Second Ave. Sagas

Category: Service Cuts

  • Pointing a finger at state, city over student transit cuts

    As New York City students face the reality of life without a free MetroCard, most of the outrage has been directed at the MTA. How could the MTA desert the city’s children? How could they play politics with the city’s future? Doesn’t the authority know truancy rates will increase?

    Over the past week, I’ve examined both the politics and the mathematics behind Student MetroCard cuts, and the picture is not a rosy one. The state, once a guarantor of the Student MetroCard program, now pays just $6 million in transportation subsidies for its students while the city hasn’t increased its funding past the $45 million mark in a decade and a half. The MTA, meanwhile, is saddled with $160 million in costs for the program.

    For families, the pain will be acute. Based on my calculations, it will cost at least $687.60 for a family to send one child back and forth to school every year. Add some extracurricular stops, and the costs will rise to approximately $800 a year. As Sharon Otterman explored today in The Times, many families will struggle to find that money, and the city’s school choice program would suffer. “If I had to pay for the MetroCard, my mother would have preferred a school closer to me,” Alejandro Velazquez, a 15-year-old from the Bronx who travels 40 minutes to school each way, said. “There’s one right down the block from our house.”

    I am guardedly optimistic though about the MTA’s position here. What is notable about Otterman’s article is her utter lack of sources who blame the MTA for pushing through these cuts. People are out there who are willing to point fingers, but journalists who are doing their jobs will not give them a platform. The state and city should bear the costs of transporting students, and journalists should know that.

    In the end, it’s a tough situation for everyone. Urban areas are not legally required in New York State to provide free transportation to students, and the MTA in particular is under no mandate to give away transit to students while the millions of New Yorkers who rely on the transit network for to power the area’s economy wait longer for more crowded trains. While state officials may want the MTA to “find money” through other cuts that sustain student transit, the reality is that student transit is not the business of the MTA, and student transit is now acutely holding down the MTA from fulfilling its role.

    “No other transit agency in the country subsidizes free or discounted student travel,” agency spokesman Kevin Ortiz, said. “Transporting students usually falls on the government body responsible for educating them.” Amen.

  • Many answers, but no real solutions, for MTA woes

    As the MTA struggles with the political fallout of the rampant service cuts the authority may need to implement to cover its budget, officials everywhere are looking for answers. We know that some advocates are pushing a move to cover the operating gap with capital funds — a misguided idea at best — but other officials are searching for ways to provide for a steadier stream of transit funding and not just a one-time fix. The answers are out there, but are any of these proposals a real solution?

    Right now, the MTA can look to three sources of potential revenue: the city, the state and the federal government. So far, Mayor Bloomberg has been quieter than most in this brouhaha. He campaigned on transit but has done nothing to support, let alone reform, the MTA since winning reelection next month. He hasn’t pledged to cover student transit costs; he hasn’t tried to renew his calls for congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls; he hasn’t looked at ways to further fund the MTA. For now, at least, City Hall is a non-starter.

    Although the mayor’s silence is disappointing, the words spewing forth from the City Council are downright alarming. As Chris O’Leary detailed at On Transport, the City Council doesn’t have a clue about how the MTA works. After cutting funding for years, City Council members criticized the MTA for a legally required vote this week and claimed that a meeting in the works for months “ambushed” the city. Most of the Council members seem to support the quick fix of moving capital funds.

    Up in Albany, things are simply a mess. Sen. Pedro Espada wants the MTA to sell its real estate holdings. In a letter to Jay Walder, he wrote, “The MTA must prioritize fiscally prudent lease and sale of assets before deciding to leave children, seniors and hard-working citizens stranded without a safe, reliable and affordable means to get to and from work, school, grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments.” Selling assets in a down real estate market is a great way to minimize potential gains. I say pass.

    Meanwhile, Sen. Brian X Foley is so confident of the MTA’s fiscal state that he is already proposing to roll back the payroll tax. Because the tax provided the MTA less than expected, Foley wants to lower than tax by 68 percent in Suffolk County and 34 percent in Nassau County. Do I really need to tell you how dumb of an idea this is right now? Foley would leave the MTA with even less money than it current takes in.

    Sheldon Silver is still a hope, but he hasn’t endorsed tolls or congestion pricing yet. His district stands to lose the most from these service cuts, and I’ll look at him more in depth later today.

    For his part, Gov. Paterson, while not proposing any new ideas, seems to recognize the MTA’s limited options. Speaking yesterday with WOR’s John Gambling, Paterson questioned how much the MTA could really save by eliminating jobs and overtime. He echoed Jay Walder’s call to “take the place apart” and noted, in so many words, that reinstating the commuter tax could solve many of the agency’s financial woes. For now, that idea remains the Holy Grail of funding and a political non-starter. I wonder though if Walder and Paterson could succeed in overhauling the bureaucracy of the MTA. It would be a tall undertaking but a vital key to reforming transit in New York.

    In the end, for a temporary fix at least, the MTA might be able to turn to the feds. Speaking on New York 1 earlier this week, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood expressed the Obama Administration’s support for transit’s future in New York. “It is a priority for President Obama and those of us at the DOT to make sure that cities have good mass transportation,” he said. “We’re willing to work with the state of New York, with the governor with the mayor and others in the legislatures to make sure that New York has a first rate transit system and a transportation system.”

    LaHood’s comments suggest to me that the President and LaHood would prefer to see their money go toward expanding mass transit’s reach in New York and not just keeping a struggling authority afloat for a few more months. But if push comes to shove, the feds, with their deeper pockets, just might be, for now, the MTA’s best hope.

  • Against the use of capital funds to cover the gap

    At yesterday’s MTA Board meeting, two sides to an important policy battled emerged. On the one hand were those who supported the so-called Gene Russianoff plan, a call to shift 10 percent of the MTA’s available federal stimulus funds from its capital budget to cover its operating gap. On the other side were those who lived through New York City in the 1970s and experienced first-hand what capital neglect meant to the city’s subway system and what it led to.

    Doreen Frasca, a 2008 Paterson appointee, spoke out in favor of shifting the funds. She urged the agency to shift its pay-as-you-go funds to cover its operating gap and wanted to make the move to transfer nearly $90 million in stimulus funds, the maximum allowed by the feds, to the MTA’s operating balance sheet as well. “I will vociferously support transferring 10 percent of that money” to cover the gap,” she said.

    Others spoke out against the idea. “I have great difficulty in moving capital money to operating,” Mitchell Pally, the Suffolk County representative, said. “That’s the problem we had in the 70s when we did that and it took us a very very long time to change the negative consequences of that.”

    Norman Brown, one of the labor reps from the Metro-North Railroad Coalition, agreed. “The fear is that if capital is flexed to operating, that if federal funds are flexed to operating then the state and the city government will not be forthcoming with the funds they were previously forthcoming with,” he said. In fact, he continued, the state’s shifting of capital debts to the operating ledger is exactly why the MTA is saddled with excruciatingly large debts due to come due in a few years. To do the same in reverse would accomplish nothing.

    Despite this burgeoning ideological policy debate, these comments only scratch the surface of the why of it all. On Tuesday, the Regional Plan Association released a statement that explained the policies behind its opposition to the funding shift.

    First, the RPA says, there are two specific problems with “bleeding particular sources of capital dollars.” The pay-as-you-go fund allows the MTA to both keep the capital plan moving into the new year before the agency’s next five-year plan gets approved, and the capital budget faces a budget gap of 9.9 billion. To take money from capital today would drastically harm transit’s tomorrow.

    The release continues:

    2. Capital spending is good for long term economic recovery, which the MTA desperately needs given tax revenues are tied to the economic health of the region. Also, we’re in this operating mess because of past lack of investment. Moving these dollars to operating would undercut the system’s reliability and safety and jeopardize the progress that has been made since 1980 in restoring the system to a state of good repair. And by deferring required maintenance, it would actually increase future costs to sustain the system, requiring even larger investments – and putting more pressure on the fare – in the future. Similarly, halting or deferring projects like East Side Access or the Second Avenue Subway would undercut future economic growth and require returning federal funds that have already been committed.

    3. The MTA’s riders and taxpayers are already paying a heavy price for past financing practices brought on by underinvestment (lack of capital spending). As a result of the disastrous system of “borrow now, pay-during-the-next-person’s-term-of-office” used to finance capital programs in the late 1990s and the first half of the current decade, starting in 2012, almost one in five dollars of the MTA’s operating budget is expected to be devoted to paying debt service. Cutting capital expenditures is the same as cutting service, just in the future rather than the present.

    It’s important to underscore the interconnectedness of the future with the capital budget. It’s vital to recognize that the capital budget is a separate beast so that the MTA can continue to modernize and grow its capacity through a fund more secure than the operating budget. It’s also important to highlight how the MTA would actually have to return federal funds and how thousands of workers in New York’s fragile construction economy would lose jobs if the capital budget were to dry up. That is an immediate future scary to contemplate.

    In the end, the MTA will have to escape from this capital mess by the best means on hand. It could raise fares; it could cut services; it could shift funds; it could ask Albany to institute real, permanent, reliable gap-closing measures such as congestion pricing or East River Bridge tolls. Robbing from the capital future — or even from the capital present — is no way to cover an operating debt. The two budgets are separate for good reasons gleaned from recent history and should stay that way, financial crisis or not.

  • Drilling down on the politics of student MetroCard cuts

    Let’s revisit the Student MetroCard argument for a few minutes. After the MTA Board voted this morning to cut free student transit — and, in fact, even before the vote — politicians were already slamming the agency for doing so. In a way, as I said yesterday, proposing cuts to the student transit discount was designed to get the attention of politicians, but at the same time, why should the MTA continue to subsidize free student transit? After all, the state isn’t really funding the program any longer either.

    To understand the politics behind the student MetroCard cut, let’s jump back in time approximately 15 years when Rudy Giuliani was mayor. At the time, the city gave $700 million to the MTA, and according to a Times article, $125 million of that — or three times the current subsidy — went to student transit passes. Those figures were in the news because Mayor Giuliani was planning on cutting the subsidy to renegotiate a lesser contribution to the MTA from the city.

    After much back-and-forth between the city, the state and the MTA, the three parties struck a deal on student transit in mid-1995. Each party would all contribute $45 million to the venture, and the funding would be split evenly. The $45 million is an important figure because, up until this year, that was still the level of city and state funding for the program. Despite assurances of at least equal funding as costs rose and on-again, off-again promises to fully subsidize student fares, the city and state simply hid their economic deficiencies in the MTA’s fragile books.

    In 1996, the student passes again made headlines. This time, politicians were proposing a switch to student MetroCards. Prior to that year, students received only bus passes and could not use them on the subways. With the relatively new MetroCard technology, the MTA could offer better options for commuting services. At the time, the agency said it lost $5 million annually on the giveaways.

    Two years later, the state assembly began a process that expanded student MetroCard eligibility to even more people. At the time, The Times said the program would cost an additional $45 million to administer. Only the MTA was saddled with costs as state and city contributions never increased above that $45 million level. As the ranks of the city’s children has swelled, the cost to administer this program has too, and it now costs the MTA upwards of $170 million a year to provide free rides, at the mandate of the city and state, to students.

    Yet again, student MetroCards are on the chopping block, and it has again become a hot-button issue. Transit officials and city budget experts are noting the politics behind the move but also the absurdity of expecting the MTA to give away rides. “This is something the city and state should pay,” the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas said to The Times. “It’s education spending, not transit spending. I think it is a pretty clever way to pressure the city and state to stop hiding their own budget problems in the MTA.”

    MTA Board members concurred. “Who should have to pay for it are the people who provide the education, and that’s the state and the city,” Ira Greenberg, the Board’s LIRR Commuters Council representative, said today.

    Looking again at the graphic atop this post, we can appreciate the absurdity behind those who criticize the MTA for a move the state itself just made to save money. Last month, New York State eliminated most of its funding for the student MetroCard subsidies. To balance its own budget, New York cut their contributions from $45 million to just $6 million. Although Gov. Paterson has promised to restore that money if the money for it rematerializes, why should the MTA be left picking up the tab? Any outrage should clearly be directed toward the elected officials who will not commit to funding student travel.

    In the end, parents, as news outlets have found, will be quick to bash the MTA. It’s true that student MetroCard cuts are an easy to way to get attention, but the MTA should not have to cover for political shortfalls. “Nowhere else in the United States is the public transportation system responsible for the costs of transporting students to school,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said. “In other municipalities throughout the country the local government will provide that transportation free of charge, and in most cases, provide a fleet of yellow buses.”

  • MTA Board approves ’10 budget with service cuts

    Updated 12:52 p.m.: After a morning of consternation and an intense discussion about its responsibilities to the city of New York, the MTA Board voted this morning to adopt the 2010 budget complete with massive cuts to subway and bus service across the New York Metropolitan area. To cover a budget gap of nearly $400 million, the MTA has preliminarily approved a plan to eliminate two subway lines and numerous bus routes, scale back off-peak service, eliminate a student MetroCard subsidy, cut Access-A-Ride paratransit options and reduce pay for non-union employees by 10 percent. The details of the plan can be found right here.

    While passing this budget today, MTA Board members were vehement in their anger toward Albany and stressed their responsibilities toward the city’s millions of daily transit passengers. “I will not let Albany, Washington or the city of New York off the hook for their responsibility to come up with public policy that adequate deal with the needs of the 10 million people we serve on a daily basis,” Staten Island’s Allen Cappelli, a Gov. Paterson appointee to the Board, said.

    Doreen Frasca, another Paterson appointee, also pointed her finger toward both City Hall and Albany. “This agency is in an abusive relationship with two dead-beat dads,” she said.

    The Board members were unanimous in their feelings that this latest financial crisis represents an utter failure of government and broken promises from those in charge of overseeing the state. “Government has to do their share, the mayor and the legislature,” Frasca added. “That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this mess.”

    “They” – meaning our representatives in Albany – “were the ones who put together a deal and said you are fine for the next two years; it was their deal that fell apart,” Jeffrey Kay, a mayoral appointee to the Board, said. “The politics has to stop. The public and the riders have to go through this, and they’re caught in the middle of it.”

    All, however, is not lost, and these service cuts are far from definite. Prior to calling for a vote, MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder stressed the preliminary nature of this current budget proposal. “On a personal basis, it was only a weekend ago that I began looking at the service cut package,” he said, noting that the agency will “take some time at the beginning of the year” to reassess the plans to cut service. Hopefully, he says, the MTA will be able to eliminate some of the planned cuts after a deeper look.

    In the end, the MTA Board members did not want to initiate these cuts, but they have a legal obligation to pass a balanced budget for 2010 before the end of the 2009 calendar year. The Board will continue to explore the wisdom behind shifting capital and stimulus funds to cover the operating gap, and that debate, which I’ll explore later today, will be rancorous as well. Some MTA Board members were in favor while others were not. “I have great difficulty in moving capital money to operating,” Mitchell Pally, Suffolk County’s representative to the board, said. “That’s the problem we had in the 70s when we did that and it took us a very very long time to change the negative consequences of that.”

    The Board will also try to work with New York State and City politicians to find ways to avert cuts to the student MetroCard program and the Access-A-Ride options. Early next year, the agency plans to hold another round of public hearings on the cuts, and although today’s vote was a setback for the MTA, but the agency’s hands were tied. “Service cuts are what we can actually do as an agency to stretch the money we can count on for the 12 months it has to cover,” Mark Page, a Bloomberg appointee, said. “This budget is a part of our responsibility to keep the agency going.”

    Clearly, this tale of budgetary woes is far from over, but hopefully, it will spur the beginnings of MTA economic reform that would lead to an equitable and steady revenue stream for the beleaguered agency.

  • Live-tweeting the MTA Board meeting

    I couldn’t make it to MTA HQ this morning to catch the MTA Board Meeting, but I am watching it live via the MTA website. For those of you on Twitter, I’m also live-tweeting some of the finer points of the hearing. The Board members are currently talking about their views on the budget gap. You can find me on Twitter right here @SecondAveSagas.

  • On congestion pricing, service cuts and user fees

    OldMTANYCTlogo Micheal Bloomberg, our third-term mayor who campaigned into office on the back of a platform of transit reform, has been noticeably silent as the MTA’s finances have come crashing down over the last ten days. He hasn’t pledged more support for the beleaguered transit agency, and although his appointees on the MTA Board have vowed to vote against the service cuts, that is largely a symbolic moved aimed to shore up support amongst parents who are dreading the end of the Student MetroCard program.

    Yesterday, Bloomberg broke his silence in a way. While at the climate talks in Copenhagen, the mayor stressed the need for congestion pricing in New York City. “I don’t think that congestion pricing and those kinds of things are dead; more and more cities are doing it,” he said while on with CNBC’s Squawk Box. “Next time, come March, [the legislature is] going to have to balance a budget, and I think any kind of revenue source is going to be on the table, and it may in fact still get done.”

    Later on, the Mayor tied his congestion pricing plan to the MTA’s current financial woes. Although he didn’t offer up anything more than an “I told you so” comment, he has a point. “You see all of the cutbacks in the MTA budget. The MTA has got to find another source,” he said. “If we had done congestion pricing two years ago, perhaps they wouldn’t be in this situation.”

    The Mayor’s comments led me to some thoughts on user fees and service cuts. In the parlance of those who study economics and society, user fees are as they sound: They are charges — fees — of use for public goods. Congestion pricing is a user fee because it is a charge levied on drivers who use the roads, contribute to congestion and bad air quality and lead to overall reduction in economic efficiency in transit-focused areas. Subway and bus fares are user fees because they are charges levied against those who ride public transit. The money is, in part, used to offset the costs of operating the system or, as in the case of congestion pricing, used to offset the societal costs of unnecessary driving.

    With user fees, those being charged can oftentimes pass along the costs. If the city were to institute congestion pricing, people who have to drive — delivery vehicles, plumbers, taxis — can simply charge those who are relying on their service for the fees. A plumber based in Williamsburg who makes 15 calls a day — say, seven in Brooklyn and eight in Manhattan — can raise his rates slightly per customer to cover the planned $8 congestion fee. Implemented properly, user fees should maximize the societal benefit from the use of public goods.

    The MTA has another option when it is faced with a legal mandate to balance the budget. It can hold user fees steady but provide less service for the same price. Since the agency has promised not to raise fares this year, their only choice is to cut what they offer. Does this, I wonder, make sense?

    As a transit-based city — the “most transit-dependent city in the country,” as Andrew Albert said — we as a society are better off with more service. (In fact, that is the beauty of the MTA’s capital budget, but more on that later today.) As a 24-hour city, we need the trains to run efficient service patterns that minimize transfers and waits. We need the buses to provide service where the subways do not and cannot run. We can’t afford to see longer wait times, more crowded trains and fewer buses. We are a service-dependent city used to paying user fees for a barely acceptable level of that service.

    In the end, this digression leads me to one conclusion: I would prefer a fare hike — or better yet, congestion pricing — to cover the MTA’s current budget gap while the service cuts are pushed off the table. I will continue to advocate for the end of the MTA’s subsidies of the student MetroCard program; that is very much the city’s and state’s responsibility to fund. But in terms of increase midday headways and reducing weekend service, I will advocate for user fees instead. It might cost us a few dollars more, but it is an investment well worth it for the financial well being of the city as a whole.

  • To avoid service cuts, Council members urge reallocation

    In an effort to help the MTA stave off crippling service cuts while earning some political brownie points, two New York City Council members urged the MTA to reject the service cuts proposals. Council Member James Vacca (D-Bronx) and Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn joined some transit advocates in speaking out against the cuts. The two proposed an alternate solution to the MTA’s funding gap, but it is nothing more than a temporary fix.

    According to the press release issued by the council members, the MTA would use $90 million in “unspent federal stimulus aid” that is supposed to go to capital projects to cover the budget gap while another $50 million would be moved from the capital budget to the operating ledger. Although the MTA may still have to cut salaries, the Student MetroCard program and some Access-A-Ride services, this $140 million accounting trick would avert the death of the W and Z trains as well as the cuts to citywide bus service and midday subway frequency.

    Quinn’s press release has some information backwards: It says the MTA Board is voting a week before they issue the cuts when in fact it’s voting less than a week after releasing them. The council members though defending their suggestion as a one-time solution.

    “If bus and subway services are cut the way the MTA is proposing, we will be creating mass transit deserts throughout New York City, stranding hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers,” Vacca said. “Once again, we’ll have citizens paying more and getting less. The city, state, and MTA have got to come together and reexamine the agency’s budget so that these cuts never become a reality.”

    The Speaker herself bemoaned the lack of public hearings on the cuts. “We normally would not favor using capital funding towards operating expenses,” she said. “However under these circumstances, this is the only appropriate action to take. The MTA’s decision not to hold a single public hearing for straphangers to weigh in on proposed service cuts or the elimination of student metro cards is a slap in the face to millions of hardworking families. Before these drastic changes are made, the MTA must pledge to give the public a chance to voice their concerns before enacting these extreme changes.”

    Quinn and Vacca should understand the MTA is legally obligated to pass a balanced budget before the end of the year. Without permission from Albany, there is simply no time to hold public hearings and, based on the hearings earlier this year, no real point to them. People aren’t going to like the hikes whether or not the MTA holds some hearings.

    In the end, though, it’s not about hearings; it’s about an unsatisfactory solution. For now, moving money from one budget to the other would avoid the service cuts, but it is nothing more than a short-term fix. The MTA has suffered through decades of short-term fixes, and the last thing the agency could do is move money from its capital budget to its operating expenses. The capital budgets ensure that this system doesn’t fall apart and, in fact, continues to grow. The Council should come up with more permanent ways to fund the MTA. The city is depending upon it.

  • The mathematics of cutting free student fares

    When an eleventh-hour Albany bailout package earlier this year ensured that the MTA would not need to institute its original Doomsday budget proposal, I ran something of a postmortem on the transit advocates’ roles in the debate. In a rather scathing piece that generated strong feelings on both sides of the divide, I questioned the Straphangers’ approach toward their advocacy campaign and wondered if they were truly taking advantage of their position as the city’s leading — and sometimes only — transit advocacy group.

    Since then, the Campaign has seemingly taken a more vocal role in trying to educate the public. Gene Russianoff has been quick to point out that the payroll tax short fall is entirely Albany’s fault, and he has, for better or worse, proposed alternate ways the MTA could close its budget gap without cutting too many services.

    But an e-mail I received yesterday made me raise an eyebrow or two. First, it starts out saying, “For the MTA, reviving these cuts would shred its credibility.” Of course, it’s not for another three paragraphs that the Straphangers accuse Albany of not doing its job. Perhaps the MTA does lose its credibility, but who should lose more credibility — the agency tasked with balancing its budget or the state legislature whose empty promises have left the authority nearly broke? I still believe the better strategy for a transit advocacy group is to educate and not to finger-point at the agency that has few options available to it.

    It gets better though when the Straphangers bring math into the equation:

    Riders have every right to be mad as hell ­– and parents furious. Ending full-fare and half-fare discounts for 550,000 students in New York would be a huge financial burden on families. For example, it would cost a parent at least $1,069 annually to pay to get their full-fare child to school (280 school days x $1.91 x 2. A $1.91 represents 15% off $2.25, the current base fare.) $1069 equal to the costs of a 30-day pass for an entire year!

    Now, first, the Campaign’s math is simply wrong. I use a 30-day card every month, and the totally yearly cost to me is $1068. I might be picking a bone over one dollar, but it’s just sloppy multiplication. That’s not the real problem though; the real problem is one of simple common sense. If, as the Straphangers contend, it will actually cost less to buy 30-day passes for a year than it will to pay the full fare everyday for 280 school days, wouldn’t parents just, you know, buy 30-day passes for their school-bound children? So much would it actually cost to send two children to school for 280 days? Let’s find out.

    One 2010-2011 school year calendar I’ve seen has school beginning on Monday, Sept. 13 after the Jewish holidays. Students are then in school through Dec. 17, return on Jan. 3, have a week off in both February and April and see the year wrap up around June 17. The fall semester, then, would cover three unlimited ride MetroCards plus five days of paying the full fare. The spring semester would require five unlimited ride MetroCards and another two-week MetroCard plus five days of the full fare. How’s the math look?

    (8*$89)+$51.50+(10*$1.91*2)=$801.70

    But there’s a further problem: There aren’t 280 school days in the calendar year. There are approximately 180 school days in New York City. The math for a full-fare ride for the actual school year looks like this:

    180*$1.91*2=$687.60

    No matter how you slice or dice, for many families, that figure will still look expensive. Some who use transit on the weekends will opt for the $800 approach; others may stick with the $687 figure. No matter the cost, it will be a burden to spend those additional hundreds of dollars on student transportation costs, and after enjoying free rides for years, parents will experience an element of sticker shock here.

    But my main point is that the Straphangers should be presenting an honest expense figure here. It will cost between $687 and $800 to send one student to school for the entire school year, excluding summers. The public deserves to know that, and the Straphangers, a ridership advocacy group, should not be releasing widely inflated figure as they did yesterday.

  • The politics of threatening service cuts

    As news got around of the MTA’s new plan to cut services yesterday, New Yorkers acted with predictable outrage. Many were sympathetic to the plight of the MTA while others wondered how the authority could target two vulnerable groups — students and the disabled — with the bulk of their cuts.

    The truth is that yesterday’s announcement was the first in an intricate six-month political game the MTA will now play with the city and state. On Monday, the MTA Board’s Finance Committee approved these service cuts with an eye toward closing a $383-million budget gap. Tomorrow, the full MTA Board, under a legal mandate to pass a balanced budget before the end of the 2009 calendar year, will listen to MTA CFO Gary Dellaverson’s proposal and will debate it. The mayor’s appointees to the MTA Board probably won’t approve it, but in the end, the Board will pass this plan.

    From there, everything slows down. The bulk of the cuts — those involving subway and bus service — will not be implemented until mid year. Right now, June 2010 is the target date for the elimination of the W and Z as well as the cut backs to buses. After that, the student Metrocard program will be reduced from a free ride to a half-price scheme in September with a full elimination of the subsidies the following year.

    Those representing the MTA are well aware that these cuts are far from certain. “If this budget were to get passed, it’s nothing but a plan,” Jeffrey A. Kay, one of Bloomberg’s MTA Board appointees, said to The Times. “There are many, many other steps and changes that will be made before things get implemented.”

    Despite Kay’s seemingly optimistic approach, Jay Walder, MTA CEO and Chairman, was more pessimistic. Outside of a politically unpalatable fare hike, the cuts are all the MTA can do to fulfill its legal budgetary obligations. “I don’t want to leave you with the sense that this isn’t very real,” he said. “There are few other ways to look at balancing a budget hole of the magnitude that it is right now.”

    Still, there is an element of politics here, and Michael Grynbaum of The Times explored that today:

    There appeared to be a bit of political brinkmanship at play. Leaders at the transportation authority were quick to point out that the [Student MetroCard] program used to be fully financed by the city and state, which have reduced or limited their contributions in recent years. An authority spokesman, Jeremy Soffin, said that it was uncommon for transit systems to shoulder the costs of student travel.

    Charles Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal monitor, said that while cutting student discounts underscored the pressures facing the authority, it could also be used as an effective negotiating tool.

    “It helps create the notion that other parties share some of the responsibility,” he said. “It’s not just a general holding out of the cup. It says, ‘If you, the city, would increase your share, we wouldn’t have to do this.’”

    I disagree with Brecher here in one sense. It isn’t about creating the notion of shared responsibility; rather, it is about educating the public about the city’s and state’s neglect of their responsibilities toward the MTA. It is politics because the politicians are the one who can deliver. The politicians are the one who told the MTA not to institute drastic fare hikes and service cuts last year because Albany would deliver an appropriate bailout package, and the politicians are the ones who refuse to implement an East River Bridge tolling plan or congestion pricing scheme that would equitably fund transit.

    In the end, these cuts are simply on the table. It will be six months until they go into effect, and that gives New Yorkers six months to urge their representatives to find solutions for the MTA’s funding problems — problems which Albany created. Six months seems to be a good amount of time, but it’s not. If ever there were a time to pressure New York’s politicians, it is now. The city’s transit network depends on it.