BusTalk

[Mr. Linsky]

'Transit Cuts, an Agony Without End'


By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: July 15, 2010 The New York Times

Wednesday was Bastille Day, a fitting day for public hearings on the latest cuts planned for the subways. You just knew there was a guillotine around, poised to drop on a lot of people.
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The necks immediately on the line were those of more than 200 subway station agents destined for layoffs as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority swims against a rising tide of red ink. The authority had simply planned to hand these workers their walking papers and close dozens of station booths. But a judge intervened last month. You can’t do this, she told the agency, until you’ve held public hearings.

Her order had the ring of an old western movie — the scene where the townspeople are about to string up a guy, until someone like Gabby Hayes cries out: “Now hold on, dadgummit. We’ve got to give this man a fair trial before we hang him!”

So there were four public hearings this week, one in each borough where the subway runs. But nothing is likely to change, dadgummit. The agents and their booths do not seem long for this world.

At the hearing in Brooklyn on Wednesday, half a dozen members of the authority’s board, led by the chairman, Jay H. Walder, sat at a long table in a ballroom of the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. There were about 100 people in the audience, easily half of them transit union members and their allies. What they lacked in vast numbers they more than compensated for in anger and vitriol.

They denounced the board members as sexist, racist, cowardly, incompetent and heartless. “Human garbage,” one man shouted. One woman went so far as to suggest that Mr. Walder somehow showed moral bankruptcy by not being in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Through it all, the chairman sat almost frozen, hands clasped on the table. He knew the onslaught was coming, and put on a stoic front. To some in the audience, his mien was merely further proof that he was indeed heartless, cowardly, etc.

Points raised by speakers had been previously explored: Won’t layoffs affect subway safety? Who will help riders with malfunctioning MetroCards? Who will buzz those in wheelchairs or pushing strollers through the emergency gates? They were legitimate concerns, all. They just were not new.

Whether or not one likes the transportation authority — and for many New Yorkers, it is Darth Vader — there is no reason to believe that its leadership derives pleasure from any of this. Nothing was said about elected officials and their slow, steady starvation of mass transit.

All the same, the pain for riders is real, and it keeps coming in ways large and small.

ALLAN ROSEN, who worked for the authority for many years, called my attention to a little-discussed aspect of changes that led to the closing or altering of dozens of bus routes. Some New Yorkers may now be forced to pay double to get from Point A to Point B. They have in effect been placed in two-fare zones.

Until recently, for example, people traveling in Brooklyn from Bushwick to Crown Heights might have taken the B52 bus along Gates Avenue and transferred at Franklin Avenue to the B48, heading south toward Empire Boulevard. But the southbound B48 no longer goes that far. To get where they want, riders who transfer from the B52 to the B48 must switch again at Fulton Street to the B49, running on Bedford Avenue.

That means three buses. For those with per-ride MetroCards, that second transfer costs them an extra $2.25.

Similar situations exist on other routes. Are vast numbers of riders affected? Probably not. “But the point isn’t how many people,” Mr. Rosen said. “It’s the fact that it’s unfair and no one should have to suffer like this.”

Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz made a similar point about route changes that hurt some of his constituents in Riverdale and Woodlawn in the Bronx. “Not everyone has an unlimited MetroCard,” he said. Mr. Dinowitz proposed, without success, that the authority issue free transfers to riders who face the prospect of double fares. “I’m not saying do anything special for them,” he said. “Just don’t increase their cost more than the rest of the city.”

No doubt, the worst is not over. Increases in the basic fare or in the cost of MetroCards, or both, seem imminent. Limits may be placed on those unlimited cards.

Bit by bit, riders are learning what death by a thousand cuts feels like. At least with a guillotine, you were sliced only once.

Mr. Linsky - Green Bus Lines, Inc., Jamaica, New York

[timecruncher]

The point is, politicians and public unions do not actually understand these words: There is simply no longer enough dollars floating around to pay for all of the public service currently being operated!

Sure, the larger transit systems such as MTA are huge bureaucracies with far too many layers of management and too many departments that do essentially nothing to put service on the street. There are hundreds of people making in excess of $100,000 salaries annually who are here because they are useless in the private sector and they have a high-ranking politician who is a relative in city/borough/state government who makes sure they have a job.

But work rules for operating personnel are equally to blame for making transit unsustainable. Operators getting paid when they're not working, getting 8 hours pay for 4 hours work (split runs can do that in some cities where union contracts don't allow for split runs), sometimes even people getting paid 8 hours overtime when only coming in to work a 1.5-hour tripper on an offday, you name it -- some of the stuff I've heard about away from my little world here in the midwest makes me shudder to think that taxpayers are supporting systems that are managed so poorly.

I hate to say it, because I have always preached against privitazation - but in the future that is going to be the only way transit as we currently know it will survive. Private, for-profit companies won't agree to work rules that pay people for not working. There will still be political meddling, but eventually even control of that will be written into RFP's for operating contracts.

Hopefully I'm wrong...

timecruncher

[HwyHaulier]

timecruncher -

Exactly! With private ownership models, a lot of operating and financial discipline comes with it. There is also a "soft" factor in there,
that doesn't lend itself to computer modeling. That is, the owner's name is on the door, and it carries with it a great deal of "pride of
ownership" and continuing protection of assets.

The services reliant on trunk line rail line hauls? Recall the Bad, Old Days, when each operated and directly controlled own services.
Until the last few years where conditions were very distressed, near all the lines ran presentable, well managed passenger services.

Contrast, all we have with much of the present "public model" is the introduction of a mere broker or middleman into the process.
The broker puts their own name on the equipment. Many seem a little light on how to manage that correctly...

Don't get me started on recent decades wrecks and accidents that should have never happened!

.....................Vern......................

[Mr. Linsky]

'M.T.A. Deficit Means Riders May Pay More'


By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: July 18, 2010 The New York Times


Riders of New York’s transportation system are about to learn a tough lesson of recessionary politics: In times of crisis, nothing is sacred.

Some of the more hallowed, burned-into-your-brain assumptions of traveling around the region are now on the chopping block as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority seeks to curtail yet another budget deficit — this one projected at $400 million.

The off-peak discount on the Long Island Rail Road, for instance, would become smaller than it is now, meaning that riders would have to pay more to travel into the city on weekends, afternoons and late nights. Riders would also pay peak fares for morning trains that head east from Pennsylvania Station or Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, under a proposal being considered by transit officials.

And the authority intends to strain the English language, along with riders’ pocketbooks: limits could be placed on the so-called unlimited MetroCards, which offer monthly and weekly passes for the bus and subway system. The monthly pass, in turn, could cost about $100 a month, up from $89 today.

Fresh off a punishing round of cuts to bus and subway service, New Yorkers will have less than five months to adjust before the changes go into effect on Jan. 1. The authority will formally unveil its plans next Monday.

“I don’t see how it can fail to have an impact,” said James F. Blair, a board member of the authority who represents riders of the Metro-North Railroad. “People are very careful with their dollars at all times, but in this day and age particularly. And little things like this can form the basis for a change in transportation habits.”

Analysts at the transportation agency had initially considered eliminating all off-peak railroad fares — as New Jersey Transit did this year — but that option was eventually discarded. Situations that involved fare increases of more than 10 percent were also considered, according to several individuals familiar with the plans who asked for anonymity because the discussions were intended to be confidential.

The “limited unlimited” plan, first reported by The New York Post, would cap the number of rides that can be taken on a monthly pass to about three a day, requiring heavier users of the system to pay more if they exceed the limit.

Other surcharges, like a $1 fee for obtaining a new MetroCard rather than refilling an old one, are expected to be levied as well.

Transit officials said they were trying to limit an overall fare increase to 7.5 percent, which had been their intention since before the authority’s financial situation worsened drastically in December. The agency lost a big chunk of state financing in Albany’s budget cuts, and tax revenues designated to pay for mass transit have been far below expectations. Officials are also struggling to rein in overtime costs and bureaucratic bloat.

But the fare changes will not be a simple across-the-board increase. Instead, the authority plans to raise the additional revenue by making some passes relatively more expensive than others, and instituting other surcharges.

“Most board members would prefer we don’t just raise everything 7.5 percent,” said Mitchell H. Pally, a board member from Long Island. “Yes, we want to raise more revenue, but we don’t want to discourage ridership.”

Riders’ advocates say the pain will be the same no matter what package it comes in.

“A fare hike is a fare hike is a fare hike,” said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign. “Across the board, people are going to experience higher costs for getting around town.”

Planners from the authority’s constituent agencies, which run the region’s bus, subway and commuter-rail networks, along with its tunnels and bridges, have been meeting weekly to evaluate the pros and cons of new fare structures.

The process requires transit planners to weigh the financial needs of the agency against the fact that higher prices translate to fewer riders.

Mr. Blair, the Metro-North riders’ representative, said he was concerned that off-peak riders who use the railroads for beach jaunts and family weekend trips could be discouraged from using mass transit.

“It doesn’t take much to dissuade people who are newly arrived to go back to their old ways if the economic incentives are not as good as they once were,” Mr. Blair said.

Off-peak rides make up 30 percent of revenue at the Long Island Rail Road and 27 percent of trips, officials said. Nearly three-quarters of Metro-North passengers who buy one-way or round-trip tickets do so for the off-peak period.

Mr. Linsky - Green Bus Lines, Inc., Jamaica, New York

[HwyHaulier]

Mr 'L' -

SIGH! Even the grandest and most splendid of parties must have times when it all ends...

.......................Vern......................

[Mr. Linsky]

H. H.,

I usually don't get involved in the politics of these matters (I just report on them), but I will tell you one quick story;

Some twenty-five years or so ago in the midst of another of the many NYMTA fare raise threats, I wrote a letter of comment to Long Island Newsday (they used to love to print my submissions!).

Anyway, I said that it occurred to me that each time the fares were raised there was a marked reduction in ridership (usually between two and five percent with an eventual recovery of only about fifty percent).

As crazy as it sounds, I suggested that if fares were instead lowered, ridership would increase many fold (I think that still applies!).

In my ending paragraph I noted that, in theory, if these raises were to continue unabated the Transit Authority would be left with about five customers with each paying $ 7,000,000,000 and change per ride!

Don't laugh! - it's heading in that direction now!

Regards,

Mr. 'L'

[HwyHaulier]

Mr 'L' -

I don't much like to get involved in the rough and tumble of it, either...

We have come a long way from privately owned, small fleets. With reasonably good service, positive customer relations,
and fair to middlin' management and supervision, there was a little money left over at the end of the day. Simple to do,
"cookbook" business model. I doubt if NCL ever had a felt need for MBA property managers...

.....................Vern................

[Mr. Linsky]

H. H.,

It's interesting - this history of the fairly well run private bus lines especially in New York and what caused their demise.

In virtually every case that I've read of in my research, the answer seems always to be the same; they were denied permission to raise their fares to stay afloat!

In some ways it becomes ironic again in New York; the Transit Authority along with the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA) created to take over the Fifth Avenue Coach operations in 1962, were supposed to be temporary measures until new private operators could be found.

Of course, the rest is history because no one would touch it!

Go figure!

Regards,

Mr. 'L'

[HwyHaulier]

[timecruncher]

All --

Read this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for insight into what has gone wrong with public transit in this country.

While wages and benefits to the workers on the street certainly have some effect, look at the stuff that MARTA thinks are now 'necessary cuts!'

I am apalled, even though I work in transit...

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/some-marta-layoffs-drastic-576925.html

timecruncher

Heck - they have 44 people in planning, for Pete's sake. Our entire operation is the size of one of their [three] bus divisions, and we have one planner and one scheduler (and currently, not even a Planning Manager).

[Mr. Linsky]

'M.T.A. to Propose New Fare Increases'


By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: July 28, 2010 The New York Times


New Yorkers will soon be asked to pay more to ride trains and buses that just weeks ago suffered the severest service cuts in a generation. The series of fare increases will be unveiled on Wednesday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

By Jan. 1, when the increases would take effect, the heaviest users of the city’s subways and buses could be paying as much as $104 instead of $89 for a monthly system pass. Drivers who use E-ZPass on many of the city’s tunnels and bridges would pay 10 percent more per trip, and rail commuters could face the frustration of longer lines to buy tickets.

The unlimited subway and bus MetroCard, which pushed ridership to record levels after its introduction in the 1990s and revolutionized the way New Yorkers imagine their transit system, could also be on the way out. One proposal would place limits on how many rides could be taken on monthly and weekly passes.

Officials at the authority say they can avoid additional service cuts this year as a result of layoffs and cost-cutting. And instead of an across-the-board fare increase, as in years past, the authority would make a variety of smaller tweaks to the myriad ticket types available.

But the heaviest burden may be placed on the third of subway passengers who use 30-day passes. This group will end up with one of two evils: spending $99 for a monthly pass that would be limited to 90 rides or paying $104 for an unlimited pass. Officials said that they would solicit feedback from the public before making a decision.

Both proposals will be on the table on Wednesday as the authority’s board weighs a set of actions that would affect nearly every user of the region’s buses, subways, railroads and bridges. The proposals must still be debated at public hearings and will not face a final vote until October. But many of the bleak plans laid out by the authority earlier this year have since come to pass.

The agency lost a significant amount of state money last fall, and tax revenues intended to finance mass transit have fallen far short of projections, leading to the elimination of two subway lines and dozens of bus routes last month.

So barring a governmental miracle — rare these days in New York — commuters from Connecticut, Long Island and Westchester County would pay up to 9.4 percent more for tickets, depending on the route, and the authority would end the discounts now offered for tickets purchased online or via the mail.

The authority also plans to eliminate one of the small, quiet pleasures of commuting life: that moment of discovering an old spare railroad ticket in one’s wallet. Under the change, those old tickets would be worthless, expiring after a week instead of the current six months for one-way tickets and after three months instead of a year for the popular 10-trip ticket packs.

William Henderson, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, a riders’ advocacy group, predicted that the changes would create more demand for ticket purchases inside stations, which could delay passengers.

“You buy a ticket in advance, just to have it, because at some point you’re going to be running to a train,” Mr. Henderson said. “Now you’re going to have longer lines at the ticket windows and longer lines at the machines.”

The commuter rails would also tack on a $15 fee for ticket refunds, a sum that would in most cases be larger than the refund itself. Officials said the idea was to discourage passengers from improperly retrieving their fares in the event a conductor neglected to take their ticket.

Drivers who use E-ZPass on many of the region’s tunnels and bridges would be charged 10 percent more per trip, raising the cost on most crossings to $5.04 from $4.57.

The George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel, which are not operated by the transportation authority, would not be affected.

About a third of bus and subway riders purchase a few MetroCard rides at a time, in order to receive a discount for buying in bulk. That discount would be reduced by about 7 percent, so riders would pay about $2.10 a ride, instead of $1.96, officials said. Riders would also be required to buy $10 worth of tickets to earn the discount, rather than $8.

The fare increase is expected to save $413 million in 2011, according to the authority. The next increase is not scheduled until 2013, but officials warned that a worsening in the economy, or a lack of concessions from labor unions, could again place the authority in a financial bind.

Mr. Henderson, of the riders’ group, said that the authority knew it could raise fares on subway passes because riders had few options. “As long as the fare stays within some envelope of reasonableness, they’re going to buy the card,” he said.

Mr. Linsky - Green Bus Lines, Inc., Jamaica, New York

[RailBus63]

I really don’t have a big issue with eliminating unlimited-ride passes, although I would like to see the MTA modify the system to allow a pass to be used for multiple free transfers in a set time period to avoid penalizing riders who need to use multiple buses and the subway to complete their journey. I would rather transit agencies do away with these and keep a discount in place for weekly and monthly passes (with a set number of rides) and a smaller discount for pay-per-ride fare media. Everybody pays for each ride (a ‘ride’ being a journey from Point A to Point B, regardless of how many individual trip segments are required) and discounts for regular users. We simply cannot afford to be giving away transit service anymore.