The Motorman of the Moment

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) runs the city’s public transit system and two major commuter rails, as well as most of its bridges and tunnels. It’s a behemoth with 70,000 employees, 6,400 subway cars, 5,700 buses, a $19 billion annual operating budget, a $55 billion five-year capital plan and a 23-member governing board. 

The chairman and CEO of the whole shebang — tapped for the job by Gov. Kathy Hochul in early 2022 after a long career in transit leadership and six months as acting head of the MTA — is Janno Lieber. He’s run the system at a time of tremendous stress, as the subways have struggled to recover ridership in the wake of COVID-19 and the work-from-home revolution. Crime on the platforms and trains has been a consistent concern, as has been the persistence of seriously mentally ill New Yorkers underground. 

The biggest question of all is how to fund the MTA’s plans to maintain and upgrade the aging infrastructure, including modernizing rickety old signaling systems and improving wheelchair accessibility across the city. In 2019, after years of failed attempts, the state Legislature passed and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law authorizing congestion pricing — charges on automobiles entering Manhattan’s central business district. It was set to go into effect in June, collecting around $1 billion annually in tolls, which would then be used to secure $15 billion through bond financing to help pay for urgent capital needs. Then, weeks before the switch-on day, Hochul said she was instituting an indefinite “pause,” leaving the system and its financial future in limbo.

As questions swirled about the governor’s legal authority to call the whole thing off, we talked to Lieber about the fix the system is in and the importance of the subways to the city.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Vital City: If congestion pricing doesn’t happen, what becomes of the subways? Where does it leave the system if there is no replacement source of funding by the end of the budget season?

Janno Lieber: I’m not prepared to contemplate a scenario where the governor does not make good on her commitment. She said it so many times and she said it so definitively. And the Legislature has also made clear that they are not in the business of ditching the commitment to congestion pricing, or some combination of congestion pricing and other tools.

We have to do the MTA capital program. Literally, we have to pass it in September to meet a statutory deadline of Oct. 1 to send it up to Albany. There is a lot of thinking going on about financing mechanisms, not merely as a substitute for congestion pricing, but how do you fund what we all want to see, which is an MTA capital program that keeps us moving forward toward a state of good repair, toward a better system, toward modernity and a better customer situation.

Vital City: If congestion pricing doesn’t happen, what becomes of the subways? Where does it leave the system if there is no replacement source of funding by the end of the budget season?

Janno Lieber: I’m not prepared to contemplate a scenario where the governor does not make good on her commitment. She said it so many times and she said it so definitively. And the Legislature has also made clear that they are not in the business of ditching the commitment to congestion pricing, or some combination of congestion pricing and other tools.

We have to do the MTA capital program. Literally, we have to pass it in September to meet a statutory deadline of Oct. 1 to send it up to Albany. There is a lot of thinking going on about financing mechanisms, not merely as a substitute for congestion pricing, but how do you fund what we all want to see, which is an MTA capital program that keeps us moving forward toward a state of good repair, toward a better system, toward modernity and a better customer situation.

VC: The option for the new open-gangway train cars, the R211s, is up in February. So if for some reason there is no solution before basically April, which is when the budget is due, what does that do to the MTA and to its credibility? 

JL: Listen, there is definitely some uncertainty about which version of congestion pricing the governor will move forward on, if any. But I am highly optimistic that she will not let the MTA permanently lose ground on major initiatives like purchasing additional rail cars because of that uncertainty, that we will get clarification in time to be able to move forward on some of these key initiatives.

Now notwithstanding that, we have to act like fiduciaries and financially businesslike. So what we did was we adjusted our capital program in terms of sequence, so that the stuff that was not in a state of good repair got put back to the back of the line. That doesn’t mean that we don’t take the governor at her word; it just means that we are not going to move forward on any of that stuff until the dust settles and the issue is clarified once and for all.

And the bottom line is, you’ve got to buy those rail cars, not just because the old ones are breaking down — the R46 rail cars are long past their useful life, and we waste an enormous amount of money on maintenance — but because we need cars that are equipped with communications-based train control so that we’re no longer constrained in how much of the system can run on modern signals.

VC: You’ve worked in the Department of Transportation under President Bill Clinton, you worked for Mayor Ed Koch. Now you’re appointed by and accountable to a governor, but it’s a system where you’re part of a board with its own independent fiduciary responsibility. Is this the best governance system?

JL: Well, listen, I like accountability. I like government accountability. So I’m very sympathetic to the fact that in general what we have tried to do is to make elected officials accountable for the things that they control, the way that over time we’ve made the New York City education system more accountable through the mayor.

But the MTA is also trying to respect the way that the Legislature and the governor have enacted into law this idea that we have to operate in an independent state authority with fiduciary responsibility. The governor especially is kind of our, in important ways, our collective boss. But we also have to operate in keeping with the law as independent fiduciaries whose first responsibility is to make sure that the financial health of the MTA is protected, and that our mission to serve the public with great transit is protected.

So that creates some complexity, but we’re not hiding from accountability. Unlike most other institutions of City and state government, we stand up at a very public board meeting. We take public comments and then we engage with the press on a monthly basis, or actually twice, two days a month, so that we’re very visible and we’re very up-front about what we’re doing.

We publish enormous reams of data. We believe that information is accountability, that it’s not strictly the technical structure of who reports to whom and who appoints whom, but that having all the information out there in a readily accessible way is accountability. So we have been over the top in embracing the idea of open data and open government.

VC: Many people want more funding for the MTA. But there also is plenty of waste in this system. Can you identify inefficiencies that you would like to see corrected but you maybe haven’t gotten to yet?

JL: Well, first of all, everything that a big organization does deserves to be scrutinized for opportunities to become more efficient. The first thing I did, the area where I controlled and I had some knowledge when I came to the MTA, which is to run the capital construction operation here. We started attacking all the different ways that we felt that the MTA was a crummy customer, did not efficiently buy construction and development services.

We changed the contracts to make sure that the contractors would give us the best price. We improved project management. We started administering liquidated damages, so there are consequences for not performing for contractors. We used new, what they call, delivery models, which is called design-build, which gives the contractors an opportunity to deliver the project faster and cheaper.

We also do a lot of our bids now taking into account schedule as well as how much they’re offering. Frequently when you’re doing contracts, you get a low price but then it takes way too long. So we are bidding the schedule as well as the budget. All of those things have yielded a much more effective and efficient construction development operation.

When I came upstairs to be the chair and CEO at the MTA, the other thing I did is I brought in a guy who’d been a partner in a major consulting operation. He’d been working for New York City Planning for a couple of years, and he set up an in-house consulting group where we actually go into all our operations one by one and try to look for opportunities to save money. Not just how you’re scheduling your trains, but how you’re scheduling your workers to make sure that fewer conductors have to ride back and forth on the commuter rail trains, deadheading, wasting time.

VC: What about the two-man train, the one-man train, the possible zero-man train?

JL: The whole issue of subway trains and OPTO — “one-person train operation” — is part of a labor relations issue between us and the unions.

But from my standpoint, when you have a 10-car train that runs the length of a platform, having that extra eyes and ears is really important from a safety and operation standpoint in many, many cases.

We do have some trains that can run OPTO — that shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central, the G train — because it’s less capacity and has fewer cars. 

But there are so many more areas where you can become much more efficient, much more effective. And we’re looking at them beginning to end.

You have to break down every operation. Are we hindering our maintenance work by not having the parts and materials on hand at the different shops where maintenance activities are conducted? Is our just-in-time delivery for parts causing us to slow down? That’s just one example.

One of the things I’m dissatisfied with is our workers’ compensation operation. There are people who are out much too long because they’re not getting the best medical care, they’re not necessarily getting helped to make sure that they get back to work. Sometimes people have family problems they need help with that are keeping them out of work. How do we get people back to work faster in a way that’s good for them, but also good for the public?

VC: Fare beating is a real problem. But how much money is it worth spending to try to curb it through enforcement? Can new turnstile designs mostly solve the problem? It’s even more complicated on buses, where there’s no easy technological or design fix. 

JL: Everybody who gets on the subway or a bus or a commuter rail is having their ride highly subsidized by other taxes and revenues from other sources of funding to the MTA. The ride doesn’t pay for itself, not even close. And when people skip the fare to beat the fare, call it what you will, they’re undermining the service. They’re making it so that we won’t be able to give them or their neighbors who are playing by the rules good service.

It also demoralizes New Yorkers. The essence of New York is density and our shared public spaces, and we rely on the fact that we share public spaces, that we’re all cheek-by-jowl with each other. We rely on everybody kind of playing by the rules. You don’t engage in certain behaviors that make me feel unsafe. You don’t push me, you don’t do all kinds of things. One thing that makes people really uncomfortable and really demoralized about being in New York, is when they pay because they’re trying to play by the rules and they see somebody else skipping the fare. 

The third point is we are committed to making sure that fare evasion is never a crime of poverty. Our system isn’t perfect. Transportation is one of the very few things that makes New York affordable. The cost of commuting every day by transit is like 15% of the cost of owning an automobile and going wherever you’re going via car. So transit is good, it is already affordable. We’re trying to make it even better for people who have limited means with the Fair Fares program, which is the 50% discount for people who are really at the bottom of the income spectrum. So we want everybody who really has need to get an even bigger discount.

But generally, transit is cheap. And paying the fare is a way of saying, “I recognize I belong to this community.” It’s not just an economic issue.

About turnstiles: Subway fare beating went up during COVID significantly, and it’s clear that the biggest source of fare beating is no longer the turnstile. We all grew up in an era where New Yorkers said, “Oh, they jumped the turnstile,” or they back-cocked, or they defeated the turnstile some other way. Well, the issue isn’t the turnstile, it’s the damn exit gate, which is required by the fire code. That’s become the superhighway of fare evasion.

We are trying to shut down that particular way that people cheat. One, because it’s the big numbers, when you open the gate and people just walk in one after another. And two, because those are the opportunistic fare evaders. You sometimes see people walk up with their MetroCard or their OMNY or their phone in their hand and they see the gate open and they go for it. 

I don’t have any disagreement about having fare enforcement. When people come into the subway, it is a complicated public space, it’s a little dingy. You’re cheek-by-jowl with lots of different kinds of people, you can’t move away as quickly as you want to in every situation. They appreciate knowing that there is an entry that’s being policed, or sometimes being policed, to deter people.

The proof that fare enforcement has value, apart from just getting the money and deterring fare evasion, is that when we’re just doing routine fare evasion enforcement we pick up so many guns and so many people who are wanted for pretty heinous stuff. Say what you want about City Hall, this mayor has been a supporter. He’s an ex-transit cop, and he’s been a real partner in trying to push back against subway crime in general and to make fare evasion enforcement part of it. Not the only issue.

VC: When you ride the trains, what bugs you the most?

JL: I look at everything. I deal with fare beaters on my own. My security detail hates it.

I love talking to our workforce, The cleaners and the conductors are the ones who are most available to me. I generally walk through the Atlantic Ave. station mezzanine. So I see a lot of those people as I move from the 4/5 to the Q or vice versa.

I think that disorder in the subway system makes other people uncomfortable. People have heard me say it, but if somebody’s smoking somewhere, they shouldn’t be. Above ground, it’s an annoyance, in the subway system, it messages, “What else might that person do?”

VC: When you see a very disturbed, mentally ill individual, what do you do?

JL: I use the tools available to me to notify the crisis teams, which have access to the police. And I think you’ve probably read about our SCOUT program. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to try to identify severely mentally ill people who are really struggling and are candidates for voluntary or involuntary commitment. People who need to come indoors who are, in the language of the mental health law, a threat to themselves or to others. So I want those people to get treatment, I want them to be helped and I want our passengers to feel safe.

VC: How often do you feel unsafe?

JL: Not much. I mean, I grew up in New York City in the 1970s. Not making a big deal out of it, I lived in Harlem as a twenty- and thirtysomething. I’m very comfortable in the city almost anywhere, at any time of day.

But I also recognize that when you’re in a subway car and there’s someone who’s having a psychotic episode or who’s behaving aggressively — especially since there have been episodes where those people did harm to others, random stuff — that people are uncomfortable and they’re scared. And we have to respect the fact that New Yorkers rely on this system, and we must make it feel welcoming and acceptable.

It doesn’t mean that we hate anybody who’s struggling with mental illness, it doesn’t mean we wish them any harm, but we do owe it to the folks who are just trying to get from A to B to create an environment that is free from that kind of intimidation and discomfort.

VC: When you’re in other global cities, what is it that you kind of envy the most about what they do in their systems?

JL: In Northern Europe, I envy the overwhelming compliance with the rules of public behavior. There aren’t a ton of challenges to orderliness and people respecting each other, and there’s a lot less of that, including fare evasion.

I like how, in many cases, they’ve moved more quickly along the technological spectrum than New York has. And I also like that in France, where I was this summer, which has a great metro system, there isn’t as much conflict, internal conflict, about whether enforcing rules of public behavior is expected or good or bad things. They seem much more comfortable with enforcement. We’ve had our own discomfort with the police, which is not totally illegitimate, which means that every one of the police interactions in the subway frequently has potential for somebody coming by and yelling at the cop or somebody who’s trying to enforce the rules. And that’s a little complicated.

The bottom line is, this is the thing that makes New York possible and it’s a treasure, and we have to make it feel reliable and frequent and attractive and safe. And all of those different variables that we at the MTA have to work on.

We have to manage the cost of operation so it doesn’t translate into higher fares and higher taxes and all that kind of stuff. But this is a mission worth fighting for. If you care about a Vital City, as it’s called, as your publication is called, I mean, this is it. This is the thing where not only do you do the functional thing of moving people quickly from A to B and making density possible, supporting our economy, but this is where people form their impression of this community. “Is it safe? Do I want to be here?” Or, “Can I share this public space? Or do I need to get into a different environment?”