AsidesSecond Avenue Subway

Second Ave. residents bemoan blasting

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 18, 2010

For much of 2010, MTA crews have been blasting away underneath Second Ave. in the East 90s, and the residents have not complained. However, with an unannounced change in the blasting schedule, crews are now detonating charges that are louder than usual later into the evening, and as Dan Rivoli details in Our Town, Upper East Siders are less than pleased with this development. The louder blasts came about because of the need to build starter tunnels, but it’s the time change that has driven residents and local business owners up the walls. “They should let the residents know and keep us informed. Everything is in the dark,” Joe Pecora of the Second Ave. Business Association said. “There’s been a lack of communication between all entities involved.”

For its part, the MTA says that no blasts happen after the city’s cut-off time for work and that this new round of blasting should wrap next month. “This new blast does take longer to prepare and prep for and, in essence, pushes back the blasting later on into the day. But nothing has gone on past 8 p.m.,” Kevin Ortiz, agency spokesman said. Such are the problems of subway construction in a heavily developed area.

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AsidesBuses

Fare-beating a bus problem too

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 18, 2010

The Daily News continued its week-long series on fare-beating and the MTA today with a look at how the problem plagues the city’s buses. According to today’s report, 6.7 million bus riders hopped aboard without paying a fare, and the delinquent riders cost the MTA approximately $8 million in lost revenue. Meanwhile, the cops aren’t too active in stopping the bus fare-beating. They arrested or summonsed 1826 people on buses last year. “You have better odds winning Lotto than you do for getting caught by the NYPD for evading the fare on a bus,” Gene Russianoff said to the News. “This lack of enforcement by city police costs the MTA millions of dollars, money the MTA could use badly to meet a crippling deficit.”

The problem is compounded by the fact that bus drivers are explicitly told to do nothing about fare beaters. They keep track of those who don’t pay via a clicker but due to valid safety concerns, are told not to confront those who skip out on the fare. The vast majority of those sneaking on do so through the back door, but until cops ramp up enforcement efforts, this bus-based fare-beating will continue. For more on the issue of fare-beaters, check out the coverage from Tuesday and Wednesday.

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MetroCardService Cuts

Walder promises a vote delayed on Student MetroCards

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 18, 2010

Updated 12:20 p.m.: Next week at the March meeting of the MTA Board, those who hold the fate of the New York City transportation network in their hands will vote to approve a sweeping array of service cuts aimed at partially closing a $751 million gap in the MTA’s budget. While the elimination of free student travel remains a key centerpiece to this plan, MTA Chair and CEO Jay Walder announced that the Board would delay a vote on the fate of the Student MetroCards until June.

Walder’s announcement came on the heels of a Wednesday meeting with students and transit advocates who support free rides. While some have billed it an outright victory for the students, the program is far from saved. Rather, the MTA can delay this vote until the summer because it will not take the authority long to implement a half-fare plan in September as provided for in the current plan.

Still, Walder stressed his willingness to work with the city and state to find the funds for the program. “I strongly believe that students in New York City should be able to travel to school without paying, just like students around the state,” Walder said. “The MTA has been compared to the yellow school bus, and that’s a good analogy. Students don’t pay to get on the school bus, but the bus doesn’t show up unless the State or school district provides funding. I wish I could commit to fund this program, but the MTA simply does not have the money to cover this State and City responsibility any longer.”

He continued: “I also want to take away any confusion about whether or not this will be dealt with at the board meeting on March 24th. There is no need to deal with it at the board meeting on March 24th. We’d like to leave additional time, as much time as possible for discussion with the city and the state.”

The comforting news out of Wednesday’s meeting came from the student statements. Those in attendance seemed to recognize that New York’s politicians — and not its transit authority — should be the ones funding student travel. “We want the state and the city to bring new revenue sources that can keep flowing in and this is for the broader budget,” one student said to New York 1.

Still, though, elected officials do not seem willing to find the money for the free rides. Even though they’re happy sinking money into a yellow school bus system and even though every other district in the nation pays for student travel, the Mayor thinks he’s already doing enough. “The state cut back the subsidies and cut back the monies they give to the MTA,” he said. “I’m sympathetic. He’s got to balance his budget.” Students be damned, says Walder. They can pay.

Those organizing the students called yesterday’s meeting “a step forward” but recognize that much work remains to be done. Both the city and state have little money available, and if free student travel is the victim of multiple budget crunches, the only avenue students may be able to pursue is to agitate for better representatives in Albany and City Hall. New York shouldn’t let its students down, but the MTA should not be paying for student travel out of its own pocket. With three months to go, the student MetroCards are on life support. Will someone save them?

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New York City Transit

Report: Cops handing out fewer fare-beating tickets

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 17, 2010

Jumping these turnstiles won’t get you far. (Photo by flickr user saitowitz)

As New York City Transit officials announced yesterday that fare-beating numbers are higher than expected, today, we learn that cops ticketed fewer turnstile-jumpers last year than they had in the past. Somewhere along the line, the fare-enforcement system seems to be breaking down.

According to Pete Donohue of the Daily News, cops ticketed or arrested 87,000 fare-beaters last year, the lowest total in five years. Donohue has more on the statistics:

The police gave fare-evasion tickets to more than 68,000 riders last year and arrested an additional 19,000 for jumping the turnstile. That’s a 12% drop from the 99,000 straphangers cited in 2005, with about 86,000 getting summonses and nearly 13,000 arrested.

The NYPD pointed out that although overall enforcement is down, arrests are up. “The department focused on the arrest of more serious offenders,” Sgt. Carlos Nieves said.

For its part, the MTA told Donohue that it will “continue to work with the NYPD on cost-effective strategies such as targeting high-incidence locations and placing cameras in key areas.” However, I have to wonder about NYPD priorities. They seem highly skewed to me.

Over the last few months, we’ve heard numerous stories of a ticketing blitz targeting people on mostly empty trains who are taking up two seats. As I’ve written before, taking up two seats isn’t a violation of NYC Transit Rules of Conduct unless doing so would “interfere or tend to interfere with the operation of the Authority’s transit system or the comfort of other passengers.” No one is inconvenienced if someone spreads out on a train car with only four other people at 2:30 in the morning.

Instead of targeting these non-offenders, the NYPD should be focusing on fare-beating. If the recent numbers are to be believed, only half of one percent of all turnstile jumpers have been ticketed or arrested by cops. That’s a pitifully low number, and to get fare beaters under control, the police and the MTA should ramp up enforcement. Whether or not fare jumping will increase as the number of station agents decrease remains to be seen, but that shouldn’t stop the cops and the MTA from doing all they can to halt fare-jumping.

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New York City Transit

Riders Council report faults weekend service

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 17, 2010

For the last few months, I’ve received a steady stream of comments voicing concerns about the MTA’s approach to weekend service changes. Many SAS readers have wondered if the MTA had engage in the practice of using weekend service diversions as a cover to cut train frequencies and increase headways on Saturdays and Sundays. It sounds almost conspiratorial, but a new report by the NYC Transit Riders Council reveals that weekend service — and signs warning about service changes — are lacking.

The report, available here as a Word document, faults the MTA on two fronts. First, trains aren’t running as frequently as they should be, and second, stations do not feature adequate signage informing people of weekend service changes. To better meet the demands of subway riders in New York, the MTA must, the report urged, “increas[e] the availability of information to subway users and…provid[e] service according to a realistic schedule that can maintained even in the face of major changes to the pattern of service throughout the system.”

The Council conducted its survey at 15 B division stations over four weekends this past fall, and its results are telling. Out of 168 trains expected to pass through their survey points, NYCTRC volunteers counted only 149 trains. Furthermore, actual headways counted by the volunteers differed from posted schedules by a significant amount with 28 percent of trains arriving at least four minutes later than they should.

“It is widely acknowledged,” the report says, “that the amount of service actually provided during diversions is not the level of service that NYC Transit has stated that it will provide. Our observations bear out this assessment of the situation, and the NYCTRC finds it unacceptable for actual service to routinely fall short of what is being promised to the rider.”

Beyond the actual service, NYCTRC also faulted Transit for its approach to service change announcements. Volunteers found “a mixed picture” of adequate signage. Overall, 75 percent of stations with mezzanine levels featured service change announcements, but not all stations, as the report notes, have mezzanine levels. The picture got worse as we descend into the system. Only 42 percent of platforms featured service advisory signs, and only 22 percent of stations featured these signs at street level before straphangers would descend to the fare-control areas.

“This is a cause for concern,” said the report, “as the NYCTRC has long taken the position that service change information should be available to passengers before they ascend or descend into a subway station.”

NYCTRC targeted the B division stations because those are not due for the PA/CIS system installation for at least half a decade, and in the interim, the Council urges Transit to “make every effort to inform riders when work in the system will make service less frequent or regular than would ordinarily be expected.” Riders should know before they head underground what to expect, and right now, they simply do not.

According to amNew York, Transit is testing a new sign designed to clear up the confusion and seems to agree with the Council’s suggestion. Whether service will become more reliable or whether changes will be easier to figure out will be the real test of the authority’s willingness to respond to this report.

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AsidesMTA Politics

State Senators push for more fiscal oversight

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 16, 2010

As politicians have blustered about calling for more financial oversight of the MTA, a bipartisan group of State Senators have taken the plunge forward on this project. Earlier this year, Carl Marcellino, a Republican, and six co-sponsors introduced a bill that would create an MTA Interim Finance Authority. The interim authority would administer and oversee all of the MTA’s fiscal responsibilities and, ideally, lend even more transparency to what has become a fairly transparent budget process. A similar bill has been submitted to the state Assembly, but both have simply been referred to committee so far.

In discussing the bill with the Brooklyn Eagle, State Senator Martin Golden, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, leveled a familiar charge toward the MTA. “The leadership of the MTA has failed time and time again to properly manage the agency finances,” he said, “and yet, it seems that everyone knows and acknowledges that this problem exists, but no one wants to take the MTA on. No matter what actions are taken, the MTA continues to create an even greater deficit.”

Let us supposed that the Senate and Assembly approve this bill. Let us suppose that the MTA Interim Finance Authority comes into being and helps with a forensic audit of the MTA. Who will these Senators blame when the MTA’s finances are found to be acceptably accurate and the deficit keeps growing? They won’t point fingers at themselves, but they are the ones to blame.

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New York City Transit

Transit reports $27 million in fares lost to jumpers

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 16, 2010

These turnstiles are not for jumpin’. (Photo by flickr user saitowitz)

For years, New York City Transit assumed that fare-beating with a minor, but containable, problem. Most estimates put the number of people who sneaked into the system at five million, a high number but just a few tenths of one percent of the subway’s annual ridership.

Well, toss that assumption out the window. As the Daily News reported today, a new study by Transit found that the agency lost $27 million to fare-beaters in 2009. The problem runs deeper and is far more widespread than anyone at the MTA had originally suspected. Based on new MTA estimates, riders hop turnstiles or sneak in through emergency exits 19 million times a year. While still just over one percent of annual ridership, that $27 million, as the News notes, would be enough to cover the planned subway service cuts.

Pete Donohue has more on the new methodology for tracking those who avoid paying:

NYC Transit for years arrived at fare-beating figures by using a formula based on the observations of token booth clerks. A one-day count was conducted each month, agency spokesman Paul Fleuranges said. An MTA audit concluded the agency was way off the mark. Clerks weren’t keeping accurate tallies because they had other duties like selling MetroCards, Fleuranges said. Because of staff cuts, there also are fewer clerks to make observations, Fleuranges said.

Despite the cuts in personnel and the massive increase in fare-beating numbers, Fleuranges insisted the system has not seen a spike in actual turnstile-jumping. Instead, he said, an unreliable system of estimating has been replaced with a better method that provides a more realistic picture.

NYC Transit now uses “traffic checkers” who are randomly placed at a sampling of turnstiles to count fare-beaters, Fleuranges said.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign issued the obvious comment, and there’s definitely some truth behind it. “The MTA’s only going to make jumping the turnstile more inviting by slashing scores of clerks from subway station entrances,” he said.

But what is the MTA to do? Nearly two years ago, they raised the fare-evading fine to $100. Right now, they need more police enforcement against fare-jumpers. The station agents can sit there and watch people exit and enter, but it’s still exceedingly easy to sneak into a station even with an employee in the booth.

There is, of course, a baseline problem here. No amount of enforcement will stop people from fare-jumping, but at what level of evasion does it become more costly to enforce than it would be to simply chalk up lost fares to an operating expense? After 1.6 billion paid to ride the subways last year, and as long as that 27 million doesn’t creep upward, it could just be a sunk cost.

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MTA Politics

The impact of overturning the payroll tax

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 16, 2010

When Albany approved the MTA funding package last year with the payroll mobility tax as its centerpiece, I called it an imperfect compromise. It was a plan that, as state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported a month after enactment, would leave the MTA short some money and did not address long-term institutional problems with the way the state and city fund the authority.

Since last summer, the MTA has seen the payroll mobility tax fall short on its promised receipts by nearly $300 million, and throughout the metropolitan commuter transportation district, suburban legislatures have agitated for its repeal. Now, three Republican Assembly representatives, including New York’s first Tea Party-approved official, have launched a new attack on the payroll mobility tax. As Faith Burkins-Gimzek of LegislativeGazette.com reported yesterday, the three Republicans are just two days removed from taking office, and already, they’re trying to push through a repeal of the tax.

The legislation — currently tagged as A10011 — was presented by Dean Murray, Robert Castelli and Michael Montesano, three representatives from counties service by the MTA. It calls for an immediate repeal of the payroll mobility tax but does not allow for another source of revenue for the MTA. Without the payroll mobility tax, the authority would be out at least $1.2 billion.

While the payroll tax has been a controversial aspect of the funding package since its inception, Gov. David Paterson’s executive budget proposal recently redistributed the burden. Instead of taxing businesses throughout the 12 counties evenly, the new plan would put more of the tax burden on New York City-based businesses while relieving those in the surrounding counties. Still, Murray and his co-sponsors do not believe this proposal goes far enough.

Burkins-Gimzek has more:

Murray says businesses are being hit two-fold, because not only do they pay the MTA tax, but because schools are required to pay the tax as well, districts will have to raise property taxes to account for the revenue loss, they argue.

The bill’s memo states that the fiscal implications of the repeal on the MTA would be an annual loss of $1.2 billion in revenue. The authority recorded a $1.8 billion deficit in 2009 and a recent press release from new MTA Chairman and CEO Jay Walder announced that the authority is laying off 1,000 station agents and administrative employees.

Murray said there would be no need to raise taxes if the MTA eliminated redundant positions, collected on unpaid invoices from advertisers and targeted pension spiking, when employees rack up extra overtime in an attempt to increase their retirement benefits. He said the MTA threatened a “doomsday scenario” that without this tax, fares would be raised and services would be cut. He said that even with the tax, fares have been raised and services have been cut — “a slap to the face” to his constituents…

Castelli said “If the fraud, mismanagement and abuse was corrected they would be able to pay off the deficit with a surplus.”

Besides the sheer absurdity of Castelli’s charge that the MTA is wasting $1.2 billion, other ranking Assembly Republicans proclaimed support for Murray’s measure on more principled grounds. “Nearly a year ago, I publicly called for the establishment of a fiscal oversight control board, along with a comprehensive audit of the MTA, to increase transparency and accountability to taxpayers who paid for a nearly $2 billion bailout of this authority, which is supposed to serve in the public’s interest,” said Kolb. “Unfortunately, the MTA’s finances are still on the wrong track: there is no fiscal control board, no forensic audit, and, as a result, no real reform.”

Still, the MTA defended itself and noted that the state comptroller has been auditing the MTA. While the authority is not a lean organization by any means, it isn’t nearly as corrupt as these representatives would have their constituents believe. “The comptroller audits us on a monthly basis,” authority spokesman Kevin Ortiz said. “The rescue legislation that passed last spring already authorizes a forensic audit, and we welcome it.”

Because Sheldon Silver holds the keys to the Assembly, this legislation is dead in the water, but it shows just how deep the electeds’ distrust of the MTA runs and how little they are willing to support public transit. Repealing the payroll tax would result in losses far greater to the region than the $1.2 billion, and even if the authority shores up its accounting and waste, a repeal would leave the MTA an additional $1.2 billion in the red and effectively bankrupt. At some point, our politicians will let the MTA fail, and it will be ugly indeed. Only then will they begin to see what decades of institutional neglect does to one of the state’s most vital economic movers.

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AsidesMetroCard

Labor lends a powerful voice to the Student MetroCard fight

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 15, 2010

As the MTA counts down the days to the elimination of the Student MetroCard program, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 is lending its powerful voice to the fight. As Rachel Monahan and Pete Donohue of the Daily News detail, union officials have asked the state to pressure the city to increase its contributions to student transit. “The City of New York has a responsibility to ensure that our children have the means to get to school,” TWU head John Samuelsen said.

Labor is entering this fray because TWU members know that a healthy MTA is will only help them and because many of the union members are parents who will be forced to pay for student transit if the city and state don’t pony up the dough for this program. While a Bloomberg spokesperson defended the city’s $45 million contribution as “doing its part [so] that the program stays in place,” the truth remains that the city pays far more per student for yellow school bus transportation than it does for student MetroCards. The MTA is not a school bus provider, and the city and state should ensure that this program is fully funded. The TWU’s support on this issue could help tip the money the MTA’s way.

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MTA Technology

A call for wireless access on the commuter rails

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 15, 2010

After years of planning, the MTA has taken another step forward in its quest to bring wireless Internet access to hundreds of thousands of daily commuters who use the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North. On Friday afternoon, the agency published a request for proposals (PDF) asking for wireless carriers to submit their plans for installing and operating a wifi system along the commuter rail lines. This move comes slightly over seven months after the MTA issued an RFEI for the project, but despite, according to The Post, looking to get a network off the ground before the end of the year, the MTA faces some high hurdles yet.

The RFP itself is fairly straightforward. The MTA is looking for a company to install and manage a wifi network that would reach all stations and trains that run along the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road routes. Additionally, the authority is requesting plans to wire Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal as well. The network must also coexist peacefully with the MTA’s own radio-based operations and with Amtrak’s wireless access points as well. It must be able to support the bandwidth demands of every person who wants to use it, and it must also come with a guarantee of on-time installation and service activation.

If those demands — fairly typical in an RFP — weren’t enough, the MTA has requested that the network be installed at no cost at all to the cash-strapped authority. Considering that the MTA is allowing potential providers to determine whether or not they would charge for the service, by foisting installation costs onto the provider, the MTA is nearly guaranteeing that wireless service will not be free. Meanwhile, as Wi-Fi Net News points out, this proposal comes with a host of other problems. Glenn Fleishman, who doesn’t expect the MTA to receive a single response to this RFP, writes:

The MTA wants a service provider who would operate a network to bear all the expense of installation and operation (including railroad labor costs for same), provide 24×7 customer support, and uninterrupted service. But the proposal is pretty muddled. While digital advertising (changeable signs on board trains and at stations) should be part of a bidder’s thinking to minimize the cost in installing such systems, there’s no spec for those systems. A bidder can build a bid partly around offering such services. The MTA also likes bids in which the authority shares in revenue.

I don’t see how this could fly. No sensible firm would propose taking on all this expense without any assurance of revenue beyond the public Wi-Fi side of the system. Despite the large number of passengers, many of those most likely to pay already have 3G service on smartphones or through laptop cards. There’s no operational services component, and that should be the baseline for any new rail RFP of the last five years…The system described would likely cost many tens of millions of dollars to build to the specifications that the MTA is requiring, without any substantial potential to reclaim that as revenue.

The MTA expects all proposals in by close-of-business on May 17, but as Fleishman does, I too have a hard believing a reliable company will step up to the plate. The RFP discusses the numerous infrastructure issues surrounding installation, and if the MTA wants uninterrupted service from New York to Montauk or the far reaches of Orange and Rockland Counties, these plans simply seem untenable. “Because of the complexity of the system, including overhead catenary electrical systems, buried lines, protected watershed and River view sheds, new WiFi infrastructure/towers along the right of way may prove to be very difficult to approve or implement,” the document says of the Metro-North territories, “so alternative approaches should be considered to make the system operable.”

I’ve long urged the MTA to explore a wireless solution for its commuter rail lines. After all, commuters could become quite efficient if they have uninterrupted high-speed Internet access during long commuters. Yet, with such high demands and high costs associated with installation, this RFP may very well be the closest the MTA comes to a wireless solution for the foreseeable future.

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