Want to know why transit expenses are so high? Look at the history of politics in New York.
If doing something is expensive, the “indefinite pause” of congestion pricing is new proof that doing nothing carries real costs, too.
Take the fast new subway trains the MTA purchased for the A and C lines, which began hitting the tracks this year. The option to purchase the next batch of R211s to replace the ancient cars with the yellow and orange seats that run on the B, D, N and W lines expires in February. That’s before the state budget will be passed, which is where the fight over MTA funding is likely to be resolved. The “pause” could cost the MTA its spot in line with the manufacturer, Kawasaki, delaying the retirement of old Koch-era trains, which in turn would force the agency to spend more on maintenance because the ancient models need more upkeep. And riders will pay too, stuck with old trains that run slower and less reliably.
Ditto the programs to gut and overhaul both the Sixth Avenue (the B/D/F/M through Manhattan) and Fulton Street (the A and C through Brooklyn) subway lines. The MTA wants to install modern computer control systems that let trains run quicker and much more reliably. Currently, those lines are controlled by century-old mechanically driven signals that run on timers that are tripped as a train passes by. These signals require a ton of maintenance and often break, ruining an entire rush hour. But installing computer control costs a lot of money. The overhaul of the crosstown G train is budgeted for $368 million. The Fulton Street Line is expected to cost about $1.3 billion. But that spending comes with real value. The two lines retrofitted with computer control, the L and the 7, post on-time ratings of 90%-plus and smoothly run trains every two minutes during the rush hour. That’s as good as anywhere in Europe.
The longer the congestion pricing “pause,” the more expensive it all becomes, potentially putting a $1.4 billion burden on MTA funds that would otherwise go to staffing, upkeep and service. That’s the cost of not investing. But in this mess is a unique opportunity to do something rare: put a price tag on the cynicism that infects our politics, the cynicism that sank the toll.
There is scrutiny, there is criticism, and then there is outright cynicism. The MTA is a public agency. It’s controlled by the governor, who picks the agency’s top boss, currently Janno Lieber. Its budget is functionally set through the annual negotiation between the governor and state lawmakers.
That budget is nearly $20 billion. The agency employs 70,000 people. Scrutiny is mandatory. Criticism should be expected. When the MTA screws up, New York City grinds to a halt. I spent years as a transit reporter zeroing on the various dysfunctions at the MTA — it can be insular, it can be wasteful, it can be maddeningly obtuse and opaque.
Albany treats the MTA like a jobs program that provides transit, instead of a transit agency that provides jobs.
But the MTA is also a marvel. Its ubiquity in our everyday life obscures its accomplishment. “Where’s my train,” we think, as we’re sweating it out on a platform in the summertime. Not that the single train we’re waiting on is one of 5,400 running during the peak of the rush. Not that the MTA’s subways, buses and railroads will move the combined populations of Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia every single weekday on average, not to mention more people than all the commercial airplanes in America. In New York, everyone needs transit, but few like it or appreciate it.
Enter the politicians. The MTA is a state agency in almost every sense of the word; the only reason it’s not considered a state agency is thanks to a legal quirk that allows it to issue debt independently of the state, a trivia-night factoid that Albany politicians have used for years to dodge responsibility for the MTA.
Albany exploits this disconnect to treat the MTA as a jobs program that provides transit, instead of letting its management run it fundamentally like a transit agency that provides jobs, history shows. The reasoning is simple, if entirely self-interested. Politicians like gifting jobs and high wages because they believe it yields votes; the unions really like the jobs and wages — and the impression they move votes.
This is done by protecting onerous labor contracts, where the work rules that inflate the MTA’s headcount and overtime costs reside. The MTA’s chairman has no latitude to push for reforms without the blessings of Albany, which will never come. This makes the job of the MTA chairman near impossible: You must run service that’s good enough that voters don’t get it in their heads to throw out the incumbent politicians, while keeping the unions happy enough that they don’t support challengers to the incumbent politicians, all while keeping fares low and keeping the agency from going broke.
The last time the MTA pressed for significant work rule changes was 1994. The push triggered a strike at the Long Island Rail Road, which serves a constituency viewed as a must-win in any statewide race. Gov. Mario Cuomo, enmeshed in a bid for a fourth term that he ultimately lost, cut the legs out from under his MTA chairman, Peter E. Stangl, and ordered him to drop the push. Stangl described the deal as paying a “ransom.” One of the rules Stangl had in his sights requires the LIRR to pay overtime or double-time when doing track work on nights or weekends, when it’s most logical to do the work. MTA management has to make a choice: Which headline do you hate the most: Botching a rush hour? Or handing out overtime?
Head into the city and the pattern repeats. The New York City subway is among the very last systems of its kind that staffs two people on subway trains. The first person drives the trains, while the second, a conductor, makes the announcements, checks to make sure the platform is clear and opens and closes the doors.
It’s an expensive practice. A Citizens Budget Commission study projected that going to one person would save $221 million a year. The MTA has contemplated either shrinking train crews or completely automating operations at least four times: first in early 1960s, again in early 1980s, again in 1994 and again in 2005. In 2005, MTA management actually reassigned conductors staffing the L trains during the off-peak service and ran the trains with just one person. The Transport Workers Union — a key political ally or feared enemy of many a governor — objected, sued and an arbitrator’s ruling kiboshed the new rule unless and until the TWU agrees. The work rule remains in place, viewed as sacrosanct by the union, which argues it is necessary for safety. It is now only occasionally and half-heartedly challenged by MTA management.
Abandoned attempts at reform have been followed by giveaways that put new costs on the MTA’s books. Gov. George Pataki was in charge when LIRR unions scored pension sweeteners that helped lay the groundwork for the agency’s mid-aughts pension crisis. “It didn’t hurt that the [LIRR] unions on that line have always been close to Long Island’s Republican Party establishment,” wrote then-Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, who put a spotlight on the mess. “Those sweeteners, plus a slipshod pension tracking system that recently triggered an MTA inspector general’s investigation, created a $1.2 billion deficit in the LIRR pension fund.”
The politicians who protect the generous contracts but hate paying for them also love megaprojects — but hate paying for those, too. For decades, they financed those projects by putting them on the MTA’s credit card. This practice reached its nadir when Pataki and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver struck a deal that required the MTA to construct both East Side Access and the Second Avenue Subway — and then forced the agency to fund it by issuing debt. (Yes, the Sheldon Silver who helped load the MTA up with debt is also the Sheldon Silver who killed the commuter tax, costing the MTA $506 million the first year alone.)
Fast forward to 2011 and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who took one big lesson from his father’s failed 1994 campaign: keep Long Island happy. The MTA was in the midst of another fiscal crisis, this time caused by the banking collapse tanking tax revenues. There were calls for reexamining the union contracts from every quarter, except the one that mattered: politicians, from either party. Then-state Sen. Lee Zeldin, the Long Island Republican who ran for governor a decade later as a law-and-order firebrand, punted on calling on Cuomo to make reforms because “to do something that impacts large unions, it can’t be just one senator leading by the chin.” Or, as New York Post columnist Nicole Gelinas put it: “GOP lawmakers, as usual, are gung ho on the tax issue. But on the union medicine needed, they profess that it’s the MTA that has to come up with ideas. The MTA, in turn, knows not to ask for anything anti-union that Albany doesn’t support.” In 2012, Zeldin and his GOP colleagues celebrated a court ruling that temporarily nixed the MTA business tax while dodging questions about how to fund the gap. An “audit,” said one GOP lawmaker.
When politicians say “audit the MTA,” they really mean “audit the MTA’s paper supply, because the rest is our fault.”
Labor costs, including pensions, health care and overtime, consume 61 cents of every dollar the MTA gets. Debt eats up another 15 cents. That leaves just 24 cents for everything else: from purchasing the electricity needed to drive the trains to the copy paper at headquarters. This should be the context for the rallying cries against the MTA, which were largely recycled for the congestion pricing fight: “What about the $700 million in fare evasion?!” and “What about the waste, fraud and abuse?!” and “What about the overtime?!” and, of course, “Audit the MTA!” — all offered by politicians who benefit from the current system.
“Audit the MTA” is a charade, a Batman villain’s smoke bomb, that has allowed Albany to get away with bartering the region’s lifeblood — its transit system — for political favors for decades and at little political cost. When the politicians yell “audit the MTA,” they really mean “audit the copy paper supply,” because the rest is largely their own doing. The result is a system that careens from crisis to crisis every few years.
Congestion pricing was an attempt to finally right the ship and fix Manhattan’s congestion crisis in the process, much as we use sky-high tobacco taxes to fund health care and discourage smoking. At least it was, until the cynical catchphrase and its cousins struck again.
The most pernicious toll from Albany’s decades of mismanagement of the MTA is the opportunity cost. One of the biggest findings of the New York University examination of how the MTA builds projects and a corresponding series I authored in the Post was that the MTA — unlike its sister agencies in London and Paris — does not employ a large staff of planners, engineers and architects. Those professionals let the Europeans exercise much greater control and oversight of projects, which, in turn, keeps costs down and projects on track. The MTA cannot afford to make those hires because so much of its budget is tied up in contracts, pensions and debts ordered or protected by Albany — so it has to contract out for its planning and engineering work, which means it’s more likely to get oversized designs back and has less ability to push back on bloat. All of which leads to another generation of complaints about MTA spending and management. It’s a circle line in a subway system that doesn’t have one.