New York City Transit

The MTA is still trying to dig itself out from under the metaphorical snow left in the wake of its failed blizzard response. (Photo courtesy of MTA)

No body of legislators and politicians has perfected outraged hindsight better than the New York City Council. Tasked with providing a check against the mayor and granted oversight powers over city agencies, the City Council can’t press too hard on the MTA, a state authority that derives its power from Albany, but it can make New York City Transit Authority leaders squirm. That’s just what the Council did on Friday.

For five hours on Friday, stretching past lunch and into the afternoon, City Council members used their lofty committee perches to rake Transit officials over the fire. Even though The Times and The Daily News had complete post mortems a few days after the snow, the City Council had to hear it from the horses’ mouths themselves, and the Council members had to make sure they looked appropriately outraged and disappointed for the cameras. All around, it was a giant mess.

For their part, Transit officials didn’t put on a show, but we already know how badly they messed up. We know that they opted to put the agency on a low-level Plan 1 footing on Thursday morning before Christmas Eve. We know, even as the forecast worsened, that they didn’t ramp up their staffing and procedures to Plan 4 until well after the forecast changed late Saturday afternoon and snow began to fall on Sunday. We know about trains that were stuck near Howard Beach and the deeper reaches of Brooklyn, about buses that were dispatched without chains and were stranded in the snow-covered streets. We know the MTA didn’t have a situation room or a centralized command structure in place for such a storm that weekend.

Yet, despite this knowledge, the Transit officials under the gun didn’t have answers. Transit president Thomas Prendergast said that his men “forgot” about the A train stuck at Howard Beach and had no evacuation plan once streets became impassable. The agency didn’t ready a situation room, and Prendersgast simply said, “The fact that it fell out of practice is a serious deficiency.” He didn’t know how much the storm cost the authority and said that no one had been fired or demoted yet as Transit is still conducting its own review. “We were lulled into a false sense of security on our own,” he said of the unexpected accumulation from the storm. “Nobody led us into that.”

Often, Prendergast said he didn’t have detailed answers for the Council members because his staff had been preparing for subsequent winter storms. He also reiterated what MTA sources have told me: Concerns over overtime costs played no role in the MTA’s decision to call in extra employees to respond to the storm. When deemed appropriate due to snow fall, Transit moved to a Plan 4 footing and paid no heed to the staffing costs. After all, weather contingencies are a part of the MTA budget.

Ultimately Prendergast issued his own mea culpa. “We failed during the blizzard and this is an apology on our part due to that failure,” he said.

The City Council, of course, didn’t take to Predergast, his team or his apology. The outrage ran the gamut from a call to the Governor to remove Prendergast from Transit to a clear attempt to blame Transit for the city’s own failures. It was hindsight at its finest. “Today was an abject failure,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn said of the hearings. “I was shocked by the performance of the transit leaders, the folks from the MTA at today’s oversight hearing. It really left me not feeling any greater level of confidence that the MTA can handle the next storm.”

Quinn, who called Transit’s responses “beyond shocking,” had more to say: “All you had to do was open up the blinds and see that the snow was falling. Blizzards don’t happen every week, but it’s not like a swarm of locusts came into New York or something we’ve never seen.”

She wasn’t alone in condemning Transit. David Greenfield, a councilman from Brooklyn’s District 44 who has been dubbed “Kvetch” by former Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek due to his ability to complain about literally everything, was live-blogging the hearing via his Twitter account. He comes across as simply a complainer looking to score easy political points and didn’t accept Transit’s words.

When union leaders testified that the MTA did indeed have overtime costs in mind when they didn’t call a Plan 4, Greenfield lapped it up like a good political puppy. It doesn’t matter if the TWU and ATU officials who spoke had first-hand knowledge of the response; if the MTA said it, Greenfield won’t accepted it. “Sadly, I am not surprised,” he said after the hearings. “The MTA is broken. I believe that in order to keep this city moving forward we have to stop accepting excuses and overhaul the structure of the MTA.”

Letitia James, who never met an MTA hearing she couldn’t exploit for personal gain, used her time in the sun to rail against the late December fare hikes. “You failed us and should not have raised your fares on December 29,” she said. Because of a poor response to the blizzard, the MTA should not have raised its fares to address a potential $400 million budget gap. In the world of the City Council that makes perfect sense.

Ultimately, everyone lost. New Yorkers lost when Transit was ill prepared for the biggest storm of the winter. Transit officials lost the little faith they had from the City Council and straphangers. Transit officials may also, as Nicole Gelinas wrote, lost a chit in their upcoming labor battle as well.

But the City Council came out looking petty and kvetchy. They have perfected the time-honored tradition of complaining about subway service but offered no solutions. Should Transit have dumped passengers off the A train in Howard Beach and let them fend for themselves? What should the proper blizzard response team look like? How would the City Council prefer to see the subways run? These are questions that have to be answered if New York is to move forward with better transit.

It will snow again this winter. We’ll get another big storm, and the MTA will be tested. It won’t be Christmas Eve, and Transit won’t be blindsided by mounting drifts. Will the Council accepted an improved response or still find reasons to complain?

In December, station platforms and subway tracks were buried by the snow. (Courtesy of New York City Transit)

It is snowing. Cue the plows! Pull out the shovels! Toss the salt! After last month’s snow debacle, the city is going to make sure we’re ready, and as of this writing, three plows have already passed by my window tonight. They might just be tearing up the asphalt roadbed instead of clearing up the one inch of snow on the ground, but they’re out there.

As New York works to keep its streets clear and sidewalks less slippery, the MTA has ramped up its snow preparedness as well. Already, express trains are running local and the authority expects them to do so well into Wednesday. The commuter rail lines are running reduced schedules, and the authority is urging passengers to check its website before venturing out in the morning. For up-to-the-minute reports on transit, the Daily News is running a live-blog.

Meanwhile, MTA officials spent part of Tuesday afternoon assuring reporters that the authority will be better prepared for the current storm. Hundreds of customers won’t get trapped near Howard Beach or on trains above-ground in the deeper reaches of Brooklyn, but potential commuters also must take care to travel only if it is necessary. “If you don’t need to travel tomorrow morning, please don’t,” MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder said on Tuesday.

Late last night, the authority elaborated on its approach to the snow in a statement: “Our goal in this and all storms is to continue providing service so long as it is safe for our customers, employees and equipment. We recognize the importance of public transportation especially when conditions are difficult. Doing this safely means service may be temporarily suspended or curtailed to avoid stuck trains and buses.”

But what of that next storm? What of the big one? The authority said today that it’s still conducting its own review of its snow procedures, and already, the agency has established a centralized snow command in charge of coordinating weather-related services. It’s also gearing up to have a response plan for major blizzards. Pete Donohue received advanced word of the MTA’s snow review and clued us in as to what to expect in the future. He writes:

The MTA may shut down at least some subway service during future blizzards rather than risk trains getting stuck, the Daily News has learned. “We may need to shut down the system,” an internal Metropolitan Transportation Authority document says. “We need to change the philosophy of how we operate, particularly in snowstorms. Keeping the service running regardless might not be the best option.”

The agency’s subway division kept running trains in last month’s blizzard. Three A trains with hundreds of passengers were stuck in eastern Queens – including one for about seven hours. Next time there’s such a severe blast, “We need to think about an organized shutdown of the system,” the document says.

The document is a draft summary of a meeting transit executives held last week to improve its storm response.

For years, the MTA has tried to power through the storm on the theory that trains can push snow out of the way, but when drifts pile up, as they did in December, the trains cannot pass. It happened in 1996 during the city’s big snow storm, and it always seems to knock out the subway system. Being willing to cancel service ahead of the storm may leave commuters struggling for other options, but it won’t leave them stuck at an unfamiliar train station and miles away from home.

Unfortunately, the city and the MTA cannot control the weather. They don’t dictate when it snows or how much accumulates. They can fight it as it falls, but as more arrives, it builds up with nowhere to go. To fight the snow, sometimes, we just have to accept it for what it is, and that is seemingly what the MTA’s new plan will try to do.

These new signs will begin appearing in subway cars everywhere this weekend.

On my way to the Jay St.-MetroTech ribbon-cutting yesterday, I hopped on a Manhattan-bound 3 train at Grand Army Plaza and found myself in a car surrounded by unfamiliar placards. Instead of the regular SubTalk signs discussing various goings-on at the MTA, I was face-to-face with this sign. Identical to the example atop this post, it said “Improving, Non-Stop” and was clearly a redesign of the MTA’s house ads.

When I arrived at Jay St., I had a chance to quiz Jay Walder and Paul Fleuranges, the MTA’s Senior Director of Corporate and Internal Communications, on the changes. The new signs have been designed to explain a mix of messages to riders with a focus on highlighting, as Walder said, “things we’ve done this year and improvements we’ve made.”

Graphically, the signs are meant to be simpler than the old SubTalk signs. The top is calmer, with more white space, while the MTA bullet, minimized on the old version, has been restored to a primary spot at the top. The website address is added subtly below the bullet. For the ribbon across the bottom, the new signs borrow the strip map stylings that are prominent on the cover of the new subway map.

Fleuranges and I spoke about what will be on the signs. Some of them — such as the one above which you can click to enlarge — feature general messages about the need to improve the system. Another thanks the MTA’s employees for their hard work. Others focus on bus lanes, the changes made to Select Bus Service and the arrival of the countdown clocks throughout the subway system. Fleuranges said that Transit is unveiling nine or ten new signs this weekend with more to come over the next couple of months.

The long-running SubTalk ads debuted in 1993 and were often in the news. For years, the rotating ads included a popular series called Poetry in Motion, but that was canceled and replaced with the Train of Thought ads in mid-2008. According to Fleuranges, SubTalk hasn’t been officially canceled; for now it’s “on haitus.” The Train of Thought ads though are “on the way out.”

In addition to spots in subway cars, the “Improving Non-Stop” ads will pop up at construction sites as well. On the way back to Park Slope from Downtown Brooklyn, I spotted one at Smith-9th Sts. It looks a little something like this:

The Improving Non-Stop signs inform customers of big-ticket construction projects. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak. Click to enlarge)

The idea here is to present riders with the same look and same type of messaging as the in-car ads features. After nearly two decades, it was time for a rebranding.

Signals at Ditmars Boulevard await an incoming train. (Photo by flickr user zin1966)

Thousands of subway signal inspection safety reports have been falsified over the last few years due to pressure from management, a report by the MTA Inspector General revealed on Friday. According to Barry Kluger’s ongoing investigation, inspections that should have been completed within 30 days were delayed for days or even weeks, and the safety of the subway’s complex signal system could have been compromised.

Due to the importance of his findings, Kluger has shared his initial report with Transit before releasing it to the public, and MTA officials have taken swift action. “Instead of waiting for results to come in and issue a report, we’ve been working with NYC Transit and supplying them with some of the results on an ongoing basis,” Kluger said in a statement. “They’ve moved quickly to try and get their arms around this and have been making a number of changes.”

Heather Haddon of The Post has more:

NYC Transit supervisors falsified thousands of vital signal inspections across the subway system for years, leaving straphangers at risk for deadly collisions like the one that killed nine people in Washington, DC, The Post learned.

Across every line, a cabal of managers in the signal department forced maintainers to fib on the inspections by threatening them with punishments like loss of overtime, according to a sweeping six-month investigation by the inspector general of the MTA, which oversees NYC Transit. At least one high-level chief, Tracy Bowdwin — the MTA’s highest-earning Signal Department supervisor at $165,000 a year — was demoted last week in the fallout, and managers are still being questioned, transit sources said.

The dangerous practice was a response to ramped-up pressure from the MTA to meet federal standards that call for railway switches and signals to be inspected monthly, sources said. “Instead of five signals to inspect [in a shift], they would give you 15. There’s no way 15 could be done, but they would say you had to do it,” one signal maintainer said. “It’s like you think your car is fine after going to the mechanic, but they never looked at it.”

According to Haddon’s report, “workers who didn’t comply lost overtime privileges or got sent to the dirtiest, most leak-infested tunnels.” That’s revenge at its worst for practices that could land some Transit workers in legal trouble.

For its part, Transit spokespeople ensured reporters that the signals that were the subject of Kluger’s report have been reinspected and that the system is safe. “We also took swift action to ensure that none of these deficiencies undermined the signal system’s safe operation or its underlying components,” NYC Transit Spokesman Charles Seaton said. “The signal system is safe.”