Second Ave. Sagas

Category: New York City Transit

  • Gov. Cuomo, in charge of the MTA, announces May 17th return of 24/7 subway service

    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.

  • Overnight subway closure rolled back by two hours, Gov. Cuomo announces

    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.

  • The MTA and accessibility: a few thoughts as the ADA turns 30

    Interim MTA New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg, MTA Construction & Development President Janno Lieber, MTA New York City Transit Senior Advisor for Systemwide Accessibility Alex Elegudin, and Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities Commissioner Victor Calise commemorate the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) at the Astoria Blvd station on the N/W lines on Mon., July 27, 2020. Four elevators have been placed in service at the station, making it fully accessible. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

    In normal times, the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act would have been cause for a grand celebration. But these are not normal times, and the three-decade anniversary of the landmark legislation passed a bit quieter than it otherwise would have. Still, the MTA marked the occasion by celebrating the opening of ten new elevators at four subway stations across the city, and while the coronavirus financial crisis has thrown the future of the MTA’s elevator-heavy capital plan into serious doubt, the agency is trying to forge a better path on accessibility.

    “Make no mistake: Adding four new, accessible stations with elevators will make a big difference in the lives of our customers with disabilities,” Janno Lieber, the President of MTA Construction & Development, said to mark the moment. “But the critically important work of making 70 more stations fully ADA compliant as part of the … Capital Plan cannot be achieved if the plan’s funding is cut as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Accessibility must and will always remain a core priority of any Capital Plan, but our ambitious 70 station plan only works if we have a fully funded MTA.”

    It’s a brutal twist of the knife really. After years of incredibly hard and often-frustrating work by disabilities advocates, the MTA had finally adopted a capital plan with a real commitment to accessibility. Spurred on in part by legal obligations and in part by Andy Byford’s commitment to accessibility as well as Sarah Feinberg’s long-term recognition across various positions that the ADA is law and not a suggestion, the MTA’s capital plan represented a true commitment to ADA accessibility, but with the U.S. Senate GOP unwilling to pass a COVID relief bill that includes transit funding, this capital plan is on hold until and unless a relief bill materializes or the Democrats somehow take the White House and Senate in November.

    So the ADA work is in limbo, and I wanted to mark the 30th anniversary — a few weeks late thanks to my wrist injury — with a few thoughts on where things stand. The intertwined health and economic crises have thrown a hard wrench into the MTA’s plans, and the prognosis for a recovery is murky. Still, work will, at some point, soldier on.

    The ADA is not just a moral imperative; it’s the law

    For years, the MTA had a tendency of treating the ADA as a moral suggestion, but it carries more weight than that. Yes, we should strive to make our transit system as accessible to everyone as possible and as step-free as possible, but the ADA isn’t just a recommendation. The Americans with Disabilities Act is a federal legal mandate, and while critics can claim the unfunded nature of the mandate unduly burdens local municipalities and state or city transit agencies, it’s still a law.

    Feinberg, the current interim NYC Transit President, made this point to me while she was on my podcast last year: Following the law isn’t optional. The recent cultural shift within the MTA deserves some praise, but ultimately, the agency’s hands were tied by legal obligations. The current leader cannot answer for the sins of long-gone predecessors, but watching the MTA celebrate 30 years of the ADA after spending so many of them resisting the mandates certainly raised my eyebrows. As transit dollar dry up, advocates and MTA watchdogs will have to make sure the MTA adheres to its legal obligations to make the system more accessible.

    Everyone benefits from ADA compliance

    A wider fare gate would make the subway more accessible and more customer-friendly for everyone.

    As part of the MTA’s renewed commitment to the federal mandate, Byford brought in Alex Elegudin in mid-2018 as the agency’s first Senior Advisor for Systemwide Accessibility, and Elegudin has introduced a variety of new elements to various subway stations. The most prominent of those has been the Accessibility Law features at Jay St./Metrotech, including better platform wayfinding and wider fare gates. We’re a far cry from Japan’s pervasive system of tactile paving, but these new elements show how ADA compliance can benefit everyone.

    For instance, elevators aren’t just for those who physically unable to climb stairs. Rather, elevators are a boon for people with large packages or big strollers or those who find too many stairs too arduous. Wider turnstiles allow people with luggage and strollers easy access to the subways. These enhancements and improvements should have been introduced system-wide years ago, and they make the subway a more welcoming place for everyone.

    The MTA’s ADA past is one of resistance

    While current leadership has recognized the need to fulfill ADA obligations, the MTA’s past is littered with examples of resistance and failed legal challenge. Most recently, the MTA faced a lawsuit joined by federal prosecutors in 2018 alleging ADA violations, and the agency lost that suit in 2019. As of last year, the MTA must install elevators during any station renovation unless technically infeasible. As I wrote last year, I believed this to be the right decision, and it’s just one of many legal losses the MTA has suffered as it has flouted ADA requirements over the past few decades. The key stations — a list of 100 stations to be made accessible by 2020 — was never intended to excuse other obligations under the law.

    Notably, the Subway Action Plan was one of those initiatives the MTA used to hide ADA obligations. Started by the governor, the Subway Action Plan combined cosmetic station improvements with operational efficiencies, but the MTA at the time claimed it did not have to make any of the enhanced stations fully accessible. This was a claim unsupported by law and remains a sore point a few years after the fact.

    Sunk cost and high price tags loom large

    Finally, even as the MTA has embraced accessibility and ADA compliance, cost control and lost dollar remain the two elephants in the room. The agency has routinely spent upwards of half a billion dollars on Access-a-Ride each year because the subway isn’t sufficiently accessible. Had some of this money been invested in elevators across the city, the MTA could have reduced its spending on paratransit long ago. Instead, the agency has suffered through the worst of all worlds — too many inaccessible stations and prolonged spending on the inefficient Access-a-Ride program.

    To make matters worse, the MTA’s ADA work suffers from the same cost problems as the rest of the capital plan. The MTA had planned to spend $5.2 billion on elevators for 70 stations – or approximately $74 million per station. Even if the most complex stations — such as Union Square — require multiple elevators across a number of platforms at varying depths, this average dollar figure represents runaway cost problems. The system isn’t accessible because the MTA can’t spend efficiently and has spent years hiding behind these cost control issues rather than seeking out real reform efforts.

    Ultimately, the MTA has charted a future that involves a more accessible subway, and that’s a good way to begin the ADA’s second 30 years. Of course, it shouldn’t have taken so long and it shouldn’t suffer at the hands of COVID-19. But if the first three decades are any indication, a more accessible subway will be a fight and one worth waging.

  • Gov. Cuomo announces the end of overnight subway service for now as cleanliness, homelessness concerns emerge

    Gov. Andrew Cuomo ponders what it means to “disinfect” the subways during his Thursday briefing.

    For the first time its in 116-year history, the New York City subways will no longer have planned 24/7 service as Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his MTA announced on Thursday that, beginning next Wednesday, trains will not run between 1 a.m. – 5 a.m. Overnight subway service — a New York City hallmark — will be suspended for the foreseeable future, and the MTA will continue to offer bus service or subsidize for-hire vehicle use for the 11,000 essential employees who now find themselves without late-night train service.

    Why this is happening now and how the MTA arrived at this historic outcome isn’t clear. The decision to cut overnight service, made over the course of around 24 hours and without consultation or approval of the neutered MTA Board, arrives amidst an increase focus on homeless New Yorkers taking up residence in the subway and increased attention on the perceived need to clean subway surfaces to combat the threat of COVID-19. Yet, for a city used to relying on the subways to get around at any time of day, the official justifications for the move are frustratingly murky, and it’s not clear how the MTA will guarantee sufficient replacement service or when the agency will restore the overnight subways, a hallmark of the city’s non-stop economy.

    The governor first announced the shutdown during his daily coronavirus press conference on Thursday. (The meandering transcript is available here.) The announcement came a day after the governor, waving around a tabloid story that displayed a homeless New Yorker covered in his own excrement and flashing an MTA operator the peace sign, challenged the MTA to improve cleanliness, and two days after Mayor Bill de Blasio asked the MTA to shutter 41 terminal stations overnight to allow the city to assist with homeless outreach (and removal). In a sense, it was the denouement of a fight that’s been raging for days, months and years. The city has failed to provide adequate and safe shelter for some homeless New Yorkers who are in desperate need of social services and, in many cases, psychological help, and those homeless New Yorkers have often fled to the subways. This was wrongly tolerated to a degree during good times but became a public health crisis as the coronavirus pandemic raged around us.

    Essential workers were being forced to ride trains with semi-permanent homeless residents while the mayor refused to accept responsibility for the problem and the governor challenged the MTA to come up with a solution. As Julianne Cuba wrote on Streetsblog NYC yesterday, the crisis is a housing problem and not a transit problem, but still, the mayor and governor both seemed to expect a transit agency to address a societal problem it isn’t, by its nature, capable of addressing.

    Is this about homeless? Cleanliness? When asked that question by NY1’s Pat Kiernan on Friday morning, MTA Chair Pat Foye first said, “No, this is about disinfecting trains.” But he immediately continued speaking at length about the issues the mayor raised. Foye continued:

    “Obviously the homeless has become a significant issue and as the governor noted yesterday, there’s been rapid deterioration especially in the nighttime period on the subways. Yesterday Mayor de Blasio joined by Zoom, the governor in making and affirming and supporting this decision, but the City also committed a robust and sustainable NYPD presence to continue to help with the closing of the subway system from 1am to 5am, but also to continue offering services to the homeless and getting them shelters. The NYPD has really stepped up its activities in the last week and number of weeks, and that level of commitment is really critical to this to this effort and us being able to assure our employees, current riders and future riders that the system has been disinfected on a regular basis, every subway car, every bus, every station.

    Either way, as Clayton Guse of The Daily News summarized on Twitter, “The governor is using disinfecting/cleaning as air cover for the wholesale removal of homeless people from the system.”

    Gov, Andrew Cuomo announces the temporary end of overnight subway service as Interim NYC Transit President Sarah Feinberg and MTA Chair Pat Foye look on. (Photo: Darren McGee – Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo)

    So what exactly is happening? According to the MTA’s numbers, only around 11,000 riders have been using the subway between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m., and most of those — 5,692, to be exact — have been using the subways between 4 and 5 a.m. So the MTA is going to kick everyone off trains for four hours supposedly to “disinfect” every car every day. “This is an unprecedented time and that calls for unprecedented action to protect the safety, security and health of our system for customers and employees. This closure will enable us to more aggressively and efficiently disinfect and clean our trains and buses than we have ever done before and do it every single day,” MTA Chair Pat Foye said in a statement.

    How — or if — the MTA will clean over 6400 subway cars every night in the span of four hours remains to be seen, but all 472 subway stations will close. According to the MTA, the city via the NYPD will be responsible for enforcing this closure. Does this mean homeless subway riders will be removed, forcibly or otherwise, from the subway system at 1 a.m. only to return at 5 a.m.? It’s not clear yet, but unless homeless riders are going to be detained, it seems likely. It’s also not clear how all subway stations will close without a massive amount of NYPD manpower as many do not have gates that lock and a good number no longer even have station agent booths eying entrances. The MTA has yet to share details regarding enforcement, but that’s not all we do not know.

    We don’t know what the MTA’s new overnight “Essential Connector” service will be. We know that buses will still run 24/7, and an MTA spokesperson tells me that the agency will add bus service to respond to demand if certain routes are too popular for social distancing to be maintained. We know that essential workers with sufficient proof will be allowed two for-hire vehicle rides per night, but we don’t know how those will be ordered or how disinfectant standards will be maintained. We also don’t know how the MTA plans to disinfect its entire fleet every night. On NY1 on Friday morning, Foye stressed the bus service. The Essential Connector service, he said, “is going to be the full current bus schedule which will be supplemented as necessary. That’ll be the primary mode. These aren’t shuttle buses; this is regular bus service run by TWU members and other union members who are employees of the MTA, in this case New York City Transit. That will be the primary mode of moving between ten and eleven thousand passengers in the 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. period. That’ll be supplemented as necessary by livery cabs, by taxis, and by for-hire vehicles. But the primary method of moving those customers, between ten and eleven thousand, will be the bus service which will supplement as necessary and supplemented secondarily by livery cars, for-hire vehicles and taxis.”

    By all accounts, this is still a work in progress with details to be announced ahead of next week’s launch. Already, though, as Jose Martinez reports today in THE CITYM, essential workers who have to commute overnight feel left out of the planning process and are scrambling for the alternatives they may have. It’s a bad situation all around.

    But is it a necessary one? That’s the question looming over this, and after speaking with a few folks both within the MTA and outside of the agency, it’s not clear that the answer is yes. From a virology perspective, evidence is scant on surface transmission of COVID-19. The viral load doesn’t seem sufficient for transmission via subway pole in the normal course of a day, and disinfecting is only effective until the next person touches the surface. A rolling approach that maintains service would likely be sufficient.

    Most subway lines are operating on 20-minute overnight headways so train service is infrequent. At 1 a.m., for instance, the Q has four trains running to 96th and four heading to Coney Island. The MTA could disinfect other train sets earlier in the evening, take the Coney Island-bound trains out of service at Stillwell Ave., replace them in service with disinfected cars, and maintain 20-minute overnight headways for a fraction of the cost of shutting down the subways. This would alleviate all of the hassles and headaches late-night workers detail in Martinez’s article, but it wouldn’t address the concerns regarding homeless New Yorkers taking up semi-permanent residents underground. To that end, the city and state would actually have to address the myriad intertwined problems that lead to homeless New Yorkers taking up residence on the subway, and it’s much harder to address them during a crisis after failing to do so during the boom years.

    The response from the advocacy community has been a mixed bag. Homeless advocates are not happy. In comments to Curbed New York, Craig Hughes of Safety Net Project said, “The Mayor and Governor continue to see homeless people as nuisances to be bounced from place to place, rather than full human beings who need housing. Rather than provide them with masks, hand sanitizer and other protective equipment, the MTA, Governor, and Mayor are opportunistically using the COVID crisis to move forward a long term goal of ridding the subways of people with no homes.”

    Many transit organizations have called the governor’s decision “the right thing to do,” as the RPA did without offering must justification for that assessment. The Riders Alliance (of which I am a board member) struck a more forceful tone. “Even during a crisis, New York is and will be a 24/7 city,” Executive Director Betsy Plum said in a statement. “Governor Cuomo’s suspension of subway service must be strictly temporary while a longer-term solution is developed and implemented. And, in the meantime, the governor must ensure that riders have access to safe, reliable, and frequent replacement bus service.”

    “Strictly temporary” is indeed the hope, but we don’t know when 24/7 subway service — a vital part of any recovery in New York City — will return. The MTA, in its release said, it “resume overnight service between the period of 1-5 a.m. when customer demand returns, and innovative and efficient disinfecting techniques have been successfully deployed systemwide.” This is a chicken/egg problem as customer demand won’t return if the service doesn’t exist, and in off-camera comments on Thursday, Interim NYCT President Sarah Feinberg said they expect the service suspension to last the duration of the pandemic. Again, it’s not clear what that means as Cuomo is likely to loosen some PAUSE restrictions in the coming weeks and months, but the World Health Organization likely won’t declare an end to the pandemic until well into 2021. Are we to go without 24/7 subway service for that long? Can the city survive without it?

    State Senator Brad Hoylman doesn’t think so, and to that end, he announced that he will introduce legislation requiring overnight subway service to return “after any declared end to the pandemic.” But again, that’s ambiguous timing. Who gets to determine the end of the pandemic? Why can’t overnight subway service return before the end of the pandemic as life in New York returns to normal? Who can guarantee that the state and the MTA won’t use this period as a trial run to end overnight subway service entirely? These may be uncomfortable questions to ask amidst a pandemic, but transit is key to sustaining residents during the pandemic and will be a key part of New York City’s recovery. Uncertainty creates anxiety that undercuts the city’s future.

    By now, I think you can see my skepticism toward this whole idea. Has late-night subway service become another pawn in the battle between the mayor and governor? I’ll let this tweet from MTA advisor Ken Lovett answer that question.

    Meanwhile, on Thursday night, cops (but not social workers) were sending homeless New Yorkers out into the rain. The subways need to be clean; the subways need to be safe; the subways should not be a home of last resort for the down-and-out; and the subways should not be viewed as a de facto homeless shelter by the mayor of New York. But the subways need to run, and they need to run all night. Cutting overnight service isn’t a decision that should be mad rashly over the course of 24 hours, and it’s a move that should come with a clear alternate service plan and an end date. Without justification or an analysis of alternatives that can guarantee both disinfectant procedures and subway service, this move seems to be governing via headline rather than rigorous, justifiable policy. For New York to succeed, the subways and its political leaders need to be in concert, and right now, they’re not as the City That Never Sleeps grabs a new-found four hours of shuteye every night into the future.

  • What Andy Byford showed New York and where it all goes from here

    During the first MTA Board meeting of the post-Andy Byford Era, Sally Librera, the senior vice president of subways, shared some positive news about subway speeds. As the chart shows, subway run times have decreased, year-over-year, on every subway line, and in turn, train speeds are getting faster.

    “Peak run times on nearly every line are continuing to improve,” Librera told the Board’s Transit Committee. “Every single line in the system got faster, which is an incredibly encouraging result.” Librera credited a number of initiatives, including the CBTC-based bump in 7 train performance, but in focusing on the A Division — the numbered lines — which showed the most improvement, she praised Transit’s SPEED Unit. These improvements, she noted, “track with the number of civil speed changes.”

    In a way, the SPEED Unit was Andy Byford’s crowning achievement and, according to most reports and my own sources, the straw that broke the governor’s back, and the chart Librera presented to a Byford-less room on Monday was a testament to what was and what could have been. Andy Byford arrived in New York amidst a crisis; he listened to a lot of people ask a lot of smart questions concerning slow trains that had gotten slower in recent years, faulty signal timers that were miscalibrated and speed restrictions that were unnecessary. He established a team that carefully and systematically studied signals throughout the subway system and fixed them so that trains could run faster and operators could have faith that they wouldn’t trip a red by going the posted speed. He worked with the union to reduce the onerous penalties train operators would incur by tripping those fault signals, and he produced a subway system that is saving millions of New Yorkers hours per year in unnecessarily slow trips.

    What did this effort earn him? Scorn from Albany and a one-way ticket out of the job atop Transit. The signals effort wasn’t the only point of conflict between Gov. Cuomo and his hand-picked Transit president, but as I explored last month in the aftermath of Byford’s departure, it was front and center amidst the conflict. As Byford’s SPEED Unit picked up steam, Cuomo wanted something more — faster returns or more credit.

    While Byford was focused on doing the job slowly and carefully while maintaining safety, Cuomo wanting everything faster, faster, faster. It was the same approach he took to completing the Second Ave. Subway, a decision that cost the MTA millions and arguably led to the 2017 declines in subway performance. The governor commissioned his own signals report, which was released at around 5 p.m. on New Years Eve and became a political football in the dispute between the two men. Byford claimed it reinforced the Save Safe Seconds campaign while Cuomo and his allies pushed for a more aggressive approach to speeding up trains, improving dispatching practices and reducing dwell times. It wasn’t quite a bombshell, but it exacerbated already-high tensions between Byford and Cuomo.

    As the MTA’s transformation plan picked up steam, Byford and his team were essentially sidelined from the signals process, and that was one area where Byford felt he was in the right and knew he was making the right difference. The governor knew that too as Byford had routinely communicated he desire to remain in charge of signals to the Chamber, but when push came to shove, this was not arrangement Albany wanted to support.

    Will Sally Librera’s slide — one last victory lap for the beloved Train Daddy — be the MTA’s high-water mark on improving speeds and fixing fault signals? I hope not, but as with much within the MTA these days, we can’t be sure. In the week since Byford has left, the conversation has shifted from fixing things to eliminating things, a move Cuomo apparently had hoped Byford would implement two years ago. But when Byford dug into the bones of the MTA, he found a staff that needed guidance rather than elimination.

    Now, though, jobs are on the line, as you can see from this letter Chief Transformation Officer Anthony McCord (the not-a-hatchet-man hatchet man) sent out late on Thursday afternoon. The MTA will soon be radically overhauled, but in a way that doesn’t make sense or attack the agency’s root causes. While some back-office rationalization is necessary, morale within the agency is at a low as workers fear for their jobs, and a bunch of hand-picked Cuomo appointees have come to cut an agency that needs anything but cuts these days. We’ve turned a swift corner, and I don’t like where things are heading. But for now, we’ll have those faster trains, a testament to what can happen when someone with a true vision, dedication and belief in his job is allowed to make positive change. Better things are possible.

  • Thoughts and reactions following Andy Byford’s resignation

    Andy Byford celebrated New Years Eve by thanking NYC Transit employees working to get everyone home safely. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

    Over the summer, as he does from time to time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo sat down with the editorial board of The New York Post, and the conversation turned to the MTA. At the time, the Transformation Plan had recently been unveiled, and the governor had turned his attention to the signal system and complaints that the MTA had been addressing regarding slower train speeds. It was one of those moments when transit observers and advocates knew that the governor was stepping into a field Andy Byford had been mining, to great success, and concerns grew over fears that Cuomo and Byford would butt heads over a sensitive and important part of the MTA’s long road to recovery.

    Over the weekend, Post reporter Nolan Hicks shared pieces of the transcript from that meeting, and it is a prime example of the relationship that had developed after nearly 20 months before Byford and Cuomo. The governor attempts to minimize Byford’s role in fixing the subways while promoting the Subway Action Plan and then he turns his attention to signal timers. The governor claimed that the union brought concerns with signal timers and the steep penalties for tripping red signals to him, and after months of a very public effort by Byford and his team to fix exactly these faulty signals and recalibrate timers, he was the one to fix the problem. Said Cuomo:

    I met with the union, and I said, ‘How do we fix this issue where the trains are slower?’ And what we agreed to with the union is we would bring in an outside consultant, the unions would get on a train, the designers would get on a train, everyone would work together, come up with speed limits, fix the signals to calibrate to those new speed limits and the union would be comfortable with the speed limits, comfortable that the signals were actually calibrated. So if it said 20, it actually happened at 20 and that was the resolution.

    If that sounds familiar, well, that’s because it is nearly exactly what Andy Byford’s speed unit and the Save Safe Seconds campaign was already doing, as Aaron Gordon subsequently pointed out, except, as Gordon said, “Cuomo wants to add an expensive consultant for reasons.” In a way, Cuomo already had his consultant in Byford. After all, that’s why the governor imported Andy from Toronto, but Cuomo and Byford could not co-exist. And the governor wanted to do things his way.

    I chose to highlight this part of The Post’s transcript because the signals are reportedly one of the key issues that pushed Byford to resign for good this time. Even though the legislatively-mandated signals report, essentially demanded by Cuomo as part of the congestion pricing push, landed with a thud late in the day on New Year’s Eve, Cuomo recently sidelined Byford and his team from the discussions on recalibrating signals, and that was one of many last straws for New York City’s most prominent Plymouth Argyle FC fan. Now, Byford is out, and much to the chagrin of transit advocates around the city, Pete Tomlin, Byford’s signals man, is going with him.

    The turf war over signals was but one issue among many that led Byford to leave, and I believe it’s accurate to consider him pushed out. After all, if your boss were to take your job and remove all of your responsibilities from it while indicating how unhappy he was with your public profile, how would you respond? And that’s exactly what happened with the MTA’s transformation effort, as Byford wrote in his resignation letter:

    “The Alix Partners MTA Transformation plan called for the centralization of projects and an expanded HQ, leaving Agency Presidents to focus solely on the day-to-day of running service. I have built an excellent team and there are many capable individuals in Transit and others within the MTA family, who could perform this important, but reduced, service delivery role.”

    Transformation was a clear-cut demotion, to a position beneath the stature and skills of Andy Byford, and he simply wasn’t going to take it any longer. Many at the MTA has said to me that the transformation plan seemed uniquely designed to minimize Byford and his role even as the New York City Transit President was enjoying success fixing the subways, and The Times also reported that Cuomo wanted Byford out. I have also been told that Byford (along with other internal MTA candidates) was not permitted to apply to the open COO role when Ronnie Hakim departed the MTA, and it was clear the writing was on the wall. The governor could not co-exist with someone of Byford’s popularity and success. As I think on this news, one week later, it all just seems so unnecessary.

    I’ve struggled quite a bit with the reaction to Byford’s departure. There’s a lot to say about it, and none of it particularly optimistic. I’d like to think, as Eric Goldwyn argued for City & State, that Byford’s departure will accomplish exactly what we hope it will: that New Yorkers will wake up to the problems with a state-run transit agency and a state chief executive who won’t listen to anyone else and that local politicians will begin to support transit planning decisions rather than oppose them. But I am instead left pondering the question Nicole Gelinas asked: “Why would anyone take over after Andy Byford fled the MTA?” What qualified outsider will willing join a toxic work environment that Byford, a very competent and qualified and well-respected man within the industry, left so quickly? Who will save us from ourselves and the electoral decisions we have made? Railway Age took this one step further and unleashed a loud and angry takedown of the man who ousted Byford and his decisions.

    Over the past week, as the dust from Byford’s resignation has settled, I’ve noticed the reticence with which politicians have approached this move and the rhetoric behind their statements. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is very likely to run for mayor on a platform that calls for city control over its transit system, started a #BringBackByford campaign but transitioned that to a pledge to re-hire Byford if he can wrest control of the buses and subways from Albany. Countless other local pols chimed in with similar sentiments, and the mayor outright embarrassed himself all week calling on Byford to reconsider. “Why don’t we try and convince him to stay?” the mayor asked Brian Lehrer’s audience last Friday. This was a deeply surreal back-and-forth, ignorant of the larger political dynamics at play, and one that warrants a closer look:

    Mayor: So, I think the State of New York should get to it to try and convince Andy Byford to stay. Look, Andy Byford has done an amazing job and he put forward a plan that really was transformative. I think his presence was a big part of why we were able, last April, to pass the first plan in memory to actually fully fund the MTA and fix it. And I think, you know, we need him, going forward, and why not try and keep him?

    Lehrer: Have you launched some kind of effort to try and keep him? Have you appealed to him?

    Mayor: No it’s just the first – I am talking about it now for the first time because it dawned on me this morning that when I thought about history a bit, there have been people who were getting ready to leave and changed their mind or were persuaded to come back. And I think this is a case where he’s a singular talent and he’s obviously getting a great outpouring of support from New Yorkers. Why don’t we try and convince him to stay?

    Lehrer: This seemed to happen once already. He was going to resign in October and Governor Cuomo convinced him to stay, right?

    Mayor: Well that seems to be the case. I wasn’t in those backroom discussions, but look, I think New Yorkers want him to say, I want him to say for sure. I think the City Council wants him to stay. My appeal to the State of New York is, get in a room with him, try and get him to stay, see what it’ll take to get them to stay. Maybe there are some changes that would be possible that would convince him he could continue on in a productive, positive manner. I don’t think guys like Andy Byford grow on trees. I think he’s a pretty special talent and he’s proven he can handle New York City. Let’s try and keep him.

    Lehrer: When you say the State of New York should get in a room with them, you mean Governor Cuomo?

    Mayor: Yeah, and whoever else from his team that has been working with Byford. I don’t know who are the people most active in dealing with the MTA, but unquestionably if he needs persuasion that a lot can be achieved – I mean, look again, anybody looking at the outpouring of support in the last 24 hours, he doesn’t have to wonder whether he has popular support or the support of the elected officials of New York City. We all want him to stay. So I think it comes down to the State trying to figure out what’s it going to take to get him to change his mind. I don’t think it’s an impossible equation. I’ve seen harder things done.

    Besides laying bare the reality that the mayor has no idea what’s happening within the MTA, the transit system used by millions of his constituents on a daily basis, and that Brian Lehrer seems to have a far rosier view of the Byford-Cuomo dynamic that reality dictates, the mayor’s words and everyone else’s seem to willfully ignore the reality here. Andy Byford is leaving because Andrew Cuomo wanted him out of the way. Only Jumaane Williams and Council Member Antonio Reynoso directly named the governor, and everyone other politician tried to tip-toe around the powerful head of New York or pretend the problem was something else, as de Blasio did. Does this bode well for the future?

    All hope shouldn’t be lost though. As a variety of transit activists told Curbed New York’s Amy Plitt, Byford laid a very strong foundation for future success, and while many within the MTA are rightly feeling discouraged right now, the agency should be able to continue to build on Byford’s successes if the right people are given the right support and the right opportunities. There is no way to sugarcoat Andy Byford’s departure. It was far too premature and represents a big blow to New York City. But the governor is allowed to make these decisions. It’s #CuomosMTA, after all, and if everyone is going to push him to take charge, that means accepted the good with the bad for as long as we can. Right now, New York City is worse off for it, but if this becomes a catalyst for increased attention on the politics of transit, perhaps Cuomo will have won a pyrrhic victory.

    Ultimately, your commute won’t get worse tomorrow or next week or next month, but will it get as better as Byford had promised? That tantalizing reality now remains out of reach, and it didn’t have to be like this.

  • Andy Byford to depart NYC Transit, for good this time

    Andy Byford has announced his resignation from New York City Transit.

    After rescinding a resignation letter in October and nearly walking away from New York City Transit over a tense relationship with Governor Andrew Cuomo, Andy Byford has officially resigned as the President of New York City Transit after a little over two years on the job, the MTA announced today. In comments following Thursday’s MTA Board meetings, agency Chair and CEO Pat Foye cited “personal reasons” as driving Byford’s departure. But Byford had felt sidelined by the recent MTA Transformation process, especially as his roles changed, and he clashed frequently with the governor. Byford, in his resignation letter, cited transformation as a concern and said his last day will be February 21. The MTA has not yet named an interim president to replace the popular Byford.

    Byford’s resignation letter hit the Internet this afternoon, and he clearly pointed to the MTA’s ongoing reorganization as a driving factor. “The Alix Partners MTA Transformation plan called for the centralization of projects and an expanded HQ, leaving Agency Presidents to focus solely on the day-to-day of running service. I have built an excellent team and there are many capable individuals in Transit and others within the MTA family, who could perform this important, but reduced, service delivery role,” Byford wrote to new MTA COO Mario Peloquin.

    According to senior MTA officials, Byford felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under him as he was brought to New York City to lead the supposed renaissance of the subways and buses but was instead being siphoned into a service delivery role for which he was overqualified. It will be interesting to see how this impacts potential recruiting for Byford’s replacement as the NYC Transit President role doesn’t carry nearly the same cachet as it used to. I’ve embedded the resignation letter below.

    Andy Byford’s letter of resignation.

    The news first broke in the middle of the monthly board meeting when Dana Rubinstein published her bombshell report at Politico New York, and the MTA quickly sent out a brief press release acknowledging the news with the following statements from Foye and Byford.

    “Andy Byford will be departing New York City Transit after a successful two years of service and we thank him for his work,” Foye said. “Andy was instrumental in moving the system forward, enacting the successful Subway Action Plan and securing record capital funding with the Governor and the Legislature, and we wish him well in his next chapter.”

    “I’m very proud of what we have achieved as a team over the past two years and I believe New York City Transit is well-placed to continue its forward progress now that the MTA has a record breaking $51.5 billion Capital Program in place,” Byford said. “I’m very grateful to Governor Cuomo, Chairman Foye and members of the Board for giving me the opportunity to serve New York and to head up North America’s largest transit system.”

    Reactions have flown in fast and furious with local city officials bemoaning the loss of Byford, and the impact it’ll have on the city, its transit network and potential for the future. “DEVASTATED,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said via Twitter (though he later stopped short of blaming the governor). I’ll round up more of these comments and reactions from transit advocates later.

    While local politicials did not specifically blame the tense relationship between Cuomo and Byford as the main driver of his departure, recent reporting from Emma Fitzsimmons at The Times did just that. She writes:

    Mr. Byford had considered quitting since last spring and struggled to get along with Mr. Cuomo, who controls the subway and the flow of money to the system.

    Mr. Cuomo was angry after Mr. Byford tried to resign in October, according to officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The governor signaled to state officials that the tense relationship had reached its end point and that he expected Mr. Byford to be gone by the first quarter of 2020, the officials said.

    By December, Mr. Byford made up his mind that he would leave after completing his second year, those officials said. Another likely departure, officials say, is Pete Tomlin, who was brought in by Mr. Byford to run a multibillion dollar overhaul of the signal system.

    When asked at a separate appearance on Thursday touting a legislative compromise on legalizing e-bikes if Cuomo was happy with Byford’s departure, the governor said, “No, I thought he was a good man.” The governor had previously praised Byford during the same appearance. “He’s a good man and I wish him well and I think he did great work,” Cuomo said, before launching into a critique of Byford’s plan to re-signal the subways, a cornerstone of Fast Forward and the five-year capital plan, on the grounds that it would have taken too long. (MTA insiders believe Pete Tomlin, the signals guru Byford brought in to oversee CBTC installation will depart at some point in the near future as well.)

    Byford too stressed that his departure was his own decision. “This was 100 percent my decision. There was no external pressure for me to go. This is something I’ve given careful thought to,” he said to Fitzsimmons.

    Still, by all accounts, that Byford and Cuomo clashed behind the scenes and personality-wise did not help smooth over any problems with their relationship, despite their public comments. And for now, yet again, New York City Transit is looking for yet another head, leaving New Yorkers to ponder what comes next for the subways and their improvements after the so-called Train Daddy departs.

    Check back for updates as I’ll have more on this breaking story.

  • With signal timers in sight, Byford set to speed up trains, hopefully

    A list of the first set of signal timers Transit will fine tune. Transit later issued some correction. Click to enlarge.

    As subway service has gone from good to bad to worse over the past few years, signal timers have come up frequently as a topic of conversation. The timers, as I explored in March, arose out of a 1995 subway crash that was ultimately determined to be due to human error, and the MTA has spent over two decades slowing down the trains because, well, who knows. No one could explain why by the time year 23 of the signal timers arrived that many were being installed. Subway service has been slowed because the MTA opted to slow the trains, and now Andy Byford is starting to do something about it.

    Emma Fitzsimmons of The Times broke the news in an article on Monday in which you will find a few comments by me. The essence is this: By attacking faulty signal timers and raising speed limits on others, Byford believes he can alleviate the system-wide slowdown caused by the MTA’s own internal decision-making processes without sacrificing safety. As anyone who has experienced a slow crawl of, say, a 2 or 3 train north of 86th St. or an R train ride up or down 4th Ave. in Brooklyn will attest to, eliminating these slow spots is a move that can’t happen soon enough.

    The MTA announced the changes in a press release on Monday afternoon as part of the awkwardly-named “Save Safe Seconds” campaign:

    This past weekend, several months of careful testing and study have led to the safe increasing of five speed limits between 36 St and 59 St on the nr line in Brooklyn, with 15 mile-per-hour zones being increased to 20 or 30 miles per hour. Twenty-nine more increases throughout the system have also been approved by a safety committee and will be rolled out in coming weeks, with Transit officials estimating speed limits to be safely increased at more than 100 locations throughout the system by the springtime. The speed limit changes already approved increase speeds generally in the 10 to 20 mile per hour range to speeds that reach the 40s.

    The same team doing this work is also testing and fixing speed regulating signals called “time signals” or “timer signals,” with 95 percent of some 2,000 such signals tested since the initiative began in late August. Approximately 267 faulty timer signals have been discovered and approximately 30 of them have been fixed so far in what amounts to very labor-intensive work to inspect, diagnose and repair or replace numerous possible pieces of equipment during times of exclusive track access for workers such as weekends or nights.

    “Safety is always our top priority, and we’re working hard to maximize our subway’s potential within the boundaries of stringent safety standards,” said NYC Transit President Andy Byford. “Subway cars have come a long way in safety and performance since the system’s speed limits were first put in place up to a century ago, and some speed-regulating signals have become miscalibrated over time, forcing trains to go slower than they need to. We’re taking a fresh look, with no compromise to safety, at how to reduce delays and get people to their destinations sooner.”

    This announcement though seems modest in comparison with the findings in Fitzsimmons’ article. According to her reporting, the MTA has installed around 2000 signal timers throughout the system — or the equivalent of around 3 for every mile of track. Even though we can point to multiple causes for the declining reliability of subway service, it’s hard to understate just how costly these signal timers have been as trains have slowed to a crawl lately. The initial effort to remove them is a modest too. Here’s Fitzsimmons:

    Over the summer, Mr. Byford created a new “speed unit” — a three-person team that traveled every mile of track on the system in an empty train to find areas where trains could safely move faster. The team identified 130 locations where the speed limit should be increased. So far, a safety committee at the transit agency has approved 34 locations for speed increases…

    About 30 signals have been repaired in Brooklyn, from the DeKalb Avenue station to the 36th Street station, on the B, Q, D, N and R lines, and near the 9th Avenue station on the D line. Mr. Byford wants to eventually fix all of the faulty signals, though he cautioned that the work is complex and could take awhile.

    I’m guardedly optimistic that this move is the start to a solution for our speed woes. As Fitzsimmons notes, NYC subways are among the slowest in the world, and as I keep saying, that’s largely in part due to the MTA’s own choices that slowed down speeds to an unacceptable level in response to discrete incidents caused more by human error than faulty signals. Unfortunately, 30-40 timer fixes every few months won’t do much to fix speeds, and any observant rider can reel off a handful of spots where timers have become more noticeable in recent years (the Franklin-Atlantic run on the 4/5, Grand Army Plaza to Bergen St. on the 2/3, the Q/N heading north into Union Square, the 6 between 51st St. and Grand Central, etc., etc., etc.). So for this to pay real dividends, Byford will have to push for a faster pace, and a faster pace is what frustrated NYC subway riders deserve. For this one, the MTA has only itself to blame, and only the MTA can fix it.

  • Despite NYC economy, transit ridership continues steady decline

    Generally, in recent New York City history, as the city’s economy grows and employment increases, transit ridership does as well. On a basic and obvious level, it makes sense. After all, people need to get to work, and if more people are working, more people are going to be using the subways and buses to get to their jobs. And yet, this time around, something funny is happening: As the city’s economy continues to add jobs, transit ridership has continued to plunge.

    This story began years ago as ridership started to slip, and I looked into the numbers over the summer. When the agency released its board materials for last week’s meeting, the picture remained negative. Average weekday subway ridership in July 2018 was nearly 2 percent lower than in July 2017, and the MTA noted that this dip was a steeper decline than the one during the second quarter of this year. Weekend ridership has declined by over 5 percent. Take a look at the graph of the 12-month rolling averages. Weekend totals include both Saturday and Sunday.

    July ridership numbers show an ongoing decline.

    The averages aren’t the only numbers showing an alarming dip. Year-to-date ridership is 0.5 percent below 2017’s pace even as total NYC employment has inched up by nearly two percent over the same period in 2017. Where is everyone going? Or better yet, how are they getting to work?

    In the Board materials, the MTA doesn’t speculate as to the lost riders. The agency notes that bus ridership is lower due to fewer student rides, but student rides make up a small fraction of trips especially during the summer months. That’s an unsatisfying answer. Meanwhile, we’ve already seen the MTA attempt to explain the ridership decline with less than impressive results. The agency blamed for-hire vehicles for the declining ridership rather than the poor service, and it’s not clear the agency has a plan to stanch the bleeding or cares much about it.

    And that brings me to the next question: Should we care? The answer is a nuanced one. On the one hand, the declining ridership in excess of MTA projections means the agency will miss its fare-based revenue projections, but the miss totals only around $3.1 million. The year-end total will be somewhere around $5.5-$6 million, a piddling amount for an agency with a $13 billion budget but still an amount that could lead to service cuts. Meanwhile, if a modern economy allows potential commuters to work remotely, perhaps we shouldn’t expect a ridership increase commensurate with employment numbers.

    But the nagging feeling I have, based on that July report on ridership mode shifts and the general worsening subway service, is that subway and bus ridership numbers are declining because the MTA can’t provide regularly reliable and fast service. Thus, potential transit riders are looking at other modes for travel, and the increase in usage of FHVs (along with added congestion) will increase because the MTA’s service doesn’t provide the reliability New Yorkers need.

    If Transit is worried about this ridership decline, the executives aren’t showing it. Andy Byford’s Fast Forward remains a plan without a funding stream rather than an ongoing concern, and agency officials haven’t spoken of the need to combat the decline or a fear that the bottom could fall out. I believe stopping this dip should be a primary concern if NYC is stay on a pace of sustainability with fewer car trips and more transit usage. This slow-motion death spiral will choke the city.

  • On the effect and cause of the MTA’s ridership decline

    A Monday meltdown reinforces why transit ridership is down across NYC. (Source: MTA)

    Monday morning dawned in New York City yesterday as it so often does these days: with a total MTA meltdown. The problem this time came about because of a year-long project to fix a stretch of tunnel under 4th Ave. about which the MTA forgot to tell riders and somehow messed up the GO. Thanks to a typo, the D, N and R were all running local and wooden plywood formed a surprising barrier on the express tracks. As complaints on social media piled up and no one knew what was happening, riders flocked to any other possible route — ferries, Ubers, whatever they could find.

    Later in the day, the MTA determined that a typo caused the meltdown, and Aaron Gordon did a deep dive into the mess that was. As Gordon discussed, because the work order identified the wrong signal as the end point of the construction zone, D trains were routed onto the local tracks, and the entire 4th Ave. line south of Atlantic Ave. was thrown into disarray. Furthermore, since Transit had scheduled this work as a long-term change, the internal communications staff didn’t realize it required special word to passengers in the form of station posters and announcements. Thus, the powers-that-be at Transit simply didn’t know they needed to make an effort to bring word of these service changes to commuters during rush hour on a Monday morning.

    The agency struck an apologetic tone. Sarah Meyer, Transit’s new-ish Chief Customer Officer, issued a lengthy statement about the issue (which notes how the blue wall actually improves service and eliminates the need for flagging). “We deeply apologize for our significant errors today and know that we need to do better,” Meyer (a long-time classmate of mine in elementary and high school) said. “We are working through our policies and procedures to ensure this does not happen again.”

    But happen again it does time and time again. As Dave Colon detailed at Curbed (while linking to this post of mine on this very topic from 2011), the MTA constantly fails at communicating basic information about subway delays. As Colon noted, Transit’s twitter account had no update on the issue until 9:17 a.m., at least 40 minutes to an hour after initial reports started trickling in. No one anywhere knew what was happening, and this lag in getting information to the public is a near-daily problem these days.

    Now, Monday’s delay was a particularly bad one, but this a long-winding way of getting to another point: Monday’s issue isn’t that rare and is illustrative of declining reliability of subway service and a main driver behind the alarming multi-year dip in ridership I charted last week. Following the release of the raw numbers, during the MTA Board meeting last week, agency executives presented a deep dive on ridership trends. What they unveiled wasn’t surprising: Subway ridership is on target for another two-percent dip this year, and the biggest declines in weekend ridership are from the hours of 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., not coincidentally when service gets less frequent and more likely to be plagued by track work-related changes.

    Other than from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., weekday subway ridership is down across the board with the biggest dips in evening and late night travel. (Source: MTA)

    It’s hard to find good news in the MTA’s report. The only time ridership has steadily increased has been in the hours between 5 a.m. – 7 a.m., and while the morning rush is still above 2014 levels, by the end of this year, ridership in the 22-hour period from 7 a.m. – 5 a.m. will be at its lowest in six years. Overall, the biggest declines are in the Bronx and Queens, with these boroughs seeing subway ridership fall by 6 percent and 5 percent respectively this year.

    Not coincidentally, again, the MTA notes that growth in the usage of for-hire vehicles — the Ubers, Lyfts and Vias of the world — increased markedly in 2017. Growth in FHV usage was 13 percent last year as 63 million more riders used for-hire vehicles in 2017 than in 2016. That’s a larger increase than from 2012-2016 combined, and when combined with the 199 million bike and ferry rides (and the corresponding 6 million rider increase last year), this increase is a one-for-one match with the 69 million rider decline in subway service.

    The increase in for-hire vehicle and taxi usage corresponds closely with the dip in subway ridership. (Source: MTA)

    So is Uber responsible for the MTA’s ridership dip? That is what MTA Chairman Joe Lhota seems to want the city to believe. As he said last week in response to a question to Dan Rivoli of The Daily News, “Some days, I drink Coke, and some days, I drink Pepsi.” It’s hard to read this as anything other than an attempt to blame personal choice and forces outside of the MTA for the decline in ridership. To me, though, this is both a gross misreading of the situation and an inverting of the cause and effect. The cause of the MTA’s ridership declines isn’t an increase in Uber use; rather, the effect of the MTA’s declining service reliability is an increase in the use of for-hire vehicles.

    Notably, the MTA has charted steep declines in outer-borough routes (that is, travel between the boroughs rather than to Manhattan), and that can be explained by long and arduous trips that either require multiple transfers or multiple modes. With VC money still subsidizing for-hire vehicle fares, those New Yorkers who need to take these outer borough trips and can afford a taxi ride do so, particularly when subway service (and communication about that subway service) is a crap shoot. As one Uber rep said to The Wall Street Journal, “The best way to boost subway ridership is to improve service.”

    These ridership declines are worrying trends. The spiral will continue to send those with means out of the subway system while New Yorkers who can’t afford alternate travel are left with an unreliable system that costs them time and money in delays and lost wages. The MTA should recognize that the cause is not Uber but rather the service, and Monday’s communications and travel meltdown was just another sign of the depths of the transit crisis.