Public Transit Policy

It’s been a few years since Mayor Michael Bloomberg put forward his PlaNYC2030 vision, and by now, we’ve had a chance to see what has succeeded, what will move forward and what won’t. As the political fallout from an ambitious and, according to some, heavy-handed attempt to change New York has settled, I’ve been disappointed by the lack of cohesiveness and clarity in the city’s long-term transportation planning. We have only the bare minimum of expansion plans in place with a lackluster attempt to improve the bus network and no steady and dedicated funding scheme in place. Where did we go wrong?

A few days ago, while browsing through The Other Side of the Tracks, I came across a story out of Washington, D.C. The Nation’s Capitol, with less than 1/10 the population of New York City, is hoping to grow by over 40 percent over the next two decades. Mayor Vincent Gray wants to add 250,000 to the district’s headcount, and he has a comprehensive urban plan that would help D.C. usher in this growth.

On the one hand, the plan is an ambitious attempt to re-imagine urban life in a mid-sized East Coast city. He wants to cut waste, eliminate the need for people to use cars and turn the city into a hyper-local, largely self-sustaining ecosystem. On the other hand, city officials are hoping that 75 percent of trips will be by foot, bicycle or public transit, but they seem to be intent on promoting street cars over an expansion of the Metro system. We could debate the wisdom of such a move forever, but the truth remains that without a more comprehensive Metro system within the District of Columbia, the city won’t be able to absorb a 40 percent increase in population.

Still, that’s besides the point. D.C. has a plan, and a mayor willing to put his name behind the plan. Furthermore, the plan has a significant transportation component that aims to reimagine how city streets are used and how city transportation is prioritized. In New York City, we have a once-powerful mayor who fought one battle, lost and then gave up.

Bloomberg’s story focuses around congestion pricing, and it was a one-off battle. He made congestion pricing a centerpiece of PlaNYC 2030, failed to gather political support before unveiling the plan and then lost the fight in Albany. Since then, we’ve had ineffective state executives unwilling to pick this fight anew, a mayor who has recoiled from dealing with the state and a new and very powerful governor who is unwilling to push for congestion pricing. As Streetsblog noted on Wednesday, Cuomo sets the agenda right now; if he believed in a congestion pricing plan, it could become law within a matter of weeks.

Yet, even with congestion pricing, New York City has no plan. Our subway expansion efforts, due to a variety of factors including out-of-control costs, are meager. We’re getting a one-stop extension of the 7 line and a three-stop extension of the Q up Second Ave. The Triboro RX plan is often scorned as impossible, and those who dare to dream about it speak in decades rather than years. Beyond that, we have a Select Bus Service plan that fails to unite boroughs, neighborhoods and job centers, and no unifying goal. New York City has no transit champion.

Partly, the political structure of the MTA is to blame for this deficit. The MTA is a creature of the state, and thus no mayor can do too much to impact the direction of MTA-related transportation growth. We need the state’s approval to move forward and the state’s dollars as well. Anything the city wants to do then will either have to involve the state or have to escape the purview of the organization that runs our buses and subways. It’s quite the conundrum.

So we’re left spinning our wheels. We need that reimagining of our transportation priorities, and we need a plan to move forward and expand. Instead, we have incremental technological improvements, regular fare hikes, a legacy of service cuts and no champion. Who can step up to save and improve the city’s transportation network and its long-term future?

New York City’s Borough Presidents don’t have much power within the city’s government. They have small discretionary budgets, can appoint Community Board members and are largely ceremonial. Because New Yorkers love a figurehead, though, serious politicians can use the BP spot as a spring board to greater ambitions. Many a former Manhattan Borough Presidents have moved into Gracie Mansion, and Scott Stringer is looking to do the same.

Armed with the support of his long-time family friend and native Manhattanite Scarlett Johansson, Stringer must overcome the presumptive front-runner Christine Quinn’s edge, but he is a vocal and tireless campaigner. As Borough Presidents go, he has also been a friend of transit — at least as much as he can be in his role. He hosted a conference late last year about the future of transportation in New York City and seems to recognize that our mass transit system powers Manhattan and the city’s economy.

Yesterday, at a speech before the Association for a Better New York, Stringer laid out his views on transit. We know he endorsed a commuter tax plan, but he had far more to say on the subway system. “We have a basic problem: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority—the central nervous system of our regional transit network– is a fiscal house of cards,” he said. “That’s not just bad for straphangers. Without a healthy MTA, our region’s 1.2 trillion dollar economy could come to a screeching halt. Without action, we risk becoming a first-class city with a second-rate transportation network. We cannot let that happen.”

In his speech, Stringer laid out what he called a “roadmap” for the MTA. This wasn’t about taking cheap shots at the beleaguered transit authority or flat-out ignoring transit as our current Governor has done. Rather, this was a speech about paying attention, making some hard choices and investing in our present and future. He issued a call for a New York City Transit Trust Fund with dedicated revenues from the mortgage recording fund; he urged Albany to embrace Sam Schwartz’s traffic plan; and he called upon the restoration of the commuter tax.

He said:

“Under my plan, the New York City Transit Trust will also leverage private dollars, but will do so responsibly, by tying the infrastructure bank to a dedicated revenue stream – our existing Mortgage Recording Tax. Now as many of you know, the Mortgage Recording Tax is a fee that gets paid every time property changes hands in the City and the 7-county MTA region. Today, those fees flow directly into the MTA’s operating budget.

Now, unfortunately, the MRT is a horrible source of operating funds – it swings wildly from year to year, making solid projections very tough. At the height of the housing bubble, the Mortgage Recording Tax and other transfer taxes generated $1.5 billion for the city and the MTA. But by last year, with a flat market, revenues dropped 75 percent to just $400 million.

Relying on a source of revenue that can plunge 75 percent over a five year span is no way to run a railroad, much less the nation’s largest transit system. Over the long haul, however, we know that the Mortgage Recording Tax brings in an average of $400 million a year. A dedicated revenue stream of that size can be used to leverage over $10 billion in capital that could be quickly put to work.”

What then would the city be able to do with this money? Spend it wisely, says Stringer. Echoing a point I’ve made before, he leveled his sights on current projects. “We can’t be throwing precious dollars at projects like the Fulton Street station in Lower Manhattan,” he said. “That station is costing taxpayers 1.4 billion dollars and will do nothing to add capacity when work finally ends in 2014.”

With the added dollars, we could reimagine the transit network, he said. Stringer would expand bus rapid transit. He wants to add light rail to 42nd St., and he wants to deliver an AirTrain to La Guardia. He even spoke of the Triboro RX line. “Here’s why it is not a pipe dream: The line is built entirely along existing rights of way,” he said. “That means no tunneling, which is the biggest hurdle in this day and age to building new subways.”

It’s unclear what Stringer’s political future is right now. The 2013 mayoral race is both a long ways off and very unsettled. But no New York politician has taken such a vocal and ardently pro-transit stance as Stringer did yesterday. For that, he deserves a good long look even as his ideas would face steep opposition in Albany. He might just be the city’s best hope for a better transit policy.

Stringer’s speech is available in full right here.

By a vote of 74-22, the Senate yesterday passed their version of a reauthorization of the transportation bill. You can read all about the vote at Streetsblog and Transportation for America. I wanted to discuss a few key New York-centric aspects of this new measure.

First, the good: New York City stands to benefit tremendously under the Senate version of the bill. As The Post notes, New York State would receive $1.4 billion in transit dollars and $1.7 billion in road money. The bulk of the transit dollars would fund MTA projects, and the commuter tax benefits would be restored to $240 per month. “It’s one of the most important bills for New York that’s going to come this year,” Chuck Schumer, Senior Senator from the Great State of New York, said.

Now the bad: Besides the fact that the House seems intent on enacting a Tea Party-style death by a million cuts on the Transportation Bill and the final version will have to go to conference for a reconciliation, the safety measures are something we should not be quick to embrace. As The Washington Post explains, the Senate, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the derailment and collision problems through which only the WMATA suffers warrant sweeping federal safety oversight of the nation’s subway systems.

“We have federal safety standards for planes, trains and automobiles. We need them for transit systems like Washington’s Metro,” Maryland’s Sen. Barbara Mikulski said. “I will keep pushing forward on reforming Metro until it’s safe for the people who work on it and the people who ride on it.”

Now, it’s all well and good for the Senate to be concerned with the lone subway system that literally runs through its backyard, but as I said a few weeks ago, federal oversight for subway systems is unnecessary and likely costly. It will carry unfunded federal mandates that lead to detrimental redundancies that just aren’t necessary to operate a fast and efficient rapid transit network. We’ve seen it with the FRA, and there’s no reason to expect otherwise here. If the Senate has a problem with their own Metro, they should address it at home and not by making the rest of us suffer.

Before we get too upset over these developments, though, we must wait for the House. A looming showdown could drastically alter the structure of this bill, but at least the Senate is willing to move forward with a somewhat sensible transportation solution.

As things in Washington, D.C., stand now, H.R. 7, the transportation bill that has had many wringing their hands over the past few weeks, is unlikely to become law without some serious work. Still, New York representatives from both sides of the political aisle are concerned that the city will lose a major source of transit funding (and money that goes toward job creation in the area). They and leading transit officials have been speaking out against the bill.

Yesterday, in a conference call with numerous transit agency heads, MTA CEO and Chairman Joe Lhota explained how New York City benefits from the current funding scheme. “That billion dollars in funding is used to buy rail stock and switching and signaling equipment, critical to maintaining our system in a state of good repair,” he said.

Under the new bill, a dedicated funding stream for transit projects would dry up, and the money allocated for various grants for transit projects would be thrown into a common pot. Every project would compete for scarce funds, and transit and pedestrian-improvement projects would be a complete disadvantage to road building. But that’s the problem only on the top level. Below the surface the bill is rife with inefficient practices.

Take, for instance, Section 5310 of the new bill. This section concerns the bus and bus facilities formula grant. According to some commentators, approximately $900 million would be available for transit agencies under this section, but there’s a giant caveat. Section 5310(c)(1) discusses eligibility and defines it as such:

RECIPIENTS- Eligible recipients under this section are providers of public transportation in urbanized areas that operate fixed route bus services and that do not operate heavy rail, commuter rail, or light rail services.

In simple English, the only agencies eligible for funding under this section — the only folks who could claim a piece of a lofty $900 million pie — are those who operate bus systems only and also do not operate any rail service. That will lead to two consequences: Either any major transit agency — the MTA, the WMATA, the MBTA, etc. — would all be eliminated or they would have to spin off their bus operations into brand new agencies thus creating another layer of transit bureaucracy.

Transportation for America is highly critical of this section of the bill. This section, they say, “needlessly diverts tax dollars to bureaucratic overhead that should be used to provide much-needed transit services to local communities.” Why have one transit agency without streamlined operations that wastes money on bureaucracy when you can have two?

On a granular level, this is the kind of transit policy coming out of the House of Representatives right now. As three decades of dedicated transit funding sources are coming under attack, common-sense governmental operations are under the microscope too. The MTA has worked hard, with varying degrees of success, to tame a multi-agency bus system, and if H.R. 7 becomes law, the authority would either have to forfeit funds or discard its bus system entirely. Nothing about that sounds like sound policy to me.

As of now, the bill doesn’t have the votes to pass the House, but as Streetsblog noted yesterday, we’re not out of the woods yet. “I think that the drafters go back to the drawing board and they recognize that we have some issues that we can’t just overlook,” Michael Grimm, a House rep from Staten Island said. Hopefully, those drafters will listen to officials who are urging a better bill, but I’m not so optimistic.

On Monday, when it wasn’t clear if the House Ways and Means Committee mark-up of the Transportation Bill would see the light of day, I discussed New York’s staunch opposition to the bill. MTA officials as well as the region’s federal representatives gathered a few days ago to speak out against a bill that would turn guaranteed transit dollars into, well, nonguaranteed dollars. Our region stood to lose more than any other.

Now, as the bill is moving toward a floor vote with signs that it could pass the House, The Times has lent its editorial voice to the fight, and they aren’t holding back. Calling it a “terrible bill,” the Grey Lady urges the House to reject it, and if it passes, the Senate to turn it back. Here’s their take:

Here is a brief and by no means exhaustive list of the bill’s many defects:

¶It would make financing for mass transit much less certain, and more vulnerable, by ending a 30-year agreement that guaranteed mass transit a one-fifth share of the fuel taxes and other user fees in the highway trust fund. Instead it would compete annually with other programs.

¶It would open nearly all of America’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, including environmentally fragile areas that have long been off limits. The ostensible purpose is to raise revenue to help make up what has become an annual shortfall for transportation financing. But it is really just one more attempt to promote the Republicans’ drill-now-drill-everywhere agenda and the interests of their industry patrons.

¶It would demolish significant environmental protections by imposing arbitrary deadlines on legally mandated environmental reviews of proposed road and highway projects, and by ceding to state highway agencies the authority to decide whether such reviews should occur….

In any case, none of this is good news for urban transit systems, including New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which, in 2010 alone, received about $1 billion from the trust fund.

If we want to enjoy future subway expansion projects, if we want to see the Second Ave. Subway’s Phase 1 wrapped up on time, this bill cannot become law. Transportation for America has more on speaking out against this bill with the details on contacting your federal representatives. New York City denizens need not worry about our representatives voting in favor of HR 7, but this is a national issue. Say no to HR 7.

As more New York State Republican representatives try to whittle down the MTA-supporting payroll tax, their colleagues in Washington are trying to do the same with federal funds dedicated toward transit. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee voted to send a markup of the transportation bill to the floor, and if passed by the House and Senate and approved the president — a tall order indeed — the bill could rob New York City of billions of dollars of transit funds.

For extensive coverage of the bill, check out articles from Reuters and The L.A. Times. Streetsblog D.C. offered a short summary of the mark-up’s impact. Essentially, the Ways and Means Committee is hoping to bar gas tax revenue from funding transit. Today, those taxes are essential part of federal transit grants. Ben Goldman writes:

The Ways & Means bill [PDF] would funnel all gas tax revenue toward road programs, redirecting billions of dollars per year away from transit, which for decades has received about 20 percent of fuel tax receipts. Instead, the House GOP wants transit funding to come entirely from the general fund, pitting transit against all other government spending. To offset that spending, $40 billion would have to be cut from the rest of the federal budget.

Essentially, the House GOP is holding transit hostage to achieve budget cuts elsewhere — and they don’t seem to care if the hostage dies. They will also be tossing aside a precedent set during the Reagan administration, one that has enjoyed bipartisan support through several transportation bills, including the 2005 law, known as SAFETEA-LU, which was passed by a Republican president and Republican Congress.

The announcement of the mark-up, which you can read here, came just one day before the committee voted to send the bill to the House floor, and a broad coalition of union officials, politicians, contractors and transit agency heads have voiced their opposition. Later today, in fact, MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota will join with TWU President John Samuelsen, NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and four New York House representatives to speak out against the bill.

In the meantime, Lhota, a one-time Giuliani deputy, has penned a letter to David Camp, the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee. “The 2.86 cents of the motor fuels tax currently dedicated for public transportation provides a stable fund source that the MTA relies on to fund its capital investments. It is critical,” he wrote, “that these funds continue to be dedicated for public transportation purposes.”

He later warned of the consequences of federal divestment. “Consistent, on-going investment by the federal government is critical to ensure that the MTA continues to be a safe and reliable system for the long term,” he said. “A less predictable funding stream for public transportation will not only result in degraded service, but will also have a ripple effect on manufacturers and suppliers that serve the transit industry.”

This is an issue that extends far beyond the borders of New York. It would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the nation in various domestic industry. Within the city, it would likely impact any future work on the Second Ave. Subway or other system expansion plans. It is yet another attack on transit dollars from those who underestimate the importance of public transit to the nation’s economy. It is a measure that likely won’t survive the Senate or the President’s veto power, but the House GOP is serious about gutting the funding mechanism for capital plans for transit agencies through the nation. That is a scary future to ponder indeed.

The MTA's familiar bucket seats aren't wide enough for most New Yorkers. (Photo by flickr user bitchcakesny)

The 2 and 3 trains out of Brooklyn represent a chunk of my daily ride to work, and when my office moves to the West Side, I’ll be riding those trains for longer. In the morning and in the evening, I always root for the 2 train to arrive. It’s not the overall experience of the new rolling stock per se, but rather it is the seats. The bucket seats on the 3 train — as well as various other cars across the system — just do not work.

New Yorkers, you see, just don’t fit into the bucket seats. It’s not that New Yorkers are getting wider. Some are; some aren’t. But rather, the seats themselves aren’t wide enough for a normal sized adult who rides the subway, often with coats and layers. While the bench seating feels more natural, even in tight squeezes, the bucket seats are inefficient, impractical and uncomfortable. People try to squeeze into their perfectly defined spaces only to find the lip of the seat digging into certain areas where things should not dig.

As transit agencies are planning for next-generation rolling stock, the subways at least have done away with the buckets. All new cars have the bench seats. Yet, commuter rail cars still have something approximating bucket seats, and as car configurations are redesigned to conform with wider bottoms, seating may be a victim. Christine Haughney of The Times explored this conundrum yesterday. She wrote:

Each time an agency decides to purchase new trains or buses, it must consider whether to make its seats wider, knowing that a decision to do so could come at the expense of passenger capacity. New Jersey Transit has a five-year plan to add 100 double-decker train cars that have seats 2.2 inches wider than the 17.55-inch seats found in its single-deck trains; the seating configuration has been changed to two seats on either side of the aisle, rather than three on one side and two on the other. Amtrak intends to introduce “designs that will be able to accommodate the larger-sized passengers” on 25 new dining cars starting next year, said a spokesman, Cliff Cole.

But while transit agencies consider the needs of heavier passengers, they do not always yield to them. Over the past half-century, the width of New York City subway seats has not changed much, said Marcia Ely, assistant director of the New York Transit Museum. If anything, the seats have occasionally gotten smaller — and immediately encountered resistance.

Joseph Smith, who retired in 2010 as a New York City Transit senior vice president who also oversaw bus operations in the city and on Long Island, said that the agency once had to abandon plans to introduce Mercedes-Benz Citaro buses, which are popular in Europe, after riders complained about too-narrow seats.

Haughney’s article focuses on how transit agencies and the federal government are changing their requirements for weight distribution as well. Metro-North’s M9 cars will require double seats that can handle loads of up to 400 pounds while new federal crash-test standards for buses require 175 pounds and 1.75 square feet per person, up 25 pounds and 0.25 square feet over previous standards. “It’s clear that the US population is getting heavier,” Martin Schroeder, an engineer with the American Public Transport Association, said to The Times. “We are trying to get our hands on that and figure out what is the best average weight to use.”

This is are just a polite way of dealing with the reality of expanding waist lines, but that’s a genuine concern on public transportation (or anywhere, really). We’ve all been squeezed in the middle of people who are wider than the bucket seats or find ourselves underneath someone trying to sashay his or her way into a space that just isn’t big enough. It’s a hazard of the job, so to speak.

On the other hand, though, the increasing weights of passengers will require different federal standards which will require heavier and more plodding vehicles. We’ll lose seats on trains as New Jersey Transit, for instance, plans to cut out a third seat on some new cars, and we’ll lose speed as buses and rail cars, like their passengers, become heavier to cope with the added weight.