MTA Politics

Vanterpool’s MTA Board departure leaves city representation lacking on key transit matters

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on December 17, 2019

Veronica Vanterpool will be resigning from the MTA Board to join the Delaware Transit Corporation as its first Chief Innovation Officer.

When the MTA Board is at full strength, New York City enjoys four seats at the table. Although the Governor legally nominates every member to the MTA Board, he is required to defer to various stakeholders, and the mayor has the power to request four Board members. Yet, when the MTA Boards meets on Wednesday for its final meeting of 2019, it will be the last time the city has even three representatives as Veronica Vanterpool will be leaving new for Delaware. I can’t recall a time when the city had only half of its MTA Board seats filled, and at key juncture in the history of the MTA, the city’s voice is being silenced as the mayor seemingly refuses to pressure Albany to act.

In a sense, this saga began earlier this year in April when Carl Weisbrod left the MTA after only two years. The former city planning official was widely praised as a strong voice on the Board, and the mayor nominated Daniel Zarrilli to replace him. He is the mayor’s current chief climate policy adviser, as Trottenberg’s replacement, and with 15 years of experience in government and a few years in the transit, Zarrilli’s nomination seemed like a no-brainer.

A few weeks later, in June, Polly Trottenberg abruptly stepped down as well. We don’t know why Weisbrod quit, but as Streetsblog detailed in June, the DOT Commissioner seemed fed up with Andrew Cuomo’s meddling and annoyed with the mayor’s refusal to stick up for the city in all matters MTA. The mayor nominated Bob Linn, a labor lawayer, to the MTA Board. Many thought it to be an honorary nomination as Linn has recently retired from his role as the city’s chief labor negotiator, and Zarrilli was expected to pick up the transit slack left over by Trottenberg’s departure.

But with Andrew Cuomo and the MTA, things that should be certain aren’t, and while Linn’s nomination sailed through the confirmation process, Zarrilli’s didn’t. Officially, as Mark Chiusano wrote five months ago, the hold-up concerned the background check. Despite a long career in government, Zarrilli seemed to in limbo, but of course, the state legislature, at the demand of Andrew Cuomo, found time to exempt Robert Mujica from the MTA Board residency requirements. The governor claimed they received Zarrilli’s nomination “late” without enough time to go through the background check process, but that seemed to be a load of bunk. As Dana Rubinstein reported, Zarrilli’s nomination arrived one business day after Linn’s, but what the governor wants, the governor gets. As the MTA Board debated the $51 billion five-year capital plan, the 2020 budget and the AlixPartners transformation plan, the city was down a voice during discussions that could reshape the city’s transit space for decades to come.

At any point since June, the legislature could have picked up and acted on Zarrilli’s nomination. That they have not suggests further reticence from Cuomo, and now the MTA Board will lose another forceful advocate for transit as Vanterpool reports for duty on Wednesday for the last time. Rubinstein broke the news of Vanterpool’s departure last month, noting that the board’s “most outspoken member” will be leaving, and the city will be worse off for it. Vanterpool was the only woman of color on the MTA Board, the youngest member at the time of her initial nomination, and as the one-time executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a long-time player in the transit space. Rachael Fauss of Reinvent Albany called Vanterpool’s departure a “huge loss” in comments to The Post.

For her part, Vanterpool has played down the impact of her departure and defending the mayor to the bitter end. In comments on Gotham Gazette’s “What’s the [Data] Point” podcast, Vanterpool discussed record city investment in the MTA Capital Plan while attempting to parry with the claim that Bill de Blasio has not been invested in transit. (The mayor, you may recall, handed the MTA a blank check without ensuring the money would go only to city concerns, as Michael Bloomberg had done with money for the 7 line extension during his time in office.)

Still, it’s hard not to view Weisbrod’s and Trottenberg’s and Vanterpool’s departures as a lessening of city authority and say over transit governance concerns. We already know, as Vanterpool has said in her various exit interviews, that the MTA Board is Cuomo’s through and through and that, at best, city voices can be squeaky wheels gaining the attention of the press and public as part of the PR war. Practically and politically, the city’s four voices can never carry the day, and going through a prolonged period of time during which only two of the city seats are filled will leave New York City transit riders underrepresented on the MTA Board.

What comes next is tough to say. In her podcast appearance, Vanterpool excused de Blasio’s hands-off approach while also speaking wistfully of a governance model that empowers the Board, and not the governor, to name the MTA leadership. She appreciated the independence the mayor affords his board members and she talked about conversations with “city leadership” generally about transit while pointedly not mentioned the mayor’s involvement. It’s an enlightening conversation, and Vanterpool had similar things to say to Streetsblog as well.

But that independence, and the mayor’s very apparent hands off approach, also means that city voices have no real transit champion speaking up from City Hall. Early last week, I’ve asked the mayor’s team if they have any names ready to replace Vanterpool and if they plan to push Albany and the Governor to act quickly on these nominations and have yet to receive a reply. Most city-watchers and transit advocates I’ve spoken with this month feel the mayor just doesn’t care enough about the MTA to invest any political capital whatsoever in fighting for quick action on the two empty board seats.

Still, the jockeying has begun. In an ideal world, Zarrilli would be approved as soon as the governor passes his nomination to the State Senate, and TransitCenter’s Colin Wright urged the mayor to appoint a disabled New Yorker to the Board. But for now, the city’s voice in its transit affairs will be further diminished following Wednesday’s meeting. While our loss is Delaware’s gain, it’s time for the mayor to step up and fight for adequate NYC representation on the MTA Board. With MTA transformation in full swing and $51 billion in capital investment in the balance, New York City can ill afford to lose its transit voice.

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MTA ConstructionMTA Politics

Debarment Debacle: Disqualification rule raises concerns over bidding as contractors file suit

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on December 1, 2019

Contractors have filed suit over the MTA’s debarment regulation as transit advocates worry about the short-sightedness of the new rule.

During last month’s MTA Board Meetings, a routine discussion on a procurement contract took an interesting turn. The agency is currently in the process of awarding a two-year, $38.8 million contract for elevator installation and other accessibility upgrades at the 4 train’s 170th Street station and had initially identified six potential qualified bidders for the project. In the end, only two companies opted to bid on the work while three of the others declined to propose offers, citing, as the MTA put it in Board materials, “excessive risk associated with terms and conditions contained in the contract.”

On its surface, a few companies dropping out due to “excessive risk” hardly seems newsworthy, but underlying that excessive risk was the MTA’s new debarment policy. At the direction of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State legislature earlier this year passed a law mandating that the MTA institute a debarment (or disqualification) policy, ostensibly to maintain better oversight over project budgets and timelines. The MTA’s current emergency policy, designed to comply with law, mandates a five-year debarment for any contractor that delivers a project at least 10 percent late or at least 10 percent over budget.

Watching contractors drop out of the bidding process like flies following the implementation of the debarment rule was anticipated and feared by MTA executives and external watchdog organizations alike, and many have accused Gov. Cuomo of once again taking a wrecking ball to a problem that required a more delicate solution. Now, a group of contractors is fighting back, as they have filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the MTA’s debarment rule, as enacted, is unconstitutional. Neither the state nor MTA will comment on pending litigation, but so far, debarment has been a predictable mess for the MTA.

A Recent History of Debarment: an Executive Order, a hastily-enacted law, and emergency rule-making

The recent history of debarment in New York State starts with an executive order issued by Gov. Cuomo in late January. EO 192 established a requirement that all state agencies “rely on the determination made by other state entities” regarding debarment of a contractor. Thus, if any state agencies or any public authority for which Cuomo appoints the chair or CEO, as he does with the MTA, determines a contractor must be debarred, every other state entity must adhere to that decision.

With this EO, the risk to contractors doing business with any New York state entity increased exponentially, and for months, the contractor industry has been buzzing with concern over this requirement. It’s compounded by the reality that debarment in one state often leads other states to disqualify contractors, and suddenly, a contractor can find itself out of government work entirely.

Then, in April, as part of the budget negotiations, the state legislature approved a debarment requirement applicable specifically to the MTA. The new requirement, Section 1279-h of the Public Authorities Law, became law with no public hearing or comment period and obligated the MTA to create a “debarment process for contractors of the authority that prohibits such contractors from bidding on future contracts, after a debarment determination” by the MTA. The state directed the MTA to create a debarment regulation applicable “in situations involving a contractor’s failure to substantially complete the work within the time frame set forth in the contract, or in any subsequent change order, by more than ten percent of the contract term; or where a contractor’s disputed work exceeds ten percent or more of the total contract cost where claimed costs are deemed to be invalid pursuant by the contractual dispute resolution process.”

And that’s just what the MTA did. In May, the MTA issued an emergency regulation, since twice extended, that did exactly what the state legislature and governor mandated, each time without any public hearing or comment period. If any contractor faces debarment, three MTA employees will hear the complaint, and while the contractor will be able to present defenses, the debarment panel is not permitted to employ discretion in determining whether to proceed with debarment. If the grounds for debarment are met — if the contractor misses the target completion date by 10 percent or if the project is over budget by 10 percent — the MTA must debar, and the MTA can also opt to disbar the contractor’s corporate parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. It is, to put it mildly, draconian.

Concern over debarment from within and outside the MTA

Even before the contractors filed suit a few weeks ago, debarment has faced criticism from agency insiders and watchdogs who have frosty relationships with Gov. Cuomo. The Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA raised concerns about the process that lead to the debarment regulation in a letter to MTA Chair Pat Foye earlier this year. Lisa Daglian wrote:

We are particularly troubled that this emergency action was taken during the Executive Session…Contractors must be held accountable, but so too must the MTA for the decisions it makes: undertaking such a sea change in secret sends a message that the authority is in a constant state of emergency, is above the law, and can make or bend the rules as it sees fit. The public has a right to know what the MTA’s Board members are voting on, and how. They have a right to review documents in advance of public meetings, and comment on proposed rule changes. They should not have to read about votes taken in secret for “emergency orders” that will ultimately affect them for many years to come.

Since debarment was approved, I’ve spoken with senior officials within the MTA who are extremely concerned with the chilling effects of debarment. Based on the challenges of working with the MTA, an organization known for being unable to manage project scope and budget, and the now-steep penalties, these MTA officials have routinely expressed their beliefs that debarment will lead to a decrease in the number of companies willing to work with the agency and a corresponding increase in project budgets. To combat the potential risk of debarment, those contractors willing to take on the risk will now be incentivized to submit bids with significantly inflated price tags and long construction timelines, thus further exacerbating the MTA’s cost crisis.

Good governance groups have picked up on this potential effect as well. “On debarment — which we strongly oppose — at Monday’s Transit Committee meeting, it was revealed that three vendors didn’t submit proposals on a design-build contract because of risks from debarment,” Reinvent Albany’s Rachael Fauss said to the MTA Board last month. “This risks includes factors beyond their control. Debarment is bad policy and a big mistake because it reduces competition. This means higher prices and a smaller pool of expertise to draw from.”

At a time when the MTA wants to increase the scope of its work and is on the verge of moving forward with a plan that calls for over $10 billion of construction spending every year for five years, imposing a five-year debarment penalty could whittle down the field of contractors to too few to complete the work. If only two out of six would bid on ADA work now, how can the MTA hope to fulfill its promises to deliver 70 fully accessible stations within five years?

And within the environment of the MTA, ADA work is considered relatively easy. I’ve spoken with MTA officials who are concerned that debarment could put Siemens and Bombardier at risk of losing their abilities to bid on MTA projects. If that were to happen, it would be functionally impossible for the MTA to complete most of the five-year capital plan at all. There simply aren’t enough companies able to do work within New York to ensure competitive bids and enough bodies to perform all of the work in the face of a debarment threat.

Contractors file suit to stop debarment regulations

In an effort to stop the MTA from enforcing its debarment rules, a group called the Alliance For Fair and Equitable Contracting Today, or AFFECT, filed suit shortly before Thanksgiving. The Alliance, represented by one-time Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, consists of the General Contractors Association of New York, the New York Building Congress, the Associated General Contractors of New York State LLC, the Building Trades Employers Association, and the American Council of Engineering Companies of New York. It is the über-lobbying group for the contracting industry, and in their lawsuit, they say, “Debarment is a death penalty for a public works contractor.”

In short, the suit alleges a variety of constitutional violations, including the Contract Clause, the Supremacy Clause, the Dormant Commerce Clause, procedural and substantive due process, and the First Amendment. The MTA’s debarment regulation applies retroactively and thus rewrites pre-existing contracts. It also affords the MTA with no leeway in determining fault. A few sections of AFFECT’s complaint struck me as particularly noteworthy. Calling New York’s approach to debarment “wildly out of step” with other debarment regimes around the country, AFFECT states:

The Debarment Statute and MTA Regulations do not require any wrongful conduct by the contractor or permit consideration of mitigating factors or allow inquiry into whether the contractor, engineer, or other vendor acted in good faith. MTA authorities must debar a contractor, consultant or supplier once a determination is made that the contractor exceeded the statute or regulation’s schedule or claim thresholds. No consideration is given to why a project went longer or whether a claim for a cost overrun was put forth in good faith. Nor is any consideration given to whether the contractor has taken steps to prevent schedule and cost overruns in the future.

As a result, the Debarment Statute and MTA Regulations create a draconian regime where a contractor operating in good faith may be debarred for merely exercising its express contractual rights to request additional time or costs due to changes necessitated by the MTA or a third party.

Whether this is a winning legal argument is, of course, another question and one premature to answer. The MTA has around two weeks to file a response to the lawsuit, and state and agency representatives have defended debarment all year. “The MTA is changing the way we do business to deliver for our customers and that means ensuring the historic $51 billion capital plan will be delivered on-time and on-budget,” Abbey Collins, an MTA spokesperson, said in a statement last week. “Beyond that, we don’t comment on pending litigation.” 

I find the state’s approach to debarment far too limiting and am sympathetic to the arguments I’ve heard from MTA insiders and advocates that debarment will be harmful in the short-term to an agency looking to build fast. It’s not a solution to the MTA’s cost crisis and actually exacerbate it in the long run. Whether a court decides to invalidate the debarment regulations or not, New York state (and by extension the MTA) and its contractors should work out a better solution to the problem of cost overruns and missed deadlines. The debarment sledgehammer isn’t the answer.

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Queens

Long-awaited Rockaway Beach Branch study reveals subway, LIRR options — and a high price tag

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 20, 2019

Could the M train one day snake through Queens via the Rockaway Beach Branch line? Some rail activists have a plan that could bridge the rails vs. trails gap if stars, and costs, align. (Via The QueensLink)

Re-activating the defunct Rockaway Beach Branch line could cost up to $8 billion dollars and a one-seat ride to JFK Airport using the once-and-perhaps-future LIRR right of way could run to nearly $20 billion, according to a long-awaited report the MTA released last month. If the MTA’s numbers are to be believed, this report may serve not as a rallying cry for advocates to push for rail reactivation but rather an indication that the MTA’s inability to manage costs will back-burner any transit use for this ROW for years to come. Without an obvious political champion pushing this project, one could be forgiven for believing the inflated costs to be almost intentional.

The history of the Rockaway Beach Branch line is a tortured one that I’ve covered extensively over the years. It’s one of those spaces that’s constantly in the cross-hairs of different groups, and nearly since the day after the misguided decision to end rail service in the early 1960s, various factions have tried to lay claim to the route. We’ve seen dreams of a new Rockaway Beach Branch rail line come and go, plans for one-seat rides to JFK live and die, and over the past decade, fights between the so-called QueensWay group that wants to convert these rails into trails and transit activists fighting for train service into underserved areas. Lately, the folks at The QueensLink have tried to bridge the gap, offering a plan for rail use of the ROW with added park space as well.

Amidst this battle, back in 2016, then-Assembly representative Phil Goldfeder secured state dollars for a study examination reactivation of the RBBL. The report was to be due by mid-2017, but the MTA failed to hit that deadline. Eventually, Systra delivered the report in September of 2018, but it languished out of view until Jose Martinez of The City came knocking in early October. Late last month, the MTA finally unveiled the full report in all its glory.

The Long Island Rail Road alignment would return commuter rail trains to the Rockaway Beach Branch.

The report itself is extensive and broken into two phases. The first part [pdf]explores, in great detail, the 3.5 miles of unused right-of-way between Rego Park and Ozone Park where the line then meets up with today’s A train out to Howard Beach and beyond. Systra assessed reactivation via a spur off the LIRR’s Main Line and a New York City Transit spur from the Queens Boulevard line. I’m more intrigued by the subway option that the LIRR routing, but allow me to summarize both.

In each case, the underlying assumption appears to be that most of the current elevated structure — the old Rockaway Beach Branch viaduct — would have to be replaced entirely due to deterioration and modern safety standards, thus driving up costs. The LIRR routing is the cheaper choice but with lower ridership. Sending the Main Line down the Rockaway Beach Branch is projected to cost $6.7 billion and would include new stations at Rego Park, Parkside, Woodhaven, Ozone Park, Aqueduct and Howard Beach. Systra modeled frequencies of 15, 20 and 30 minutes and determined that around 10,800-11,200 riders per day would use the LIRR option with travel times from Howard Beach to Penn Station maxing out at around 25 minutes.

The proposed subway alignment would send a mix of M and R trains to Howard Beach.

The New York City Transit option would include a spur off of the Queens Boulevard Line, approximately 4000 feet of tunneling and new stations at Parkside, Brooklyn Manor, Woodhaven and Ozone Park. As subway junkies know, the current Rego Park station along the Queens Boulevard line has tunnel provisions in place pointed toward the Rockaway Beach Branch right of way, and the report anticipates a mix of M and R trains serving the RBBL with 10-minute headways. Travel times from Howard Beach to Herald Square are estimated at around 45 minutes, and the RBBL could account for 47,000 subway riders per day. This project comes in at a cost of $8.102 billion. Needless to say, both of this plans carry prohibitively expensive price tags, but at least the subway option has a significantly lower cost-per-passenger than the LIRR plan.

The second part of the study examined using the RBBL to serve as a true one-seat ride from Manhattan right to the terminals at JFK Airport. You can browse this part of the report right here, but I must warn you that the costs make it an exercise in futility. To add on a one-seat JFK extension to the LIRR plan above would cost an additional $12 billion for a total of nearly $20 billion. Travel times range from 23 minutes to and from Manhattan with a stop only at Woodside to 30 minutes to and from Manhattan with local stops in between. Ridership estimates range from around 8000 per day to 15,000, and while the report is an intriguing read with alignment renderings fun to contemplate, the combination of the high price tag and lower ridership make this long-desired one-seat ride an academic exercise in futility rather than a viable plan.

The MTA assessed two options for a one-seat LIRR ride to JFK. The northern alignment (not shown here) would follow the Belt north of Howard Beach before merging with the AirTrain ROW.

Beyond the dollars and the ridership totals, it’s worth paging through the reports, not least to see how the plans are laid out, where stations are sited, and how the modeling anticipates ridership growth. The subway proposal has some challenges. Off the bat, Systra raises concerns that tunneling close to Queens buildings that abut the right of way could damage foundations, and the report calls for proper mitigation. Plus, as we know, certain non-park uses of the right of way will have to be reclaimed. And for what it’s worth, the report allows for joint park and rail usage including via a trail under the viaduct between 97th and Liberty Avenues, parallel to the tracks south of Fleet Street or via an elevated walkway through Forest Park. But none of it is impossible if only the costs were right.

And therein lies the rub. The costs are not right. Each option — the two JFK one-seat alignments north or south of the current Howard Beach A train stop, the LIRR reactivation and the subway extension — are budgeted with excessive cost padding. The subway proposal, for instance, features nearly $2.5 billion in soft costs, $1.2 billion in contingencies, and escalation factors totaling $2.7 billion. The raw construction is estimated to cost only $1.6 billion in 2016 dollars if the tunneling from the Queens Boulevard Line is cut-and-cover. QueensRail advocates who have been pushing the project believe the price tag is unnecessarily inflated and design-build could carve off billions from the soft costs. Still, once the dollars are out there, it’s hard to overcome the political problems these inflated figures create.

Ultimately, then, it’s easy to see this entire report as an exercise in futility and the one the MTA is keen to leave behind. The costs are far in excess of any money the MTA should be spending here, and reaction from all quarters reflects that concern and a healthy skepticism toward the accuracy of the MTA’s cost estimates. In an extensive piece for Crains New York exploring the current state of the rails-vs.-trails debate, Matthew Flamm spoke with former MTA Capital Construction President Michael Horodniceanu. “It’s extremely high,” Horodniceanu said of the cost estimates. “Even though you have a tunnel, the estimate is way out of line.”

Horodniceanu told Flamm he felt construction should come with a price tag “at most” half of what the report predicted, and if the MTA has lost Michael Horodniceanu on cost projections, then they’ve really lost the thread.

I asked Stephen Smith of @MarketUrbanism for his view of the costs as well. Smith, a constant critic of the MTA’s profligate spending, said, “While $8 billion does seem high, even for the MTA in 2019, I think we all should have learned by now to never underestimate the MTA’s ability to spend money. Given the densities along the line, this route is going to be marginal in the best of cases with regards to cost, and we are nowhere near the best of cases, to say nothing of the fact that there’s no evidence that design-build will bring costs down to that. There is so much more lower-hanging fruit in Queens transit, whether it’s bringing the LIRR up to rapid transit standards, running the buses and subway more efficiently, or bringing down construction costs. This project isn’t going anywhere.”

The proposed layout for a Parkside subway station near Metropolitan Ave. may be all we’ll see of the RBBL reactivation plan.

I believe Smith is right. With Goldfeder out of office and his successor Stacey Pheffer Amato losing interest in the project, there is no natural champion even as the need for better rail connections through Queens and into the Rockaways are clearly needed to improve mobility in New York City. To make matters worse, City Council rep Karen Koslowitz, who thinks none of the intermediate stops carefully laid out in the report actually exist, has refused to support rail. “She has always been and will continue to be unalterably opposed to the reactivation of the Rockaway Beach branch,” a spokesman said to Crains New York York. “The neighborhood’s not going to get the benefit of converting it to a public transportation line, but the foundations are going to crack, and homes are going to shake.”

Even if the report details mitigation efforts the MTA could take, at great care and cost, to ensure foundations don’t crack and buildings don’t shake, this is a project without a champion and with a cost far in excess of reason. It’s a lesson in maintaining rail service over rights-of-way and not letting them grow fallow. And it’s a lesson in torpedoing a project an agency doesn’t want to do by inflating the price. New Yorkers will continue to dream and agitate for reactivation of the Rockaway Beach Branch, but until the dollars make sense and political support materializes, the case may sadly be closed.

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Subway Security

It’s not just about the Churro Ladies

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 14, 2019

In what was, in hindsight, the unavoidable result of an ill-conceived plan to unleash 500 cops into the subways with little guidance and nearly no oversight, a video of NYPD officers handcuffing a churro vendor in the Broadway Junction subway station went viral over the weekend. You’ll see why when you watch the video.

For the past few days, the city of New York has spent countless hours defending the churro vendors and generally arguing over the under-the-table food vendors who can’t navigate the city’s labyrinthian and expensive permitting process. We’ve heard calls for the city to loosen permitting regulations and for the cops who are cracking down on this type of vending in the subway (even while serving as the churro ladies’ loyal customers) to scale back aggressive anti-churro enforcement. But it’s not just about the churro ladies.

Earlier this year, for reasons that I still haven’t quite worked out, Gov. Andrew Cuomo got the idea planted in his head that Something Had To Be Done About The Subways™. Too many people, he claimed, were evading the fare, and the subways just weren’t safe, the governor argued. The current coterie of cops wasn’t sufficient, and instead, despite major felony rates at just over 1 per 1 million riders and crime at near-record lows, the city and MTA absolutely had to add 500 additional officers.

Perhaps someone once again grabbed him by the lapels. Perhaps his spokespeople, who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the subways are not safe yet, as Dani Lever did to The Times just last week, have been whispering sweet nothings into the Governor’s ear. But whatever the reason, the governor went to great pains to herald the arrival of 500 new cops, first on loan from the NYPD and eventually hired by the MTA as new officers. The June press release is important and instructive, a mash-up of reasons, excuses and tensions that come through and have been laid bare in recent weeks.

Cuomo’s release talks about three reasons for the increased police presence. Notably and unfortunately, assaults on transit workers have increased by 15% since 2013; fare evasion has spiked to supposedly a $240 million problem; and there “problems of public safety,” an open-ended sweeping claim. Said the governor, “The MTA is still plagued by problems of public safety, attacks against transit workers and persistent fare evasion – issues that have only worsened in recent years. This new multi-pronged effort will improve safety on the system overall, protect workers from these incomprehensible assaults, and deter fare evasion by deploying 500 new uniformed officers on our subways and buses.”

The mayor, a willing participant in this effort, echoed the governor’s statements. “The additional officers we’re deploying to the subway system will protect riders, prevent fare evasion and respond in emergencies,” Bill de Blasio said. The governor hasn’t ridden the subway since 2016, and the mayor has taken no more than a few token rides over the past year and change.

The statement I find most intriguing from the press release is from the outgoing NYPD Commissioner. “In 1990, there were nearly 17,500 transit crimes, compared to 2018, where there were 2,500 transit crimes, which is approximately one crime for every million riders,” James O’Neill said. “These additional officers will help us continue to reduce crime past already record lows, work with our partners to solve problems, and provide increased visibility to deter theft-of-service – all while preventing crime and disorder from occurring in the first place.”

But the rest of the release is a bit of a mess. It notes, without offering any evidence, that “the MTA fare evasion problem coupled with the growing reports of assaults on MTA workers has led to concern among many riders who believe there is a greater need for police presence in the subway and transit system.” And while the release discusses the real problem of assaults general harassment against transit workers, the bulk of the initiative is clearly focused around fare enforcement.

And so with this carte blanche permission to take over the subways, 500 NYPD officers have descended into the subway with predictable results. They gather at turnstiles; they tackle teenagers selling candy; they’ve been filmed attacking riders (and have been subsequently sued for $5 million or 1.8 million subway fares); they’ve harassed people sitting on benches. In each case, cops claim after the fact that subjects were failing to cooperate and obstructing governmental administration, excuses that legally act to excuse a wide range of otherwise socially unacceptable police behavior. In a city still smarting from years of a very controversial stop-and-frisk policy, nothing we’ve seen unfold comes as any sort of surprise, and this litany of incidents is barely scratching the surface.

At this point, the dialogue has moved far beyond protecting transit workers, and even the cops, standing around bored and playing with their phones at Canal St., have admitted they’re focused on amorphous quality-of-life offense and fare evasion.

Imagine my surprise then when Edwin Delatorre, the NYPD’s Chief of Transit, sat in front of the MTA Board this week and said, “I also want to make clear, there is no NYPD crackdown on fare evasion.” Simply put, that’s a lie. That’s a lie based on Cuomo’s press release; that’s a lie based on what the cops themselves say; and that’s a lie based upon the lived experiences of every New Yorker who’s ridden the subway since June.

Now, the case for 500 new MTA cops has never been a compelling one, and the obfuscation around the problems that have arisen has made everything worse. Rachael Fauss penned an extensive takedown of the rationales behind the push for more cops for Gotham Gazette. The non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission has detailed how adding 500 new MTA police officers will cost the cash-strapped MTA nearly $900 million over the next ten years, dollars that will come out of the budget in the form of fare hikes or service cuts. Meanwhile, the MTA’s own inspector general has noted that the agency’s fare evasion numbers seem unreliable at best, and TransitCenter has raised similar concerns. For its part, the MTA has never bothered to baseline an acceptable rate of fare evasion or issue a cost-benefit analysis explaining how much it costs to capture lost fare revenue on a dollar-to-dollar basis. Eventually, it costs more than the captured fares to push evasion down to zero, and every transit agency accepts some amount of fare bleed. And what of the transit workers? Their assaults have nearly vanished as cops have seemingly focused everywhere other than there.

Predictably, the governor and mayor have each doubled down on defending this plan. The governor simply repeated his unfounded claims that the subways aren’t safe (a claim O’Neill recently took to the pages of The Post to dispute in print) while the mayor claimed 75 out 100 subway riders are simply clamoring for more cops.

In a vacuum, the mayor’s statement may not be wrong, but should those cops come without limits? Should they come at the expense of investment in service? Should they come with the videos that have made the rounds lately and the conflicts that are emerging between New Yorkers, and especially minority communities, and the police who seem intent on picking on them on the subways? Council Member Antonio Reynoso summed up the problems in a statement:

“The recent incidents of excessive use of force and broken windows policing are a predictable outcome of unleashing an additional five hundred officers into the MTA system at a time when we have record low crime rates in the City of New York. This is all the more concerning when the governor has explicitly stated that these officers have been deployed specifically to combat fare beating, an offense that very often stems directly from poverty. The recent arrests of women selling churros in the subway is a particularly egregious example of enforcement targeting vulnerable members of our society for offenses that stem from economic insecurity.

This all seems to be building to a head, and earlier this week, Cuomo, who started this whole thing, accidentally stumbled into something when he said during a NY1 interview that “the real issue is the relationship between the police and the community, and that’s what has to be fixed here.” That’s right, but that was also right five months ago before Cuomo decided to unleash the cops into the subways, and that’s something that should have been considered by the MTA and the governor and mayor before this exploded into general unrest and increased tensions across the transit network.

So where does the city go from here? One path leads New York into a dark place where the lessons of Fruitvale Station and the death of Oscar Grant are learned anew in a different city under different circumstances. The other involves a reset and pullback from the current situation. It involves maturity and a recognition by the governor and mayor and MTA Board that this was handled poorly from the start. It involves reducing the purview of this crackdown to true quality-of-life offenses. It involves prioritizing the safety of transit workers, and especially of those on buses where most assaults occur, first, and homeless outreach second, before Churro Ladies, candy vendors and people sitting on benches come under the microscope. It involves honesty in the fare hike debate, and an enforcement effort that’s rational with real goals and with a real commitment by the city to expand Fair Fares and redesign fare control areas to increase accessibility while incorporating best-in-class designs that include taller and wider fare gates and fewer unstaffed emergency exits. It involves a recognition that maintaining quality of life in the subways is important, but it also involves an acceptance that the MTA’s current summons-based enforcement, rather than criminalizing trivial acts that aren’t arrest-worthy offenses, should be sufficient.

It’s not hard to get this right so that vulnerable communities don’t feel unfairly targeted and so that our politicians aren’t constantly trying to convince the public, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the subways aren’t safe. It requires two stubborn leaders to admit they weren’t right in the first place, and it requires honesty about the NYPD’s relationship with the people it’s supposed to protect. It’s not in the end just about the churro ladies, and it’s not too late to get it right. But without a political reckoning, it sure is getting late early.

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L Train ShutdownManhattan

Thoughts as an L train entrance at Ave. A opens

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 5, 2019

Alphabet City finally has easier subway access as the MTA marked the opening of an Ave. A entrance to the L train’s 1st Ave. station. (Photo: MTA / Trent Reeves)

As the L train project continues apace, the MTA celebrated a milestone on Monday morning when the agency finally — finally! — opened a new eastern entrance to the L train’s 1st Avenue stop. The staircase leads down to the Brooklyn-bound platforms and connects to the world above at Avenue A, finally opening the subway to the eastern reaches of the East Village and Stuy Town, 95 years and change since the BMT’s 14th Street-Eastern Line opened in June of 1924. A similar entrance on the 8th Ave.-bound side will open in a few weeks and elevators on both sides will be in service when the L project work wraps next year.

The MTA held a perfunctory opening ceremony on Monday morning complete with the requisite comments from local politicians. “The East Village and Lower East Side are some of the biggest [subway] deserts in Manhattan,” City Council Representative Carolina Rivera said, “and these new entrances are going to make a big difference for the thousands of residents who have to walk up to half a mile to reach this station. These accomplishments are helping to restore faith in our city and state’s ability to get big successful projects done right, and I can’t wait for the rest of the entrances, elevators, and the L train project to be completed.”

The mutual admiration society that accompanies these types of projects may seem rote, but it’s important. I’ll explain in a second. In the meantime, you can see some footage from the new entrance in the video embedded below, and the MTA posted a handful of photos on the agency’s Flickr page.

While seemingly minor in the grand scheme of New York City’s transit needs, I think the opening of this new entrance is worth considering. First, entrances like this one are a key part of expanding transit access in the city and should be a normal part of the MTA’s year-to-year strategy. Because of the design of the L train station at 1st Ave. where all exiting and entering passengers are filtered through a small fare control area at the extreme western end of this station, this stop has long been a good candidate for a second entrance, and citing it at the extreme eastern end can held with crowd control while providing better subway access to thousands of riders coming from Stuy Town, Alphabet City and points east.

In fact, as East Side L train ridership has exploded over the past twenty years, it’s almost a scandal that the MTA hadn’t been planning an Ave. A entrance until the Sandy recovery work forced the issue. This is an entrance the city and MTA should have opened 10 or 15 years ago as the East Village population swelled and L train usage grew, and it’s hard to overstate how important it is for encouraging transit use to give people a notably shorter walk to the subway. It’s too bad the MTA’s current cost and construction productivity crisis meant that the agency couldn’t realistically work an Avenue C stop into its L train plans.

Furthermore, openings such as this one give politicians a reason to show up for MTA events. As we saw from the politicians’ statements, local pols like to milk these events as low-hanging, constituent-focused events, and the MTA could enjoy political support by aggressively identifying stations that could support new entrances or where entrances closed amidst crime fears in the 1980s and 1990s are reopened. Plus, as I mentioned, cutting people’s commute times to transit stops — especially when those commutes take potential straphangers past shuttered entrances — can help encourage transit use, and that’s a goal both the city and MTA should be pursuing these days. I’d suggest starting with this comprehensive list of unused station entrances and working from there. If the MTA truly hasn’t opened some of these entrances over ADA compliance concerns, the new push to drastically expand accessibility in the subway should also lead to the reopening of closed entrances.

Yet, not everything is perfect with this new entrance. As you can see from the video above, the MTA is still using the same turnstile design and still included emergency exit doors, both of which are under scrutiny as part of the hand-wringing over fare evasion. Testing new fare gate designs that make turnstile jumping harder and eliminate emergency exits which are easy to prop open could have been a part of the new entrances at Ave. A. Plus, the new turnstiles aren’t OMNY-equipped so another contractor will have to head down into the system in a few months to install the new readers.

These are minor gripes with a good project though, and the MTA should look for low-hanging, lower-cost fruit to help open up transit stations and reduce walking distances to station entrances above ground. It would take only a small political push and can pay immediate dividends for thousands.

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BusesPodcast

Second Ave. Sagas Podcast, Episode 8: Better Buses Better Cities with TransitCenter’s Steven Higashide

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 1, 2019

Buses are certainly having their moment these days. With the launch of the 14th St. Busway, we’ve seen a vision of a better New York City, one that prioritizes transit over private automobiles and makes it easier for people of every stripe to move around.

But the success of 14th Street isn’t the only bus story in America. Across the country, transit advocates are winning the fight for better bus service, either through network redesigns that bolster ridership or investment in new routes dedicated to buses. To that enter, Steven Higashide, the Direct of Research at TransitCenter, recently published a new book entitled Better Buses Better Cities: How to Plan, Run and Win the Fight for Effective Transit. At 142 pages, it’s a quick read, but an insightful and meaningful one for anyone who cares about improving buses. Higashide profiles efforts around the country at fixing buses to make service frequent, useful and popular.

This week, Higashide joined me on the podcast to talk about the lessons from his book gleaned from his travels around the country and the ways they can be applied to New York City. We talked, of course, about the new busway, but we also spoke about the bus network redesign Andy Byford is currently leading and the shortcomings in this project. We discussed fighting against the Arthur Schwartzs of the world and planning a bus network that can lead to faster service and higher ridership. Is this the dawning of the age of buses? Listen on to find out.

You can find my conversation with Higashide at all the popular podcast spots — iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or Pocket Casts, to name a few. Or you can listen by clicking the “play” button below. If you like what you hear and have been enjoying the podcasts, please consider leaving a review on your iTunes.

As always, thank you for listening and thanks as well to Joe Jakubowski for sound engineering. I’ve been enjoying producing these podcasts but they take a lot of time and effort. I can keep doing them only through the generous contributions of my listeners so please consider joining the Second Ave. Sagas Patreon. Since this site runs entirely on Patreon contributions, your help keeps the proverbial engine going. And be sure to check out Better Buses, Better Cities. It’s worth any transit advocate’s read.

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14th Street Busway

The one simple trick to fix NYC bus service

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on October 20, 2019

A 14th Street for buses offers a vision for NYC’s future streetscape. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

The past few weeks have been transformational for New York City’s streets. Whether New Yorkers realize it or not, the launch of the 14th St. Busway, after months of delays due to spurious lawsuits, and the lack of a traffic apocalypse on adjacent side streets should usher in a new era of re-envisioned city streets as buses are prioritized on key arteries at the expense of cars, ensuring that the city’s suffering bus network gets the boost it needs to run buses faster and more reliably than ever before. All it took was one simple trick advocates for years have been clamoring for: Get the cars out of the way.

The Busway brings faster buses and more riders

The history of the 14th Street project is one well known about these parts. In its current form, it grew out of the need to repair the L train tunnels following Superstorm Sandy, and we heard whisperings of a car-free busway as early as 2016. As 2017 unfolded, both the RPA and Transportation Alternatives issued calls for redesigning 14th Street to prioritize buses during the L train shutdown, and a year later, Arthur Schwartz, the pro-car villain in this story, filed the first of many lawsuits he would lob toward the city, state, DOT and MTA. Earlier this year, the Governor torpedoed a full-time L train shutdown, but the city rightly forged forward with the busway plans.

In late September, Schwartz finally lost an appeal that allowed DOT and the MTA to implement the vehicle restrictions, and for the past few weeks, the M14 and New York City bus riders have been enjoying the glories of the 14th St. Busway, the first of its kind in the borough of Manhattan. The early going has been a tremendous success for the MTA and DOT, as numbers released by the MTA have made clear. Since the lane restrictions went into effect, the average weekday ridership on the M14 has gone up by around 17% from approximately 26,000 riders per day to over 31,000. Note that this early period includes both Yom Kippur and Columbus Day, and the non-holiday average appears to be closer to 32,000. The M14 has lost nearly 25% of its weekday ridership since 2013, and this reversal, if it holds, would represent the line’s best performance since 2015. Weekend ridership went up by around 33% with only the introduction of the Select Bus Service treatment, and we’re still awaiting enough data on weekend trips since the lane restrictions were implemented.

Travel times are down too. Trips between 3rd and 8th Avenues now take an average of 10.6 minutes, down 30 percent from 15.1 minutes last year, and on-time performance has jumped to 68 percent from 45.6 percent in the weeks since the busway was implemented. I’ve heard many tales from riders noting too that buses have had to wait at stations because drivers have been too far ahead of schedule due to the lack of traffic. For the corridor’s 31,000 bus riders each day, this is an unqualified success and offers a clear path forward for the city and MTA to combat a decade of declining bus ridership.

As predicted, traffic apocalypse fails to materialize

And what of the doom and gloom Arthur Schwartz and his West Village neighbors swore up and down would arrive? It hasn’t materialized yet, according to INRIX, an urban analytics firm brought in to assess the impact of the busway. According to the early numbers, as INRIX notes, the 14th Street Busway “had no discernible performance changes to neighboring roads. As you can see from the table below, travel speeds have generally declined by a few tenths of a mile per hour with the largest decrease coming on 16th St. during the 4 p.m. hour.

INRIX data shows the minimal impacts the busway has had on side street traffic.

INRIX offered some commentary:

It’s remarkable that initial analysis showed little change immediately following this massive road network change. In most instances, a radical change road configuration causes havoc until a new ‘normal’ is established, but in this case it did not. In effect, the driving experience has not changed as a result of the busway’s opening.

The 14th St busway illustrates the common fear associated with removing car lanes for other modes (e.g. bus, bike). According to the data, the displacement of personal vehicles to neighboring roads was negligible, but the time savings for the tens of thousands of daily bus riders was massive. The impact, or lack-there-of, may seem surprising but similar projects around the world have had similar results. The reallocation of space from vehicles to buses represents a far more efficient use of a limited public resource…As a result of this project, more people are getting where they need to be faster and more reliably.

So the traffic apocalypse hasn’t arrived, and the business owners, such as Salvatore Vitale of Joe’s Pizza, who were complaining to Winnie Hu about the traffic restrictions seem to be doing A-OK. In short, everything the project’s proponents knew would happen – faster bus speeds, a reduction in driving, no traffic on side streets – has come to pass, as we seen in countless other cities around the world, and the worst predicted by opponents hasn’t materialized.

A victory lap for advocates and a glimpse at a better future for NYC’s buses

While the immediate history of the 14th St. project dates back only a few years, the first Manhattan busway nearly came to fruition along 34th St. in 2011. That time, then-Mayor Bloomberg gave up in the face of sustained public outcry from NIMBYs along 34th St., and I mourned the missed opportunity. It took nearly a decade for the city to make another attempt, and that is a fate hopefully we can avoid this time around. The advocates are pushing hard for an immediate commitment to more bus lanes and soon.

Thomas DeVito, Transportation Alternatives’ Director of Advocacy, penned a piece in the Daily News urging the rollout of a citywide busway plan. “If we’re smart, we’ll learn from the experience, and see this as just the beginning of a much bigger revolution on streets throughout the five boroughs. Most of New York City’s 2.4 million daily bus riders live in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. It’s in those boroughs and those neighborhoods where commutes are the longest and bus-priority streets are needed the most,” DeVito wrote. “We should not have to wait three years and gear up for a sustained battle to win every project.”

Over at Curbed New York, representatives from all of the city’s transit advocacy organizations offered their thoughts on ways to expand a bus lane prioritization program throughout the city. Aaron Gordon and I joined in with our takes as well. Though you should read everyone’s views, here’s what I had to say:

It’s trite to say everywhere, but how about everywhere and all that once? With the success of 14th Street in their back pockets, DOT and the MTA could roll out multiple busway corridors at once in a variety of neighborhoods at the same time. There is no real reason for a restructuring of streets one at a time other than fear of backlash, and the only real barrier to more busways along more streets in more boroughs right now is political trepidation. As the successes and popularity of the 14th Street pilot grow, so too should the political will.

With that in mind, the next projects should focus on streets outside of Manhattan where subway access is limited, bus ridership is high, and bus speeds are slow. Fordham Road has been an unqualified SBS success story, but traffic plagued speedy bus service. Utica Avenue’s B46 has encountered so many cars blocking its route that the MTA recently had to restructure service and reduce frequencies. Both routes would benefit from a busway.

In Queens, routes serving Flushing and Jamaica would help improve last-mile bus connections while providing transit relief to subway deserts. And in Manhattan, any major crosstown street could support a busway. The city could brush off the old plans for 34th Street or explore the Vision42 proposal, and dedicating most of 125th Street to buses would do wonders for Harlem. I’d also think big—or at least north/south—and explore turning a Manhattan avenue into a busway. Thinking big, after all, is how we can truly transform NYC streets for the better.

The call I issued on Curbed New York over the summer to reform environmental laws to grant de facto approval to transit priority projects still stands as well.

Gordon had previously offered a fuller overview of the Miracle on 14th Street the week after the busway made its debut. “The totality of this shift from a miserable, traffic-clogged thoroughfare to a pleasant urban street with speedy, efficient bus service feels like a miracle,” he wrote. “It is a miracle, when you consider how hard it is for anyone to accomplish anything positive in this city’s transportation scene.”

As the quiet and calm — and it is noticeably quieter without the constant headache-inducing din of traffic — descends upon 14th Street, transit officials and politicians too are taking up the call. Andy Byford told reporters last week that he would “love to replicate [busways] elsewhere” throughout the city, and even though he hasn’t experienced the busway in person yet, Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke at length about the future of the project during his weekly appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show on Friday. Despite hedging about the “test/pilot” nature of the program, the mayor indicated a willingness to expand this type of street treatment elsewhere. I’ll quote at length:

We did this to test this approach and to decide at the end of the test what it meant not just for 14th Street, but what it might mean beyond. But I said at the beginning, you know, this is not something you do for a few weeks. We’re taking that test into next year, and when it’s concluded we’re going to start to think about what it means for every place else. A lot of folks in the community were really concerned about some of the consequences of it, intended and unintended, and whether there’d be more traffic on the side streets and all that. We need to study that over a period of time and be responsive to those concerns as well. But the central reason we did it – and I’m the one who authorized it – is because we’ve got to get people back on the buses, we’ve got to get people to feel more comfortable with mass transit, we’ve got to get cars off the street, and the only way you’re going to get cars off the street is if mass transit works a lot better and is more reliable and faster. So, it’s very encouraging, but to everyone who’s either an advocate or already believes in the approach, we owe it to the whole city and to the community to really give this a thorough test, and then we will have a much stronger case if we make any other changes, going forward, because it’ll be based on a serious body of fact.

The mayor’s statement is a bit of a mealy-mouthed mess of mumbo jumbo, but he seems willing to explore the issue. And when he’s out of office in 27 months, the next mayor can take this busway ball and run with it aggressively. In the vein of DeVito’s call, it shouldn’t take three years — or 18 months — for the city and MTA to begin planning new busways.

I’m going to close this for now with a thought on the mayor’s words. As part of the back-and-forth with Lehrer, de Blasio also said, “It’s never been done before in New York City, and we’ve got to get it right, and we’ve got to play the long game.” The long game, of course, is catching up with us as the climate continues to change at a breakneck pace, and the city must do what it can quickly to curtail the use of private automobiles. With congestion pricing on the horizon, busways can be a major part of ensuring adequate transit service for those who leave their cars at home.

And yet, part of me thinks this reaction from the city has been a bit too much. The busway is great, and we knew it would be great because busways like this one work all over the world. We don’t need to pretend New York City invented the busway, and we don’t need to spend months studying the effects of the busway on bus service or traffic on adjacent streets. We have years of data from a variety of cities, and instead of falling back on New York Exceptionalism, we should push forward for more bus treatments all over the place as soon as possible. It’s not very complicated: Getting cars out of the way does wonders for bus service. That’s one secret trick and the true vision New York City and its bus riders deserve.

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Podcast

Second Ave. Sagas Podcast, Episode 7: Board member Sarah Feinberg on the state of the MTA

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on October 16, 2019

Former FRA Administrator and current MTA Board Sarah Feinberg spoke with me at length about all things transit.

Sarah Feinberg, a recent Cuomo appointee to the MTA Board, isn’t quite like the Board members we’re used to around here. While most MTA Board members are long-time or even life-time New Yorkers who operate within the enclosed world of the MTA and its environs, Feinberg came to New York City only recently. She grew up in West Virginia, worked in San Francisco Washington D.C. before arriving in NYC after her stint as the Administrator of the Federal Railway Administration under President Barack Obama. To that end, she brings opinionated views and a more national perspective than the insular MTA often sees.

Eight months into her stint on the MTA Board, Feinberg sat down with me for the latest episode of the Second Ave. Sagas podcast. We talked about her time in Washington and how dealing with a large bureaucracy in D.C. helps her understand the even-larger bureaucracy in New York City. We talked, of course, about Gov. Cuomo and his heavy hand on transit lately and the success of the 14th St. Busway. We dove into whether or not fare evasion is the same problem the MTA claims it to be. And we discussed how the agency needs to understand that the Americans with Disabilities Act — and accessible transit facilities — is the law and not a suggestion. I hope you’ll find this conversation a refreshing and honest glimpse into the way the MTA Board interacts with both the MTA and the governor, and I’ll highlight some bits and pieces from the podcast in the coming weeks.

You can find my conversation with Feinberg at all the popular podcast spots — iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or Pocket Casts, to name a few. Or you can listen by clicking the “play” button below. If you like what you hear and have been enjoying the podcasts, please consider leaving a review on your iTunes.

As always, thank you for listening and thanks as well to Joe Jakubowski for sound engineering. I’ve been enjoying producing these podcasts but they take a lot of time and effort. I can keep doing them only through the generous contributions of my listeners so please consider joining the Second Ave. Sagas Patreon. Since this site runs entirely on Patreon contributions, I can keep it going only with your help.

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Public Transit Policy

It’s time to stop subsidizing the NYC Ferry fares

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on October 6, 2019

The EDC finally released demographics of ferry riders, and the fare subsidy should now come under political scrutiny.

Let me ask some questions about the NYC ferry system. Your answers, I believe, will depend entirely on your experiences and your convictions: Is Bill de Blasio’s signature transportation initiative — the New York City Ferry system — a success? Should the city keep subsidizing fares to keep the cost of a ferry ride on par with a $2.75 MetroCard swipe?

Perhaps your answer depends on your commuting habits. If you’re a ferry ride who views them as more “civilized” than the subways or buses, as some riders told The Village Voice last year, you may feel the ferries are great. But if you learn the ferries began with a subsidy of $6.60 per rider that has since increased to nearly $10 per rider (and could reach $16-$24 per ride on future routes), you may feel the ferries are a giveaway, a success through legalized governmental bribery.

Much as I’ve made a career out of questioning the boats, for his part, the mayor has made a career out of defending them. He’s held, by most accounts, 10 press conferences about his ferry system, and each time ridership numbers are announced, he makes a scene about praising them as better than projected. In a way, that’s true; after all, the ferries saw 2.5 million riders over the summer and daily volumes have been a bit better than expected. But that’s because each rider is essentially being paid to take the boats. Sure, they’re not getting actual cash in hand, but they are getting generously subsidized.

Over the years, many transit advocates and supporters have criticized the boats. I’ve been particularly vocal on that front, penning a piece in May of 2018 questioning Bill de Blasio’s love of low-capacity transit, and following The Village Voice piece, I voiced more skepticism in a piece for Curbed New York. Underlying the criticism of the expensive subsidy has been a lack of transparency regarding the details of those who ride the ferries. Anecdotally, The Village Voice found a bunch of wealthier-than-average New Yorkers who would have taken the subway for the same price but enjoyed the boat rides, and when I looked at Census districts near ferry docks, I found that the median household income in Census districts one mile from the docks was around $20,000 higher city average. Thus the ferries also raise a question of policy and prioritization: Are these the transit riders and mode of travel we should be subsidizing so heavily?

Despite long-standing FOIL requests from both Aaron Gordon and The New York Post and a pledge of transparency, the NYC EDC had never publicly released demographics studies of ferry riders until last week. Now that we’ve finally received an official glimpse of the demographics of ferry riders, we can now say definitively New York City should stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money heavily subsidizing a luxury, niche, low-capacity transit option that largely attracts New Yorkers wealthier than city average and wealthier than those who rely on any other mode of transit.

The NYC Ferry largely serves those within walking distance to a dock. (Source: NYC EDC)

The results of the survey as the EDC wants you to see them are available here as a PDF. It’s notable that the city released only a 13-page summary and not the raw data because it allows the EDC to set the tone. Even still, the numbers do not make a strong case for continued substantial investment in the ferry fare. As the EDC unavoidably must note, most riders “live near the water and in walking distance of a [ferry] landing.” In fact, nearly three quarters of all riders walk to the landings while the EDC notes that 6 percent bike and 11 percent take the subway or bus. The remaining 11 percent use a car, and the EDC notes that most of the drivers are heading the boat that serves the Rockaways.

There’s not much to learn from those figures, and I’ll return to them in a second. But this slide is the most damning:

EDC data offers a glimpse at the economics of ferry riders.

As you can see from the EDC’s data, ferry riders have a median income between $75-$99,999, and while that’s a big income window, it’s already higher than the median income for the service area. While it’s not clear if this is individual income or household income, it’s far higher than median household income across the city or for users of other parts of the transit network. The median household income for NYC is around $63,000 per year while individual median income is around $38,000. The average median individual income for an employed subway rider is around $40,000 and for bus commuters is around $28,455 (per data published in 2017 by Scott Stringer). So no matter how you slice it, we’re spending over $9 per ride to subsidize a low-capacity transit service for New Yorkers who are, on average, on the high side of the income scale.

It’s long been assumed the ferries were a bad investment that do little to improve mobility for the New Yorkers who need it most, and now we have the numbers to back up that reality. While some, such as the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, have argued that these taxpayers would exit New York or perhaps otherwise drive without this generous ferry subsidy, it’s hard to see how those arguments play out. The ferries are, after all, not even three years old yet, and New Yorkers have been flocking to the waterfront for the better part of two decades. Plus, most of the ferry riders who spoke with The Village Voice said they would shift to transit if faced with a choice, and many would stick with the boats even at a steeper fare. As the ferries themselves are net polluters, the environmental argument doesn’t hold up too well either.

Meanwhile, as new analysis from the Citizens Budget Commission points out, the NYC Ferry subsidy is the second highest in the nation, and every city other than New Orleans that offers ferry service does so at a higher price point. As the ferries are bleeding taxpayer dollars, the CBC calls for a “reconsideration of the operating strategy and pricing model.”

At this point, we can comfortably say Bill de Blasio is subsidizing a luxury travel option for relatively few people who tend to be wealthier. These aren’t the folks facing a mobility crisis whose buses are stuck in traffic or who can’t afford transit fares. These aren’t folks who have endless commuters from far-flung areas of the city, and it’s time to stop the giveaway. We make these types of policy decisions routinely, and it’s time to admit that a ferry fare subsidy was a bad idea. If the city wants to invest capital dollars into the ferry system and if the city can support a ferry system with a much smaller fare subsidy — say $2-$4 to align it with subways or the more popular express bus routes — so be it. But a handout to a private ferry operator so a few people pay the equivalent of a MetroCard swipe for a “civilized” commute isn’t one we should embrace. It’s time for this subsidy to end.

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Capital Program 2020-2024Second Avenue Subway

MTA officials cite fire code in defending $6 billion cost for Phase 2 of the Second Ave. Subway

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on September 23, 2019

When I was in Japan at the end of August, Donald Trump tweeted about the Second Ave. Subway. It wasn’t clear what inspired the president’s mid-morning statement on a seemingly stalled project; after all, it didn’t appear to make its way onto one of the numerous TV news shows Trump often live-tweets.

It was, needless to say, a very strange happening, and no one — not least of all Gov. Andrew Cuomo or the MTA — knew what to make of it. There is no full funding grant agreement in place between the MTA and the Federal Transit Administration yet, and Trump has since offered no further indication that he knows much of anything about the federal involvement with this subway construction project. Cuomo eventually spoke with U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, but even then, no one had much to say about the presidential statement.

With the release of the MTA Capital Plan last week, the Second Ave. Subway and the dollars associated with this long-awaited subway expansion project are back in the news. As part of the 2020-2024 Capital Plan, the MTA is proposing to fund and build Phase 2 of the Second Ave. Subway. This three-stop, 1.5-mile northern extension of the current Q train would see the train stopping at 106th St. and Second Ave., 116th St. and Second Ave., and 125th St. and Lexington Ave., connecting to Metro-North and the East Side IRT while bringing subway service to East Harlem. This project is expected to use parts of tunnels dug out in the 1970s and may cost over $6 billion.

That’s not a typo, and it’s not quite clear what the final cost will be. The full capital plan, released toward the end of the week as a PDF, indicates that the cost for the project could be as high as $6.9 billion, but in comments earlier in the week, Janno Lieber, the MTA’s Chief Development Officer and president of MTA Capital Construction, spoke about the varying figures. The project could come in for $5.7 billion or it could cost more. Here are Lieber’s initial comments on the price tag:

The financial plan for Second Ave. Subway Phase 2 is a 50-50 split with the federal government and the MTA. Because we had $1.24 billion in the existing plan and because we under the federal government rule are providing for the financing through our own financing mechanisms, so in the federal government’s view this is a $6.2 billion project. We view it as $5.7 billion. They’ve said, as we’ve gone through the process with them, we would like you to add some additional contingency. So in order to make the numbers work, we’re adding roughly $1.6 billion in this plan for our side of the 50-50 split with the federal government.

It’s worth noting again that the MTA does not have a full funding agreement in place with the feds. Lieber, who declined to comment when asked about Trump’s tweet, told reporters that the MTA’s working relationship with the feds has been positive. “They have,” he said, “basically validated our assumptions about the constructability of the project, our budget, our schedule. They asked us to add a little bit of contingency, but it’s been a positive interaction and now we’re ready to get a final approval.”

Once the feds sign off on the funding split, the MTA expects to begin work shortly thereafter. That was, after all, the point of funding engineering work in the 2015-2019 Capital Plan, but it’s still not clear when shovels will be in the ground. A few years ago, the agency had hoped to begin utility relocation work before the end of 2019, but that timeline seems aggressive. The MTA did not say if Phase 2 is still expected to be in revenue service by 2027.

But this issue of the cost looms large. Why is the Second Ave. Subway going to cost $2.5 billion per kilometer? Can the public believe the MTA is serious about cost containment when the price tag has increased to astronomical levels? And what do these dollars say about the agency’s ability to plan future transit expansion projects down the road?

When Dana Rubinstein of Politico New York asked Lieber a similar question, he started talking about fire codes. While there is some truth here, Lieber’s answer was an unsatisfactory one, but it’s a response you should read for yourself to understand the MTA’s siloed perspective on these cost issues. These are Lieber’s words:

“I think we have to have a longer conversation about the comparisons to other places. I’ll tell you this: One of the reasons we have expensive subways is that we comply with the fire code which requires you to get people out. Every body who rides trains, and we have 1000 people plus on a train, to get them out of the station at a certain pace. Other systems which run trains that have fewer people on them do not have some of the same costs associated with vertical circulation to get people out.

There are a lot of things that make New York different, but what we’re doing is already demonstrating that we can control costs by shortening project times, by delivering fewer change orders, quicker turnaround, paying contractors faster. We’re already demonstrating that we can and will build projects faster, better and cheaper, and I’m confident the Second Ave. Subway will prove that out.”

Does Lieber have a point? In a way, yes. Nearly ten years ago, while assessing plans for the Cairo Metro’s Line 4, a conglomerate of Japanese railway engineers assessed global fire code standards (PDF) and found that if NPFA 130, the U.S. standard, “is applied strictly, the structure of the tunnel and station tends to be bigger and the cost of the construction also tends to be higher.” NPFA 130 requires more frequent in-tunnel emergency exits than other international systems, but that doesn’t mean costs should orders of magnitude higher in New York.

There are, needless to say, plenty of other cities in the world with fire codes, as the JICA report details, and plenty that are building subways at costs far lower than ours. Paris, for instance, is building a four-mile, six-station extension of Line 11 of the Metro at a cost of approximately $1.4 billion. At Paris costs, the entire Second Ave. Subway could be built for not much more than the Phase 2 price tag, and at U.S. costs, this Line 11 extension would cost between $13-$16 billion. These cost discrepancies are a crisis that will soon preclude New York City from any meaningful future subway expansion efforts, and it’s not clear, based on Lieber’s comments, that the MTA can even begin to approach solving this crisis.

What happens next seems clear. At some point, the FTA is likely to approve a full-funding grant agreement for Phase 2 of the Second Ave. Subway at an estimated cost of $6.2 billion, and the MTA will move forward with this project. No one in Washington or New York City will stop to ask if we’re getting enough subway for $6.2 billion, even as Paris could build 12 miles of subway and 18 stations for the same amount. We’re fall back on New York exceptionalism — the fire code this time; the density next time — as excuses and watch at much-needed or much-ballyhooed plans such as the Utica Ave. Subway, a cross-Bronx line or the Triboro RX die at the alter of obscene costs.

Lieber meanwhile told reporters that Phase 2, even with the price tag, isn’t the end of the Second Ave. Subway. When asked if Phases 3 and 4 are in the cards, he said, “They are very much part of the vision of a completed Second Ave. Subway, but boy are we focused like all get-on on Phase 2 which really will make a difference to East Harlem and Central Harlem and makes good on a commitment that’s been out there for 75 years.”

Seventy-five years and billions of dollars that just don’t go all that far in New York City. Hopefully, it won’t take 75 years to figure our way out of this cost crisis.

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