Transit LaborUTU

With new PEB request, LIRR strike pushed to July

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 6, 2014

In an effort to reach an agreement with the United Transportation Union Local 645 and avoid a strike for as long as possible, the Long Island Rail Road has issued a request for a second Presidential Emergency Board. The new PEB request and subsequent arbitration proceedings will delay any potential work action the UTU make consider until July 19 at the earliest.

The MTA has tacitly recognized of a favorable outcome in this fight. Currently, 59 of the agency’s 60 unions are working without a contract, and the UTU could set the stage for subsequent negotiations. If the MTA cannot achieve a net-zero labor increase, either through work rule reform, layoffs or a combination of both, the agency’s precarious financial picture will be thrown into doubt. That seems to be the X Factor New York politicians are so willing to ignore, but it was the MTA’s focus in their statement announcing the request for a second PEB.

Said the MTA:

The MTA wants to resolve these contract issues at the bargaining table, where they belong. But the recommendations of the first Presidential Emergency Board ignored the enormous burden that a 17% wage increase over six years – without a single change in work rules or other cost offset – would place on the MTA’s budget. If those terms were applied across the entire MTA workforce, they would be equivalent to raising fares 12% – or cutting $6 billion from the capital budget for keeping our system safe and reliable.

In response to this procedural move, the TWU — a very interested bystander — issued a stridently worded statement speaking out against the measure. One union official noted that “the MTA’s repeated insistence that it has no ability to pay the raises recommended by the panel is ‘a phony smokescreen rejected by four consecutive panels of arbitrators’ who have handled recent MTA labor disputes.” The TWU is the MTA’s largest union, and their top brass have vowed to support the UTU were it to engage in a strike.

Meanwhile, as this labor fight takes shape, Dana Rubinstein explored how Gov. Andrew Cuomo is using the MTA as a piggybank. Between the $40 million diversion for debt purposes and the $7 million Verrazano Bridge toll giveaway, Cuomo is not standing behind the MTA as a variety of interests jockey for money. Brooklyn now wants its own toll relief, and the union issues will loom throughout the spring and summer.

When the dust settles, the riders will wind up paying more and getting nothing in return. After all, it was Tom Roth, the UTU’s expert witness, who said at the last PEB that “he passenger has had a good run here at the MTA, and it is about time the fares went up.”

27 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
AsidesPANYNJ

Great Moments in Calatrava’s PATH Hub

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 5, 2014

As the PATH’s World Trade Center hub opens piece by piece, the city’s architect critics are starting to poke around inside of Santiago Calatrava’s marble-lined subway palace. In a piece scheduled to appear in The Times tomorrow, David Dunlap gives the new Platform A a once over, and he’s not impressed. As Dunlap sums it up, “Clunky fixtures and some rough workmanship in the underground mezzanine of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub…detract from what is meant to be breathtaking grandeur.”

As you read through the rest of Dunlap’s takedown, keep in mind that the structure is still unfinished, but in light of the fact that others have sued Santiago Calatrava over shoddy workmanship, this can hardly be a surprise. Great designs on paper that are tough and expensive to execute are, after all, a hallmark of the architect.

My favorite part of Dunlap’s column, though, comes in the form of a quote from Frank Lorino, one of the architects working for Santiago Calatrava New York/Festina Lente. “We have fought to bring the highest degree of quality to the project,” he said to The Times, “but the concerns of time, budget and scheduling have often taken precedence over quality.” Someone associated with Santiago Calatrava’s $4 billion subway station is complaining about the concerns of budget. I have no further words, your honor.

23 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
MTA Technology

Video: A look at the MTA’s new touch screens

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 5, 2014

Approximately a year ago, the MTA announced an expansion of their On The Go kiosks. As part of a creative advertising arrangement in which the MTA would shell out no dollars and draw in money after a certain threshold, two licensees — CBS Outdoor and Control Group Inc. — will foot the bill for installation and earn back the costs off of the ads they can sell. In exchange, the MTA gets touch-screen kiosks installed throughout the subway system and a cut of they money once the two companies recoup their initial investments.

Recently, the first batch of screens have popped up in Grand Central, and Gizmodo profiled the work behind building a computer sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of the subway. As with many things MTA, this is a story about false starts and delayed promises. Mario Aguilar writes:

The initial plan for the kiosks was to populate the city’s busiest stations, to help make the dynamic and often confusing system a little easier to work with. By the end of 2013, however, Control Group had only managed to install a single testing unit at Bowling Green station, near the company’s headquarters across from City Hall. After a 30-day trial period, it was apparent that everything from the hardware to the user interface had to be improved before the units would be ready to meet the needs of millions of commuters. “We wanted a better experience,” says Control Group partner Colin O’Donnell, “and we were willing to wait for it.”

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a minor course adjustment when it comes a massive agency like MTA. “It’s a behemoth,” says O’Donnell. Moving millions of passengers every day necessitates a certain amount of bureaucracy, and when every last person in that bureaucracy needs to sign off on a decision, approving something as simple as a hardware change can take, well, six months.

O’Donnell says that the initial run’s core problem was the touchscreen it had chosen. The prototype we tried last year used a surface outfitted with 3M’s dispersive signal technology (DST), which calculates the position of a touch on a screen by sensing the vibrations the touch creates. It’s rugged and cost-effective, but also a bit clumsy…User testing proved that people found the firm pokes unintuitive, but more importantly it turned out that subway stations are full of vibration-causing ambient noise and rumbling trains—no kidding!—which confused the touchscreen’s contact microphones and drastically undermined performance. As one staffer put it, the tech worked well in Control Group’s lab on the 21st floor of a skyscraper, but simply didn’t cut it underground with the trains rumbling by.

It’s worth reading Aguilar’s entire piece as it provides a rare glimpse into why technology takes forever to spread throughout the MTA’s vast system. We often scoff at the notion that the world underneath the city is a challenging one and question why simple tasks such as escalator repair can take so long. But as Control Group’s experiences show, it isn’t easy building something that can stand up to 24-hour use, and the dirt, dust, debris and vibrations of the transit network under our feet.

As the video shows, these things aren’t perfect. I haven’t used them yet, but the navigation looks clunky and the touch aspect sensitive. Furthermore, MTA’s own Trip Planner, the underlying software for the navigation system, for instance, isn’t perfect. The system routes people standing on the IRT platform at Grand Central to the 7 and Q for a ride out to Coney Island when the intuitive trip would involve an express ride to Atlantic Ave. and a transfer. Still, it’s a start, and hopefully, with the promises of revenue based on user engagement, these will only get better with time.

9 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
View from Underground

Building a better subway turnstile beep

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 4, 2014

New York is a city of noise. Amidst the hustle and bustle of pedestrian life, the largely unnecessary honking of horns and the blaring of car alarms, and the sirens that go by at all hours of the day, we tend to block out the aural distractions. Thus, a simple beep, while annoying at the wrong time, is very easy to ignore.

For subway turnstiles, that’s a problem. For every MetroCard swipe, failed or otherwise, an MTA turnstile emits a beep. No matter the outcome, the beep is the same, and even the slight double-beep of a failed swipe or a triple-beep of an empty card aren’t distinct enough to catch the attention of someone who’s already trying to zoom through. In other words, a stiff turnstile arm to the gut is far more likely to draw someone’s attention that a double beep.

As problems go, it’s not a particularly pressing one, but with the MTA eying a complete overhaul of the fare payment system within the next few years, the agency is particularly primed to do something about it. Enter James Murphy. The former frontman for LCD Soundsystem has been pushing his plan to make the subways more tolerable for a few years, and he recently garnered a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal. Murphy’s solution doesn’t solve the problem of differentiating between swipe outcomes, but it would make the subways, he says, sound more pleasant.

For the past 15 years, Mr. Murphy has been crafting what he says is a low-cost musical solution: He has worked out a unique set of notes for every station, one of which would sound each time a passenger swipes his or her MetroCard to catch a train. The busier a station becomes, the richer the harmonies would be. The same notes would also play in a set sequence when the subway arrives at that stop. Each of the city’s 468 subway stations would have note sets in different keys.

As Murphy notes that other subway systems have far more soothing sounds, he isn’t the only one proposing a solution. Still the MTA doesn’t seem too open to the idea:

[Spokesman Adam] Lisberg said Mr. Murphy’s plan “is a very cool idea,” one that several people have independently proposed over the years. But it might be hard to put into practice, he said: It’s likely to require a lot of time and money, and probably means temporarily taking each of the city’s 3,289 turnstiles out of service, something the authority is not inclined to do “for an art project.”

“If you screw something up,” Mr. Lisberg continued, you risk breaking the turnstile. Given the 5.5 million passengers who use the system on an average weekday, he said the transit authority was “not inclined to mess with anything that could get in their way.”

In other words, please swipe again.

19 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Moynihan Station

A glimpse of a future for Amtrak’s expensive waiting room

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 4, 2014

Will the Farley Post Office redeem Penn Station, hidden in this photo underneath Madison Square Garden?

When you stop to think about it, the Farley Post Office building doesn’t make for the most practical of train stations. The first thing you notice are the steps, and who wants to navigate those while lugging some giant suitcase around the streets of New York City? The second thing is its location. It’s an avenue block away from the 7th Ave. subway and two from Herald Square. That’s not added convenience; that’s moving westward to a more inconvenient spot.

Yet, the Farley Post Office is the subject of future plans to save Penn Station. It is the subject of a decades-long initiative to convert the majestic building into a new gateway to the city. By moving Amtrak’s waiting area to Farley — and spending over $1 billion in the process — various interests hope to redeem the shortcomings of Penn Station by simply turning the Farley Post Office into Moynihan Station. It is a project not without flaws.

Prior to the end of the Bloomberg Administration, various groups made a push to draw attention to the need for something better than Penn Station. It hardly needs saying, but the current station is a visual dump and a mess to navigate. The plans were fanciful, but the momentum behind the MSG replacement has died down in light of the arena’s 10-year occupancy permit.

Now, though, Moynihan Station, at least, has reared its head. As Laura Kusisto and Eliot Brown reported in the Wall Street Journal, there’s movement afoot to generate money for future phases of the Moynihan project. The money would come from — what else? — air rights, but no one’s saying much of anything right now. Kusisto and Brown report:

Empire State Development Corp., the state economic-development agency, is looking for a broker to sell 1.5 million square feet of unused real-estate-development rights attached to the property on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets, according to a request for proposals posted on its website last month. It is unclear how fast the state intends to proceed with the selection of a broker and marketing of development rights, nor is it clear if developers would be willing to pay a price that satisfies state officials or that would fully fund the project. A spokeswoman for Gov. Andrew Cuomo declined to comment.

But the move toward the sale is one of the first signs that the Cuomo administration is interested in remaking the interior of the post office into a grand waiting room for Amtrak—a project about which administration officials have said little publicly…

Using the Farley building as a train station has been a dream of planners and state officials for more than two decades. Its intent is both to evoke the original Penn Station that was demolished in 1963 and to spur nearby real-estate development, although it would do little to expand train capacity.

As the local politicians noted to the Journal, no one really knows where the 1.5 million square feet of development would go, but that’s a solvable problem with old buildings dotting the midtown landscape. The biggest question surrounds the transit purposes. Kusisto and Brown do not hold back when the note that Moynihan would “do little to expand train capacity.” Amtrak says a new station is required if the Gateway Tunnel sees the light of day — but that station would be south of the current Penn, not west.

So we’re left with something that resembles a band aid and seems more like a vanity project. It may, as Alon Levy argued a few years ago, even have negative transportation value. But the Moynihan train won’t slow down. It inches forward, but it seems to draw ever nearer. While it solves the aesthetic problem as a high cost, it does nothing to solve the transit problem, and that’s more important right now.

125 comments
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
AsidesMetroCardSelf Promotion

Event: March 19th ‘Problem Solvers’ on the future of the MetroCard

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 3, 2014

When I first launched the “Problem Solvers” series with the Transit Museum, I knew that I wanted to focus a session on the future of the MetroCard. For a few years, I’ve tried to schedule a sit-down with the right someone at the MTA to discuss the agency’s next-generation fare payment plans and the prognosis for the familiar piece of plastic New Yorkers carry with themselves 24-7.

At first, I couldn’t get anyone because the MTA didn’t really know what it was going to do replace the MetroCard; it knew only that by 2019 it would be too expensive to maintain the current system. But now I have some exciting news: The next “Problem Solvers” Q-and-A session, set for March 19, will focus on the MetroCard’s future. Joining me at 6:30 p.m. at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn will be Michael DeVitto, Vice President and Program Executive for fare payment programs at NYC Transit. We will discuss the future of the MetroCard, current initiatives on new fare technology, and all that goes into designing a fare system for the city’s transit network. We will, of course, talk about progress toward a new fare payment system.

“Problem Solvers” is a free event hosted by the Transit Museum, and this session is slated for Wednesday, March 19th at 6:30 p.m. (with doors at 6). Please RSVP here and join me for what should be an illuminating and informative conversation on a topic I’ve followed closely over the past seven and a half years.

3 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Staten Island

What future Staten Island ferry service?

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on March 3, 2014

Will the New York Wheel give a boost to Staten Island transit options?

For better or worse, Staten Island has garnered a lot of ink lately. Gov. Cuomo’s toll giveaway garnered an intense reaction from New York politicians and media commentators alike. But for all the negative attention the toll measure has garnered, other forces are pushing Staten Island transit in a better direction all thanks to a giant Ferris wheel and an outlet mall.

As you may recall, toward the end of the Bloomberg Administration, the mayor, Staten Island politicians and some high-powered real estate folks got together on the New York equivalent to the London Eye. This giant Ferris wheel will sit above the St. George Terminal and abut a new outlet center. This being Staten Island, there will be more parking than any transit advocate would like to see, but the potential for these new attractions is also drawing ferry operators.

In a big piece in this week’s Crain’s New York, Lisa Fickenscher explores potential Staten Island growth fueled by better ferry service. The underlying premise is still shaky. We don’t know if the Ferris wheel or mall will actually become a reality or if 6 million people will make the long trek across the harbor to see these attractions. But relying on the Field of Dreams mantra, ferry operators believe that if you build it, they will come.

Fickenscher writes:

If the developers of those megaprojects are right, and some 6 million annual visitors begin flocking to sleepy Staten Island in two years – when the attractions are expected to be completed – every major ferry company in the city, including New York Water Taxi, BillyBey Ferry Co., Statue Cruises and Seastreak, will be dropping off riders at a dock just a short distance from the St. George Terminal, where the Staten Island Ferry lands.

All those businesses are currently in negotiations with the New York Wheel and BFC Partners, which is developing the outlet center, evaluating whether they need to purchase more boats and how much they should charge to transport tourists from points in midtown Manhattan, New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens directly to the North Shore of Staten Island. There are no regulatory impediments standing in the way of expanded service. The city is seeking a developer to build and operate a new ferry landing…

The ferry operators’ main competition would not be each other but the Staten Island Ferry, which transports 20 million people a year to the borough on nine boats that operate seven days a week – and, most important, offers a free ride. “The big unknown is how many people will use the Staten Island Ferry,” said [Statue Cruises’ Michael] Burke. “I think a majority will go on the free boat.”

To keep the cost competitive with the free option, [Paul] Goodman of BillyBey said that subsidies either from the developers or from the city may be necessary. That could allow the boats to also cater to Staten Island commuters willing to pay a little more for direct service to midtown, for example. The city has already indicated that it will not subsidize new ferry service to St. George.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how Staten Island reacts to a potential invasion of tourists. At least the hordes of crowds will be confined to the St. George area, but the new attractions could create traffic problems across the Outerbridge Crossing or the Goethals, Bayonne or Verrazano Bridge. Meanwhile, the free Staten Island ferries will fill up with day travelers while regular commuters could find their rides far less comfortable. For a borough that has battled the tensions of development for decades, what lies in store could create some deep fissures.

More important though is the added ferry service. Can more ferries at St. George solve Staten Island’s transit problems? Can the city figure out a way to encourage ferries to eye alternate landings throughout Staten Island to better serve the borough’s commuting population? These aren’t questions we can answer now, but they are questions that deserve more thought and consideration before the New York Wheel and outlet mall open in 2016. Staten Island deserves it.

78 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Service Advisories

Endless snow affecting weekend service changes

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on February 28, 2014

With yet another joyful wonderful awe-inspiring bunch of snow heading our way, the MTA has canceled most weekend work “in order to allocate resources for the impending winter storm this weekend.” All work — with the exception of that schedule for the, um, F, M and L lines — has been called off, including the 7 train shut down. Here’s what remains:


From 11:15 p.m. Friday, February 28, to 5:00 a.m. Monday, March 3, Coney Island-bound F trains are rerouted on the M line from Roosevelt Av to 47-50 Sts Rock Ctr due to station work at Lexington Av-63 St for Second Avenue Subway construction.


From 11:30 p.m. Friday, February 28 to 5:00 a.m. Monday, March 1, L trains are not running between 8 Av and Myrtle-Wyckoff Avs due to track tie renewal north of 3 Av. L service operates between Rockaway Pkwy and Myrtle-Wyckoff Avs. Use AFJM trains, M14, and free shuttle buses.


From 6:00 a.m. Saturday, March 1, to 12:50 a.m. Sunday, March 2, and from 8:00 a.m. to 11:45 p.m. Sunday, March 2, M service is extended to 57 St to replace L service that is partially suspended due to track tie renewal north of 3 Av.

6 comments
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
AsidesMBTA

MBTA naming rights initiative yields zeroes of dollars

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on February 28, 2014

For the better part of the last year, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has been toying with the idea of naming rights, and toward the end of 2013, they issued an RFP as part of the initiative. For the low, low price of $1 million a year, you could buy the rights to name a T stop. Well, the results are in, and the project is, you will be surprised to hear, a total flop.

As the Boston Business Journal reported yesterday, the MBTA will make no money from the program this year. The responses to the RFP were due yesterday, and only one company — JetBlue — submitted a bid. Furthermore, their bid came in well below the minimum requirements. The MBTA failed to disclose the total JetBlue bid for rights to the blue line, but the agency had set the minimum bid at $1.2 million.

The MBTA isn’t closing the door to future naming initiatives, but agency officials seem unaware of the practical realities of the situation. One spokesman told MassLive.com that it was “unclear” why more companies did not submit proposals. The Loch Ness Monster of transit agencies lives on for another day.

7 comments
3 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
MTA Construction

Thoughts on the construction cost conundrum

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on February 28, 2014

The vast majority of New York’s transit experts, advocates and enthusiasts think the city has a cost problem. We have the world’s two most expensive subway stops — in Fulton St. and the World Trade Center PATH Hub — under construction; we have the world’s two more expensive subway lines — in the 7 line and the Second Ave. Subway — under construction; and we have the mess that is East Side Access currently in progress. For over $20 billion (and $10 billion in cost overruns), we’re not getting a lot for our money these days.

From where I sit, the cost of these projects is the biggest problem facing future transit expansion. The costs are why ARC was canceled; it’s hard after all to believe that ARC wouldn’t have come in well above when everything else is trending that way. The costs are why New York has to fight tooth and nail for any dollar and why we talk about prioritizing badly needed projects instead of building everything at once as quickly as possible. The costs are why we’re inching outward instead of striding toward expansion.

One of the other problems is that no one knows why everything cost so much in New York City. The easy way out is to claim New York exceptionalism. Things cost more in New York because it’s New York. That is, after all, why people pay more to live here than the vast number of Americans would think reasonable, and that is the argument Michael Horodniceanu put forward during his talk on Tuesday night. It’s not a very satisfying answer, and while the MTA Capital Construction president vaguely mentioned work rules, he seems to believe that New York’s costs are reasonable.

At Next City yesterday, Stephen Smith further explored this part of the story. Do MTA officials think these costs are acceptable? Smith writes:

Horodniceanu gave a number of answers throughout the evening. He blamed, for example, the byzantine work rules that construction unions have negotiated for themselves — something nobody with a passing familiarity of the work rules that MTA management toils under on the operations side would doubt. One reporter with TunnelTalk visited the East Side Access tunnels and came away with the impression that the sandhogs “worked for the Union rather than the contractor.”

Horodniceanu also blamed New Yorkers’ intolerant attitudes toward disruption at the surface, which has certainly been a problem in the past, even in unpopulated Central Park. But many of his answers were not so credible, and left me with the distinct impression that not only does the MTA misunderstand why its projects are so expensive, but that the agency doesn’t even necessarily see the high costs as a problem that needs fixing in the first place.

“Do you think that it’s a problem?” I asked Horodniceanu of the high costs, after his talk was over. “Is it a problem?” he replied. “Is is a problem that an apartment in New York costs a lot of money?” It was the same answer he gave Grynbaum when on stage.

Additionally, Smith recounts a statement from MTA CEO Tom Prendergast who told him that “the cost of construction is what the cost of construction is.” Neither man has a particularly satisfying answer, but in a way, there is an element of politics involved. The MTA Chairman and the head of Capital Construction can’t bemoan high costs on the one hand while asking the state to support a $25 billion five-year capital plan on the other. The optics would be horrible.

Still, if New York is serious about transit expansion, the costs have to come down. We can’t support the current regime, and hopefully, behind closed doors, someone smart is working on this problem. We need more of the Second Ave. Subway, but how much are we willing to pay for it?

43 comments
2 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Load More Posts