren’t the only recent driving factors.
Many transit observers feel the move is, in part, a response to a heightened attention to increasing subway crime rates and a partial response to a stabbing spree on the A train on Friday that left two passengers dead and two more wounded. Both the perpetrator and his victims were homeless New Yorkers in need of housing and mental health treatment, and the driving impetus for the overnight shutdown was to remove homeless New Yorkers from the trains during the depths of the first wave of the pandemic. As MTA officials have stressed in recent days, the MTA is not equipped to serve as a social services agency. Transit watchers I spoke with believe the added service is an attempt to get more people into the system as more people and more eyeballs generally leads to less crime. It’s a safety in numbers argument that bears watching.
This saga has been an ugly one in the recent annals of NYC transit history. The MTA and New York State are using numbers from April, when ridership was at its lowest ebb barely a quarter of what it is today, to justify denying overnight service to tens of thousands of essential workers, and while restoring service from 4-5 a.m. will provide subway access for over half of overnight riders, the two-hour shutdown seems pointless at this stage. The city and state must address the crises of homelessness and access to mental health care currently affecting those in dire need of assistance, and transit service and rider safety shouldn’t suffer because of the failure to respond to these crises in good or bad times.
It’s a good outcome for New Yorkers and one that brings us closer to the day 24-hour service is restored. But it’s been a bad process from start to finish, based on a lack of transparency regarding the true motives and a reliance on a science that has shifted its understanding of reducing COVID-19 transmission risks. The subways should be cleaned. The subways should not be a rolling shelter of last resort. But closing down service to essential workers to avoid solving these complicated problem never should have been a solution in the first place.
What happens to New York City without its transit system? Can the city function? Can it succeed? Can it serve as the self-professed Center of the Universe if the subways and buses that, in normal times, serve well over 7 million riders a day, can’t run frequently throughout the day? Can the Big Apple recover from the economic crisis of the pandemic without robust transit or will a transit decimated by political failures at every level drag down the city and the country as NYC and the USA, both hanging on by a thread right now, look to a post-COVID future? We may soon find out.
Facing billions of dollars in revenue shortfalls due to the ongoing pandemic, the MTA Board two weeks ago took another step toward enacting the agency’s Doomsday budget. With paralysis gripping the U.S. Senate and Mitch McConnell still refusing to negotiate a new stimulus package, the MTA’s financial picture has not improved since the Board first contemplated the worst-case scenario in August. Now, with the remainder of 2020 measured in days rather than months, the MTA has just a few weeks left to wait for federal relief before the Board is faced with the unenviable task of approving the budget presented at November’s meeting. It’s one that could cut service by up to 40 percent, but it remains a very political document aimed at Washington and with a glimpse at what the MTA truly needs to stay afloat through 2021.
During November’s Board meeting, the MTA did not vote on a 2021 budget; that procedural move will wait until December’s meeting, likely to be scheduled shortly before Christmas. Instead, the agency rehashed the same story it has been telling since the spring and again reissued its non-stop call for federal aid.
“The MTA continues to face a once-in-100-year fiscal tsunami and this is without a doubt one of the most difficult and devastating budgets in agency history,” MTA Chairman and CEO Patrick J. Foye said. “No one at the MTA wants to undertake these horrific cuts but with federal relief nowhere in sight there is no other option. As I have said, we cannot cut our way out of this crisis – we are facing a blow to our ridership greater than that experienced during the Great Depression. We are once again urging Washington to take immediate action and provide the full $12 billion to the MTA.”
What we learned was this: Since the MTA’s July budget, its financial picture has worsened, largely due to federal inaction on a pandemic relief package. Ridership remains as expected — subway ridership is hovering at around 31-32 percent of normal while buses have seen between 45-50 percent of riders return — but the $3.9 billion in HEROES Act funding never arrived. The latest budget projections include a total deficit of $15 billion, as you can see below, and here is where this document turns political.
The MTA keeps asking for $12 billion in federal funding, and that number has raised eyebrows. Could the agency actually be this far into the red through only eight months of the pandemic? As the chart details, the answer is no, the MTA’s deficit does not stand at $12 billion for one year. Rather, this is the MTA’s ask across multiple years. To be whole through the end of this year, the MTA needs $2.4 billion – which it can secure through the Fed’s Municipal Liquidity Facility. That loan though will come with more interest that we the riders will have to pay off over the years. It’s an imperfect, though necessary, way to keep the trains running.
For 2021, the MTA’s immediate need is around $6 billion or half of its continued request. The agency then anticipates deficits of $3.6 billion in 2022, nearly $1.8 billion in 2023 and almost $2 billion in 2024 for a total of around $13 billion. Securing $12 billion in one lump sum gives the MTA flexibility to restructure this out-year deficits, incorporating whatever internal cuts the MTA can institute with the federal funding to show balanced budgets on paper, but its immediate needs are $6 billion. If that amount comes in, the MTA can fight anew for a few more billions for 2022 and 2023 – if the Biden Administration and whoever controls the Senate are still in the mood to pass stimulus packages.
Ask for all you need now because you don’t know what will come later. At its very heart, it is a political request, and the MTA is not shying away from politics. Earlier this year, MTA CFO Bob Foran stated the MTA’s ask included $1 billion to account for the Trump Administration’s slow-walking of congestion pricing, and the MTA is asking for more than it needs in the hopes that it can start negotiations with recalcitrant Senate Republicans at a higher baseline. It’s a dangerous game. For most of its existence, the MTA has been politically neutral while leaving the lobbying to politicians, but with federal politicians playing a game of economic chicken with states and municipalities, current MTA leaders have, at the behest of Gov. Cuomo, turned into partisan lobbyists. In fact, Foye recently penned letters to leading Georgia-based companies warning them that MTA capital funding could dry up without federal aid. This was a clear partisan shot aimed at drawing support for the Democratic candidates in the upcoming Georgia Senate run-off.
But the MTA is also hedging on its ask, aiming to draw out that $6 billion. Take a look at the MTA’s internal deficit reduction plan – a series of cuts that lowers its long-term deficit to a still-unmanageable $7 billion over five years.
Make no mistake about it, though, these cuts would be devastating. The MTA plans to cut $343 million from annual subway service expenditures and $641 million from annual bus service expenditures. For subways, this means service cuts of up to 40%, including 15-minute weekend headways and other off-peak frequency adjustments. One of the questions driving a cut of this nature is whether the MTA can actually implement a 40% reduction in service. As with overnight trains running but without passengers, there is simply not enough room to park trains that aren’t running, and it’s not cost-efficient to cut service significantly. Just the thread is enough to see how this would ruin the subway system and save a small percent of what the MTA actually needs.
The buses, as always, would bare double the cuts as subways, and a 40% reduction of bus service would practically zero out many local routes. “Bus service reductions of up to 40% may result in reduced frequencies by up to
33% on bus routes that are not eliminated,” the MTA notes ominously. The agency is planning only $265 million in annual cuts to the LIRR and Metro-North but still halving service by up to 50 percent.
But this is all still a threat aimed at scaring the Senate into saving the MTA and the U.S. economy. In my view and in the views of many advocates, the MTA should cut service as a last resort, especially as the pandemic drags on and essential workers need to be able to maintain their commutes. “Failing to save transit at this pivotal moment is not an option,” Betsy Plum, executive director of the Riders Alliance, said. “Should Congress fail to act, the MTA’s doomsday budget must be the absolute last resort. As Chairman Foye said, literally everything must be on the table. At the end of the day, Governor Cuomo must do all he possibly can to safeguard our transit system and New York’s future.”
Yet, the MTA is heading down this path as a way to exert political pressure on Washington. Let New York fail? We dare you.
The state, in fact, has yet to do much to shore up its own struggling revenue picture, and Andrew Cuomo has a responsibility to ensure transit survives. I know various budgets and services have seen the pandemic blow billion-dollar holes through their budgets, but the state should look at other possible revenue streams — gas tax increases, legalizing marijuana, taxing the rich — while at the same time avoiding service cuts and lobbying for federal aid. (Streetsblog’s Dave Colon had a deep dive on this topic worth reading.)
As a last ditch resort before cutting service, the MTA should also look to restructure its debt and secure more credit. The state could help enable this as well by legislatively permitting the MTA to explore bankruptcy, an option currently foreclosed to it due to state prohibitions. This would be additional bargaining chips, designed to bolster political support in Washington for a direct transfer of funds back to a state that, in normal times, pays more in federal taxes than it gets back.
While we can appreciate the budget as the political document that it is intended to be and hope these service cuts are a threat rather than an omen, at some point, though, reality has to settle in. Mitch McConnell isn’t very likely to fund transit on his own, and the state should use the levers it has to cut into the MTA’s deficit so that subway and bus service could survive un-cut in a New York City on the rebound. Otherwise, with transit on the chopping block, cars will choke a city that grinds to a halt, hinder mobility and New York’s recovery and the national one at a time when the country can least afford it.
Metro-North Chief Mechanical Officer Jim Heimbuecher demonstrates the new air purification technology. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)
While the world has yet to find a link between transit and coronavirus transmission, in the age of COVID-19, transit agencies themselves are working hard to build up public trust in buses and trains. For New York, masks were an early and easy focus, and compliance remains high across the region. In fact, a 6 train car of around 35 passengers I was on this past Saturday afternoon had universal compliance. Now, as the long-term effects of the virus settle in, ventilation has become the next frontier.
As the world has learned more about COVID-19, we have come to understand that ventilation and air replacement are keys for reducing transmission risks in enclosed spaces. Generally, train cars are very efficient at air replacement. The MTA’s commuter rails, for example, filters air 30 times an hour or once every 120 seconds, far in excess of CDC guidelines, and the air in New York City’s subway cars is fully replaced every 200 seconds. Now, the MTA is piloting a new way to filter and purify air, and if successful, the agency claims these new units could kill 99.9998 percent of virus particles, further enhancing transit safety.
The pilot launched last week on one car of Metro-North’s M7 rolling stock and will soon begin on one Long Island Rail Road car as well. It builds on a proof of concept launched over the summer that uses an electrical field to generate a wave of ionized particles that destroy airborne viruses, bacteria and particulate matter. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will also test this new technology to determine if it can be useful around the country.
“As more and more customers return to Metro-North trains, they want to be confident that we are doing everything that we can to keep them safe and healthy,” Metro-North Railroad President Catherine Rinaldi said at a press conference last week. “If the pilot proves successful, not only does this new air purification technology kill COVID-19, it kills any virus including the standard flu or bacteria that cause the common cold, and even particulate matter like diesel fumes. The benefits provided by this new system would last well after the pandemic has ended.”
An MTA press release added further details:
The new system passes air through three stages. The first stage applies an electrostatic discharge to actively target viruses, and then uses physical filtration to remove the charged particles. The air is then safely exposed within a self-contained unit, to ultraviolet radiation that has long been proven to kill bacteria, mold, and viruses. Third, the air is exposed to a wave of ionized particles that attack pollutants, chemically decomposing them. The ions further travel deeply through the air distribution ducts of the car and into the vehicle interior to enhance the railroads’ existing disinfection of surfaces inside the cars.
MTA officials did not talk about any potential benchmarks for the pilot program other than “effectiveness” and will use the time to assess how quickly this system could be installed on each of the 2200 cars Metro-North and the LIRR couldn’t employ. These officials noted, however, that since Knorr and Merak created the train’s ventilation systems, it can be treated essentially as an add-on. “This addition to our ventilation would be completely invisible to the customers,” Metro-North Chief Mechanical Officer James Heimbuecher said. “We like that it can be incorporated into our existing ventilation systems with minimal intrusion. If this pilot proves successful, our crews are ready to begin adding this system across our entire fleet.”
Ventilation is clearly the current focus as the world hopes to return to some semblance of normal before any potential COVID-19 vaccine arrives, and this pilot gets the commuter rails — where ridership has lagged in recent months — on the right track. Could something like this come to the subway? It’s an intriguing possibility and one I’ll follow up on. Politically, though, there’s a rub.
Last week, the FRA put out a call for the nation’s transit agencies to apply for some or all of a $10 million grant to research COVID-19 (PDF). The goal of the grant is to encourage agencies to “develop, deploy, and demonstrate innovative solutions that improve the operational efficiency of transit agencies…in four major areas: (1) Vehicle, facility, equipment and infrastructure cleaning and disinfection; (2) exposure mitigation measures; (3) innovative mobility such as contactless payments; and (4) measures that strengthen public confidence in transit.”
This sounds right up the MTA’s alley. It is, after all, the largest transit agency in the nation and has been aggressive in testing a variety of approaching to disinfecting train cars through UV light and improving ventilation, as this new pilot demonstrates. But the MTA may not be eligible to apply for this grant. Following the Trump Administration’s political decision to label New York City an “anarchy jurisdiction,” the FRA has said they will consider this designation in determining which transit agencies can receive these grants.
The FRA is the first federal agency to make such a statement, and transit advocate organizations are not happy. NACTO sent out an aggressive statement opposing the move:
Denying transit agencies funding obstructs their ability to develop best practices to make transit safer for millions of riders and workers, and the people with whom they interact. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, TriMet in Portland, and King County Metro and Sound Transit in Seattle together make up nearly half of national transit ridership and have already made major contributions to our understanding of how to keep riders and operators safe from the virus. From testing vehicle filtration and UV light sanitation systems to instituting mask outreach and mandates, the ability of these larger, urban transit systems to evaluate new interventions is especially instructive for operators serving smaller, rural communities where Covid-19 outbreaks are currently most acute and resources are limited.
The Trump administration’s attempt to condition FTA grants on political criteria unrelated to need or merit sets a disturbing precedent. If applied to other forms of federal funding, this “guidance” has the potential to thwart cities’ long-term economic recovery efforts. Cities and transit agencies need a strong federal partner to maintain and restore service, invigorate local economies, and create new jobs.
Withholding federal funding from cities in retaliation for political disagreements is not only legally dubious but vindictive and undemocratic in its intent. Our organizations, representing cities, transit agencies, and transportation experts and advocates, stand in firm opposition to the Justice Department’s designation of New York, Portland, and Seattle as “anarchist jurisdictions” and against the arbitrary and capricious decision to deny some of the world’s most-used transit systems acutely-needed funding solely to serve a political agenda.
Close to home, Transit Center’s David Bragdon echoed these sentiments. “Secretary Elaine Chao’s willingness to expose innocent transit riders and essential transit workers to greater risk of COVID just because of Donald Trump’s unrelated personal vendetta against certain local elected officials is both reckless and un-American. No American, in any city or state, should be sacrificed to a pandemic because of a President’s petty whims,” he said.
The FRA later told Streetsblog New York that the agency had no choice but to follow Trump’s guidance. The MTA meanwhile is “reviewing” the grant application, and the de Blasio administration has threatened to sue if funds are denied. The election could render this all moot in a few days, but for now, at least, studying and enhancing transit disinfectant procedures during a pandemic remains hijacked by the same politics gripping the nation even as the MTA moves ahead with its own clean-air initiative.
After the MTA’s Doomesday budget proposal in late August, more than a few New Yorkers reached out to me worried about the future of travel in and around New York City and worried about their own subway lines. These weren’t the usual gang of anti-car crusaders, the bike advocates or the busway champions expressing the daily clamor for a better, more transit-focused and equitable transportation network. Instead, these were the workers who power New York City and need the subway to get around. They’re afraid the MTA’s pandemic-related budgetary woes will cut off their transit lifelines.
“Will the MTA actually have to get rid of the D train?” one concerned straphanger asked me, clearly focusing on the Riders Alliance’ Doomsday map. What would it mean, another wondered, if headways on local buses were increased even more? Is a bus that runs once an hour during the day even worth operating? Clearly, threats of massive service cuts — more so than looming fare hikes — hit close to home.
A July Riders Alliance report painted a bleak picture of the MTA’s future.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking more and more about MTA CFO Bob Foran’s presentation and what we should take from it. Needless to say, it paints an ugly future. After all, Foran’s service cuts threatened a 40% reduction of service on subways and buses, increasing subway headways to eight minutes, cutting bus frequency by 15 minutes and axing entire LIRR and Metro-North lines, crippling to the usefulness of any transit system. To make matters worse, while the MTA stares down a deficit of $10-$12 billion, these massive service cuts save just a fraction of the billions the MTA needs. Cuts to New York City Transit would generate just $880 million annually once the MTA factors in revenue loss from riders who abandon an infrequent system, and the commuter rail cuts generate just $160 million in annually. Even running a bare bones system puts the MTA in the red each year by a few billion dollars.
What then should New York make of the MTA’s proposal? And what is the future of a robust transit system in New York City? After all, we were all celebrating the successes of Andy Byford’s Fast Forward plan, the Subway Action Plan and the massive capital investments this calendar year. Is there any hope for the future? Or are we doomed to a death spiral that leaves the subway tunnels quiet, the city paralyzed and the MTA broke?
This is the question I’ve been mulling for weeks, and it’s one with no real clear answer right now. It’s important to understand the MTA’s Doomsday budget presentation as a political document first and a budget proposal second. It was very much designed by MTA executives who think they can get the attention of the federal government and, in particular, the Senate GOP and Trump White House, by warning of the dangers to New York’s economy should the MTA fail. “The pandemic-caused losses are beyond the capacity of any agency” to absorb, MTA CEO and Chair Pat Foye said following August’s meetings. “We’re agnostic as to the source of revenue. We’re realistic to the city’s financial conditions. We’re realistic to the state’s financial conditions….We’re going to do everything we can to reduce the size of the deficit for the federal government, but without federal funding, we will not be able to get out of this box.”
The MTA’s out-year budget include billions of dollars in projected revenue losses due to the long-term impacts of the pandemic on transit usage.
One “tell” regarding the political intent of the document is the request for an additional $1 billion in 2021 to offset revenue the MTA had expected from congestion pricing. Because the Trump Administration has completely slow-walked US DOT’s congestion pricing assessment, the MTA does not know if an EIS is required or if a less onerous Environmental Assessment would be sufficient. Thus, the MTA does not have federal approvals to start congestion pricing in January, and thus, the MTA’s anticipated revenues are short $1 billion. By requesting that $1 billion now, the MTA is both sending a political message and over-asking. It’s a shot across the bow in what should be rational negotiations regarding an MTA bailout, as the feds gave following the catastrophic damaged caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The second “tell” came in the form of an op-ed in The New York Times co-written by Foye and TWU President John Samuelsen, one of transit’s oddest odd couples. Enemies at the negotiating table, the two transit titans wrote about the “five-alarm fire” facing the MTA. Citing the Grand Depression as a comparison, the two noted that even during the depths of the 1930s, transit ridership fell only by 10-12% and not 80-90%. It’s an inapt metaphor though as the Great Depression was an economic crisis and COVID-19 is a public health crisis first and an economic crisis due to the public health crisis.
Still, Samuelsen and Foye tried to get Washington’s attention. “Punishing the M.T.A. and transit systems across the country over an ideological political agenda is not only wrong; it is bad economics,” they wrote. “The downstate New York region — New York City and the surrounding area — accounts for about 8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. New York City cannot recover without a robust M.T.A., and the country cannot rebound economically without a healthy New York.”
But the MTA’s biggest mistake is assuming rationality. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, certain factions in Washington, DC — notably, the Senate GOP Majority Leader and the Trump White House — do not operate rationally. A rational response to the pandemic would involve bolstering state and municipal finances, including the nation’s transit agencies, to stave off job losses and economic collapse brought on by faltering transit systems. After all, the MTA is not asking for the feds to step in and cover its inefficient spending; it is asking to be reimbursed for pandemic-related revenue losses. Still, for now at least, the feds do not seem interested in staving off this economic catastrophe because, for now, it’s not their problem.
It’s not their problem because of the election in November, and that’s the big wild card. The equation in DC right now involves ignoring the local government funding crisis and punting it to the next team. If Joe Biden wins and the Democrats capture the Senate, Republicans will be powerless to oppose a funding package but can disingenuously claim to be concerned about the deficit, as they do any time they’re in the Senate majority. If Biden wins and the GOP hold the Senate, a traditional DC negotiation can ensue. If Trump wins, any rescue package will depend upon the party in control of the Senate, but a Trump win with a Republican Senate represents an outcome for the MTA more akin to the August presentation than we wish to consider. Still, the MTA’s ask is about politics right now; the pain for the riding public comes later.
The MTA has more than a few options in its pocket. I’ve written in the past about the operations savings the MTA could realize by shifting to a proof-of-payment model on commuter rail and reducing the number of employees required to punch tickets. Back in July, I asked Pat Foye is the MTA would consider a quick pivot to one-person train operations. He hedged at the time but was clearly ready for the question, stating the following:
Everything is on the table. There are collective bargaining agreements with our various unions that may have to be part of the discussions, but everything is on the table. We have not made that specific proposal to any union and what we’re focusing on is getting federal funding, one; two, reducing expenses, overtime, consulting contracts, non-personnel, non-labor expenses. We’re going to continue to do that. If the federal funding doesn’t through this year in 2020 or for 2021, the size of the deficit is going to require that everything be on the table. Things that are covered by a collective bargaining we may have to respect, and they may be the subject of negotiation which may be successful or not. The unions, on behalf of their members, are going to have very strong positions on many of these issues.
I’ll let you interpret that comment, but it’s clear the MTA has put some thought into what it would take to implement OPTO, just as they have put thought into the message they wanted to send to the federal government. I am ultimately left thinking about one of Foye’s statements. “The MTA,” he said, “is not going to shut down.” That’s all well and good, but it’s no comfort to millions of New Yorkers worried about the future of their buses, their subways and their D trains. The MTA isn’t about to cut full subway lines, but the subways could be a heck of a lot less useful if that funding doesn’t come through and soon.
