Category: New York City Transit

Just one day after Howard Roberts resigned as the president of New York City Transit, MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder has tabbed Tom Prendergast as his replacement. Prendergast, 57, is a veteran of the MTA and had been serving as CEO of Vancouver’s South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority. He stepped down from his post at TransLink today to prepare for the move back to New York.

Predergast will bring to Transit 30 years of experience in the industry. He worked at both the Chicago Transit Authority and the Federal Transit Administration before landing in New York in 1982. For 18 years, he rose thorough the managerial ranks at NYC Transit. He served as Senior Vice President of Subways from 1990-2000 and as President of the Long Island Rail Road from 1994-2000. Before joining TransLink in 2008, he worked as a consultant on numerous transportation infrastructure projects.

“It is a tremendous honor to return home to lead the outstanding men and women who run one of the world’s great transit systems,” Prendergast said in a statement today. “I look forward to working with Jay Walder to implement the customer service improvements that New Yorkers deserve. Running New York City Transit is one of the great challenges and honors in the profession, and I will bring all of my energy and passion to the job.”

In July 2008, Predergast left the private sector to move to Canada, and today, his departure, less than 18 months after landing in Vancouver, came as a shock. He put it, though, in terms New Yorkers can understand today. “Leaving TransLink is difficult because this is a great organization with great people and potential,” he said. “But at the end of the day, for me, being asked to run New York’s transit authority is like being asked to play in Yankee Stadium: You just don’t say no.”

Prendergast will inherit a position faced with numerous difficulties. The subway infrastructure is sagging under its age, and the MTA is about to begin a component-based repair program that should streamline State of Good Repair efforts. Meanwhile, Jay Walder has been very vocal in his desire to see technological innovation and 21st Century upgrades arrive in New York City. Still, many believe Prendergast to be a top candidate for the job. “I believe he is universally recognized as one of the leading lights in transit management,” an anonymous source told the Daily News.

Walder, in a statement, echoed that praise. “Tom is a leader who brings an extraordinary variety of experiences from around the world to a system that he already knows extremely well,” he said. “Tom’s work running one of the most technologically sophisticated systems in Vancouver will be invaluable as we take the MTA to the next level in performance and customer service.”

Updated 3:05 p.m.: Amidst speculation that new MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder would begin to staff the top agency positions with some of his own people, Howard Roberts has resigned as the head of New York City Transit. Roberts, a veteran of the MTA, had served in his position for 2.5 years.

Although New York City Transit has come under fire in recent weeks for the increased number of weekend service changes and generally less-than-satisfactory on-time performance, Roberts, who spoke with me last winter, has been a solid Transit president. With a focus on improving customer experience, he rolled out the rider report cards in 2007 and implemented the successful line manager program.

“Earlier today I accepted the resignation of New York City Transit President Howard Roberts,” Walder said in a statement this afternoon. “Howard deserves credit for his hard work leading NYC Transit over the last two and one half years, and I am grateful for his service to the MTA. He will remain in his position through the end of November. I intend to name a replacement in short order.”

Meanwhile, Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign praised Roberts’ service. “Howard Roberts Jr. has been a good head of New York City’s transit system,” Russianoff said in statement. “Although saddled with budget cuts and disruptions caused by needed repair work, he put managers in charge of each line and pushed to provide faster bus service. The subways and buses can drive New Yorkers nuts, but Howard Roberts worked hard for a saner system.”

Where Walder goes from here will be telling. With a background steeped in transit, he will mostly likely turn to another transit veteran to fill the role. Roberts will serve out the month, and on December 1, it’s day one all over again for Transit.

The MTA’s station agents have made the headlines lately. Over the summer and into September, the stories concerned the MTA’s plans to eliminate a few hundred agents and the potential impact unstaffed stations would have on the system. A few weeks into the great Station Agent Elimination Project, nothing much has changed underground.

Meanwhile, at the same time as efforts to cut the station agents gained headlines, the MTA was engaged in something of a sting operation. Using college interns to pose as subway riders, the line general manager on the Number 4 line graded his station clerks. Eitan Gavish and Pete Donohue have a little bit more about this story:

Subway managers on the No. 4 line used college interns posing as straphangers to rate clerks in terms of how helpful and courteous they were when approached. “It’s like a mystery shopper program,” NYC Transit Charles Seaton said Friday, referring to storeowners’ use of fake shoppers to review staff and other retail workers. The young subway sleuths in Operation Courtesy made their rounds on the Lexington Ave. line during the summer.

Results are still being compiled, but some workers behind the glass apparently needed immediate polishing. “Some have been spoken to on an informal basis,” Seaton said, stressing the reviews will not lead to disciplinary charges. “You get all kinds. You get nice people, some not so nice at all,” said a clerk, who also did not want to be named.

William Henderson, executive director of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, said he believed the vast majority of clerks were professional. “There are people who are very good, friendly and adept at dealing with the public, and some who may need to be coached a little bit on how to do a better job,” Henderson said.

That is, word for word, the Daily News’ entire story. Considering the implications of the eventual report and the ways in which Transit went about assessing their workers, that’s a rather short piece.

So without having the report in front of me, I can make a few educated guess about what we’ll find out and what it means for the station clerks. I think we’ll find out, as Henderson said, that some are better than others at their jobs, but I think we’ll find out that far more of the station clerks are either apathetic or disrespectful toward straphangers in need. I say that not out of malice for the station clerks but from first-hand experience underground. Some station clerks are very friendly; others can’t be bothered for the time of day and wouldn’t know their ways around the neighborhoods in which they work.

The real impact of this report though will be twofold. First, how will the MTA work to correct the problem of poor customer relationships? In the end, station clerks, while they serve a job, are the faces of the MTA. They are what many New Yorkers consider to be the epitome of the MTA. If the station clerks are rude, straphangers think poorly of the entire system. If the experiences at the booths are bad, riders are bound to consider the agency inept in its hiring and personnel decisions. A better training program for station clerks will be a must.

On the other hand, how will station clerks — union employees, at that — respond to the MTA’s backhanded attempts at judging them? At a time when Transit is trying to eliminate station clerks to save jobs, the clerks are being undermined in a sense by their bosses. Instead of an open review process, the MTA has employed an undercover system to judge first hand just how these employees are doing in their jobs. At a time when labor relations are tense, this move might not go over too well.

The commenters on the Daily News aren’t too sympathetic to the station clerks, and stories of rudeness abounds. I’ll pass final judgment when the report is released, but in this area, the MTA can show improvement.

Earlier this week, New York City Comptroller and Democratic mayoral hopeful William Thompson released a spate of audits critical of the MTA. I examined his report on station maintenance yesterday, and today, we’ll delve into Thompson’s views on New York City Transit’s performance metrics and the way the agency doesn’t really make this data available to the public. Obviously, Thompson isn’t happy with this state of the MTA’s data.

Before we delve into the report itself, I wanted to take a minute to ponder the politics behind it. Thompson has overseen the release of a few critical audits of the MTA this week, just a few days after he secured the Democratic nomination for mayor. He is going up against a powerful incumbent who has made populist unrest over the MTA into a cornerstone of his campaign, and while Thompson’s audits started in 2008, he is seemingly trying to play catch-up through the Comptroller’s office.

Anyway, politics aside, Thompson does not believe that Transit is communicating its internal metrics properly to its riders. “If the MTA wants to win rider trust after the recent fare hike and other missteps, it must make sure that it is upfront with riders about how it is doing,” said Thompson. “One key step is measuring service accurately in a way that’s easy to understand.”

The report — available here as a PDF — urges the MTA to be more forthcoming with its internal assessments. Thompson claims that the agency’s current indicators “distort reality,” and he wants Transit to better inform the public. Riders, he says, currently “cannot track how crowded their subway or bus is compared to other lines, the severity of service gaps how clean or well lighted their subway station, among other measures.”

To this end, Thompson proposes that the MTA streamline its data presentations and offer riders more information about subway crime and safety. He bullet-points his suggestions:

• Revise on-time performance data to reflect real-life experience during rush hours, off-peak periods and night-time and weekends and add measurements on service levels and crowding;
• Release more subway and bus information by line, so that riders can see how their line stacks up against other lines. Thompson praised NYC Transit for releasing subway-car breakdown information by line for the first time ever in July.
• Release station-by-station information and revising station ratings so that they include measurements of deteriorating structural conditions, water conditions and other problems;
• Ask for more complete crime information from the New York Police Department. Currently, NYC Transit releases data only about major felonies, missing many of the more commonplace crimes that occur on subway trains and in stations. For instance, NYC Transit’s crime statistics do not record petit larceny or fare-beating.

According to Thompson, his motive for releasing this report were purely altruistic. “Because of the overall lack of useful data, riders, advocates and elected officials must rely on anecdotal reports or outside analyses by groups such as NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign,” he said. “The lack of meaningful data makes it hard to define what must be improved and prevents NYC Transit from taking credit for service improvements.

“An unreliable and unappealing mass transit system drives away both riders and employers,” he continued. “My intent – and I am sure yours as well – is to help position our transit system so that it receives its fair share of public financial support.”

Take that for what you will. As Comptroller, Thompson has urged the city to provide more money for the MTA, and he has urged the MTA to provide more accountability to the public. Nothing has come of it. This report may very well fall on deaf ears, but it shouldn’t. While I doubt riders are, as Thompson claims, avoiding the MTA due to its lack of on-time performance metrics, we would all benefit from more information about our train lines.

Just over one month ago, the ceiling at 181st St. on the West Side IRT came crashing down and with it arose cries of a subpar station maintenance program. This week, New York City’s Comptroller William Thompson issued a damning report highly critical of the way New York City Transit goes about maintaining a database of stations in need of repairs and fixing those repairs.

“We recently averted tragedy when a subway ceiling collapsed onto tracks in Upper Manhattan. That should have signaled not just the need – but the urgency – to repair hazardous conditions,” Thompson said in a statement. “Instead, it’s as if New York City Transit is looking the other way. New Yorkers deserve better.”

The audit — available here as a PDF — paints a rather bleak picture of the current state of repair underground. Thompson and his office began investigating the MTA last year and have come to a rather stark conclusion. “New York City Transit is failing to repair reported defective and dangerous conditions – holes in station ceilings and platforms, corroded metal, loose or warped rubbing boards and broken steps – in commuter areas at subway stations across the city,” the Comptroller’s press release read.

The report features numerous stories such as the one about these stairs:

The Comptroller’s Office encountered this decrepit entrance at 33rd St. on the East Side IRT on November 25. On December 22, someone placed a service call, but on February 9, the steps still appeared in this state of disrepair. At other stations, damaged platform ceiling go unreported, and loose electrical wirings at 116th St. on the A went unrepaired for at least three months.

Beyond these reported and ignored problems, Thompson’s office found that the MTA has been closing out open tickets without making actual repairs. A handrail at 71st St. on the D/M in Brooklyn was reported broken on June 2, 2008, and while the trouble-call was filed as complete, six months later, the handrail was still loose. Stories such as these are pervasive at stations throughout the system.

In fact, auditors found problems with 399 of 426 sample trouble-calls, and the remaining 26 were at locations that were unidentifiable. According to to Thompson, 15 percent of calls were not repaired despite being filed 60 days prior to inspection. Two-thirds of these calls were closed out without any actual repair work being done.

The Comptroller’s Office also urged the MTA to institute a series of inspection measures:

• Ensure that station inspections are appropriately performed by station supervisors and that all observed defects are reported to maintenance shops;
• Establish a minimum requirement for frequency of station inspections and include this requirement in the Station Supervisor Training Program Manual and other operating procedures;
• Ensure that required inspection and frequency reports are used to evidence inspections and establish record maintenance requirements for such reports;
• Establish minimum requirements for supervisors to randomly review the work performed by maintenance personnel and to report on these observations. These reviews should be used as part of employee evaluations; and,
• Consult the Information Technology-Information Systems (IT-IS) department within the agency to discuss the weaknesses and needs of the MSU in tracking trouble-calls.

In response, Transit noted that it is in the process of instituting many of these suggestions. “Several of the recommendations made in the Comptroller’s Office audit report on MTA New York City Transit’s efforts to maintain and repair subway stations are being followed, while some, including those requiring the use of web-based technology, are under review for future incorporation,” the agency said in a statement.

“Improvements,” the statement continued, “are currently underway in the areas of the procedures governing station inspections and the frequency of these inspections, while supervisors receive additional training in the identification of station defects. This includes the continuation of a two-day training refresher that helps maintain the supervisor’s proficiency in this area.”

While the Line Manager program will streamline the repair process and subsequent oversight, the MTA is going to start compartmentalizing station rehabilitation plans in order to address problem spots at stations not up for a complete overhaul. Still, as the MTA struggles to reach its state of good repair and as last month’s station collapse is still fresh in our minds, Thompson’s report comes as a rather sober reminder that our system is fragile. We need better investment in transit, and we need it now.