The budget breaks the three-year streak of raiding dedicated transit funds to patch up the state’s deficit, and it restores the hundreds of millions of dollars that Albany cut from the MTA’s payroll mobility tax, for the time being. This budget also adds $770 million in badly needed but expected funding for the next three years of the MTA capital plan (only the first $150 million will be disbursed this year).

Transit riders are hardly in the clear, however: Included in the budget bill is language that would raise the MTA’s debt limit by $7 billion, which the state has to do because so much of the transit agency’s capital program remains unfunded.

For now, the Cuomo administration is honoring its various promises to transit. Unlike last year, when the administration stole $100 million from dedicated transit funds, every dedicated transit tax dollar is headed where it’s supposed to go.

And while Cuomo cut the dedicated payroll mobility tax by $320 million a year in December, the executive budget makes the MTA whole. Of course, the trouble with cutting a dedicated tax is that transit riders are reliant on future governors and legislatures to reimburse the MTA each year in perpetuity.

The $770 million capital plan contribution, while significant, only means the MTA will be treading water. That contribution, though it hadn’t been made official by the state before today, was one of many assumptions built into the MTA’s plan for the remaining three years of its capital program, according to Charles Brecher of the Citizens Budget Commission. While sizable, it doesn’t make the MTA’s long-term financial situation any less dire.

Even if all the other optimistic assumptions built into the MTA capital plan come true, and that’s a long shot, the transit agency will still be up to its ears in debt. According to a recent report from State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office, which factored in assumptions like this $770 million state contribution, the current capital plan will rely more heavily on borrowing than any in the MTA’s history. As a result, riders will eventually pay for ever-larger debt payments with higher fares or reduced service.

It’s no wonder, then, that the budget also includes an increase in the MTA’s debt ceiling. Currently the MTA is allowed to carry $34.9 billion in outstanding debt; the increase would allow the MTA to borrow up to $41.9 billion. As the state budget documents note, the MTA’s debt limit is usually raised once for every five-year capital plan: It was raised in 2000, 2006, and 2010. This increase, however, is the second for the 2010-2014 program. All told, the MTA’s debt ceiling will have swelled by $13 billion to accommodate all the borrowing brought on by the state’s unwillingness to fund transit.

Joe Lhota was confirmed as MTA chairman by the New York State Senate this afternoon. Image: MTA.

This afternoon, Joe Lhota was confirmed as the new chairman of the MTA. Hearings held earlier today provided a glimpse into the kind of leadership New York transit riders can expect from Lhota. The new chairman defended the MTA from the most strident attacks of anti-transit state senators. When it came to the question of properly funding the transit system, however, Lhota chose to protect the Cuomo administration’s political interests, not transit riders.

The strongest accusations of MTA mismanagement came from Long Island Republican Lee Zeldin, who has also led the fight to repeal the payroll mobility tax. In successive questions, Zeldin raised the issues of overtime abuse, pension abuse and overspending on consultants, among others. Each time, Lhota explained that the worst excesses had already been curbed under previous MTA leadership. Finally, Zeldin closed by wishing “for there to be accountability for the taxpayer dollars so there isn’t a need to use taxpayer dollars at all.”

Lhota didn’t let that stand. “There is no way the MTA can operate without taxpayer dollars,” he interjected. “The entire operation of the MTA cannot be paid for from the riders. It was never envisioned that way.” It’s comforting, at least, to know that the head of the MTA will stand up for the concept of public support for transit.

That doesn’t mean that Lhota at any point articulated the need for additional revenues for transit, however. In an effort to make the case for more transit funding, Senator Dan Squadron, who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, asked Lhota how borrowing roughly $7 billion to pay for the last three years of the MTA’s capital plan would eventually affect riders. Lhota fell back on budget-speak to deny that the borrowing would put still more pressure on the fare. “There is to my knowledge no plan to have fare-backed bonds,” he said. However, both State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and transit advocates have sounded the alarm about depending on borrowing to pay for needed repairs and construction.

Similarly, when Bronx Senator Rubén Díaz, Sr. pressed Lhota about whether he’d support tolls on the East River Bridges, Cuomo’s nominee did not mention the MTA’s struggling finances. Said Lhota, “If it’s what the city wants to do and it’s approved and it’s what the state legislature wants to do, I’m the guy who will get it done efficiently and effectively.” Opining on bridge tolls might be outside the MTA chairman’s job description, but Lhota could easily have noted that the transit system needs the money.

Besides Squadron, the other senator to make an appeal for additional transit funding was Brooklyn’s Eric Adams. “If we want to get New Yorkers out of cars, then we need a first-class transportation system,” he said. “Albany has not done enough.” Adams also urged Lhota to add better bike parking at subway stations, saying that he sometimes bikes to the train himself.

Half a world away from Albany, Jay Walder has more to smile about.

Speaking at a press conference in Hong Kong, where he just started his new job as chief executive of the privately-owned Mass Transit Railway Corporation, Walder said: “New York, when I arrived there, was in a financial crisis. The system simply did not have enough money to continue to operate. The assets were not being renewed. And the infrastructure was in terrible condition.”

Walder’s understated comments were picked up by the Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others, but nowhere have we seen anyone point out how little power the head of the MTA actually wields over agency funding. Nor did any reporter or editor take Walder’s cue to highlight years of Albany malfeasance.

To read the Times piece, for example, you’d think the MTA is an autonomous operation, free to conduct business without political interference. There is a passing reference to Governor Cuomo’s gutting of $320 million in annual payroll tax revenue, but no mention of last year’s $100 million Albany raid on dedicated MTA funds. Forgotten is how state senators used congestion pricing as a litmus test for Walder’s confirmation. With Albany unwilling to enact a new revenue stream via road pricing, it fell to Walder to cut spending.

Most glaringly, absent is an accounting of the decades of lawmaker thievery and neglect that preceded Walder and Cuomo, though those misdeeds more than anything will saddle transit riders for years to come, in the form of decreased service, fare hikes, or both. Other than raising fares or selling off assets, the chair of the MTA has very little revenue-raising clout. For whatever reason this factoid never seems to make the papers.

As for Walder, you get the distinct sense that there is no looking back.

“I think we have a very different situation here,” Walder said. “We have a first-class railway. We have a sustainable financial model that is supporting that railway. And I think the people of Hong Kong are benefiting tremendously from what we have.

“I don’t think it’s the same situation as what you have in New York.”

So far, Andrew Cuomo is on track to pick up a second Mr. Magoo award at the end of 2012.

“We have a great opportunity to rebuild New York,” Cuomo said, introducing his infrastructure agenda by citing the state’s inventory of deficient roads and bridges. “We have much work to do and we need a new approach to get it done.”

Was he talking about a new smart-growth program to rein in the costs of sprawl? Maybe a new initiative to invest in the MTA’s capital program? Far from it. The “new approach” centers around public-private partnerships (P3s) to finance infrastructure projects.

The first project Cuomo mentioned was the new Tappan Zee Bridge, which his administration plans to build without a transit option. Referring to the lengthy public process that produced plans for a bridge with transit, Cuomo said, “Fifteen years of planning and talking and commiserating is too long. It’s time to build, to act, to perform.” More of the same from the first winner of Streetsblog’s Mr. Magoo Award for shortsightedness.

Streetsblog will be looking into the specifics of Cuomo’s infrastructure proposals in the days ahead. For now, the outline Cuomo gave in today’s speech includes a few red flags worth noting:

• A big part of his infrastructure agenda is to “master plan” all of the state’s major construction using a new body composed of “private sector experts and leaders of the legislature.” This entity would coordinate capital investment between multiple agencies, including the MTA, the state DOT, and the Port Authority. It’s hard to see how merging the MTA capital program with other vast agencies, which are also starved for funds, can work to the advantage of transit riders or the MTA. The fact that politicians will have a direct hand in the coordination is not reassuring.
• Speaking of the private sector, Cuomo wants to attract 20 private sector dollars for every dollar of public investment in infrastructure. As Streetsblog’s Noah Kazis has reported, the money to pay back those investors still has to come from somewhere. The question is where.
• Cuomo played up an enormous mega-project — the $4 billion redevelopment of the Aqueduct Racetrack into the nation’s largest convention center — as a signature job creation initiative. The Aqueduct, located in Ozone Park, Queens, is just barely served by the subway system. On the flipside, one of the lone acknowledgments of urbanism came when Cuomo said the Javits Center site on Manhattan’s West Side would be redeveloped “along the Battery Park City model.” It wasn’t the most current reference, but the governor at least seemed to acknowledge that the new district should have a mix of uses.

The biggest red flag was probably what Cuomo left unsaid. He never mentioned the hole in the MTA budget he opened up by cutting $320 million in annual dedicated transit taxes. Cuomo has pledged to plug the gap, but never explained how. Today he shed no light on the situation, nor did he acknowledge that the state needs to maintain transit service to keep New York’s economy going.

Update: Initial reactions from advocates are coming in…

I emailed Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign for his take on Cuomo’s plan to coordinate capital investment among different agencies. He said a limited arrangement could be beneficial. “The devil’s in the details,” he wrote. “The big agencies already have a good deal of capital construction expertise. But sharing knowledge and experience couldn’t hurt.”

In a statement, Transportation Alternatives’ Paul Steely White said Cuomo ignored the links between transit investment, job creation, and access to employment:

While the Governor is right to call for greater investment in infrastructure, Albany cannot continue to give short shrift to funding transit across our state. Public transit projects create a jobs dividend that stretches from the five-boroughs to Upstate New York. From manufacturing jobs in the North Country to construction jobs in the metropolitan area, fully funding public transit not only helps get millions of people to work every day, it creates good-paying jobs for New Yorkers.

Photo: Robert Stolarik/New York Times

New York City transit riders might have taken some small measure of satisfaction from the sight of Carl Kruger resigning from the State Senate earlier this week. Pleading guilty to federal corruption charges, Kruger became the third member of the “Fare Hike Four” — the gang who killed a 2009 plan to fund transit by putting a price on NYC’s free bridges — to exit Albany in disgrace. Two others, Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate, were run out of town by voters and their fellow legislators under clouds of scandal. Ruben Diaz, Sr. is the only one who remains, reduced to irrelevance now that marriage equality is the law of the land and the Republicans control the Senate.

So you can blame the Fare Hike Four for the 2010 service cuts (and you can also blame the Assembly Democrats, who killed congestion pricing in 2008), but these aren’t the guys who are going to write the next chapter in the MTA funding story. If New York is going to fix the transit mess that Kruger and company bequeathed to us, don’t look to the state legislature just yet.

First, Governor Andrew Cuomo has to show some glimmer of understanding that New York’s transit system matters. So far, he hasn’t displayed an inkling.

2011 began with a $100 million Albany raid on dedicated MTA funds. It ended with a tax deal where Cuomo used $320 million in annual transit funding as a bargaining chit to gain suburban Republican votes. In both cases, city residents were sacrificed to achieve the governor’s political ends. That seems to be the Cuomo MO.

Meanwhile, millions of New York City transit riders are left with a diminished system and few prospects for any sort of improvement. If you ride the bus or the train, then you know all about the longer waits and additional crowding since the 2010 service cuts took effect. Does the governor?

Cuomo didn’t cause the cuts, but he should be making it a priority to restore that service and add more. (Remember when we were talking about hundreds of millions of dollars for additional bus service?) Instead, the MTA is limping along, its budget patched up with Band-Aids.

Yesterday the MTA Board approved a 2012 budget that manages to preserve current service levels even though the agency’s CFO doesn’t know how he’ll find the money. They also voted to fund most of the gap in the agency’s five-year capital plan with $4.5 billion in new borrowing. The official line is that the MTA can handle the debt because it will be paid off with revenue from the (recently slashed) Payroll Mobility Tax.

But with each passing year, debt payments swallow up a bigger chunk of the MTA’s budget. And every dollar spent on debt is a dollar that can’t be spent to run trains and buses. In the last two years alone, according to a recent report from Moody’s, “the MTA’s outstanding debt supported by operations has increased by nearly 14%.” By 2015, the amount the MTA spends on debt service each year will grow nearly 32 percent compared to 2011, according to the transit agency’s forecasts [PDF, page 102].

The projected increase in debt service works out to around 30 cents more per ride by 2015, according to transportation analyst Charles Komanoff. Wondering why the fare keeps rising while the economy stagnates? That’s a big reason.

Does Andrew Cuomo understand that New York City’s transit system is the engine of the state’s economy? Does he care about the millions of people who depend on subways and buses? If he does, he can’t ignore the MTA funding problem much longer.

Andrew Cuomo, who governs the state with more transit riders than any other, basks in the glow of cutting $320 million in dedicated transit funding. Photo: Governor's Office

Cuomo spokesperson Matt Wing sent this response to Komanoff:

Your facts, assumptions and analysis are wrong. The reduction in the payroll tax will not cost the MTA one dollar and to suggest otherwise ignores the law.

Cuomo is trying to define the terms of the debate like so: If Albany makes up for the hundreds of millions in payroll tax revenue he just cut, then he did no harm to transit riders and the regional economy.

But the damage is all but inevitable.

The governor may very well scrounge up $320 million for the MTA this year, but make no mistake — straphangers will feel the pain of his transit funding cut. Albany commitments to fund transit never hold up over time. Consider:

• In 2001, Albany contributed $144 million in general taxes to MTA operations [PDF]. Now it contributes $7 million.
• When Governor Hugh Carey left office in 1982, Albany contributed $1.5 billion to the MTA’s five-year capital program. By 1992, under Governor Mario Cuomo, Albany wasn’t putting in a penny.
• Until 2009, Albany was contributing $45 million a year to fund student Metrocards. Then legislators threatened to cut the contribution down to $7 million. Eventually they consented to $25 million.

When Cuomo signed the MTA payroll tax cut into law, surrounded by Long Island politicians, he made it out to be a boon for job creation. But Cuomo’s appeasement of suburban political interests will hit straphangers hard. A weaker transit system means job-seekers will have less access to employment, employers will have less talent to draw from, and New Yorkers will have to deal with higher transportation costs.

The governor may find a way to restore the money this year, and even the next. Maybe Cuomo will patch up the hole he gouged in the MTA budget until 2016. The patches won’t last forever, though. Transit riders will pay for this funding cut eventually, just like they’ll pay for Cuomo’s decision to fund the MTA capital plan by borrowing. Sooner or later, the Cuomo fare hike is coming.

The Bronx's second Select Bus Service route is planned for Webster Avenue, marked as #1 on this map of high-priority routes for bus improvements. Image: NYC DOT/MTA

A new crop of bus routes is moving into the pipeline for implementation as Select Bus Service. The MTA and NYC DOT are in the initial stages of bringing SBS to the Bronx’s Webster Avenue, where the most unreliable bus in the borough runs, and to Brooklyn’s Utica Avenue, the second-busiest bus route in the city.

The innovations of SBS — pre-paid boarding, dedicated bus lanes, priority at traffic signals — have sped buses and attracted new riders on Fordham Road, First and Second Avenues, and 34th Street. And they can work on bus lines all over the city. So as the first round of SBS implementation comes to a close (lines on Nostrand Avenue and Hylan Boulevard are scheduled for completion in the next year or two), the development of new routes is a welcome signal that the MTA and NYC DOT are committed to bringing bus improvements to more New Yorkers.

The city’s first Select Bus Service line launched on Fordham Road in the Bronx in 2008, and it’s been a smashing success. Bus speeds increased by 20 percent and ridership by 30 percent. So expanding SBS to more routes in the borough is a no-brainer. The choice of the Bx41 for the upgrade was first reported in the Daily News yesterday.

“There was a lot of support in the Bronx for doing a route along Webster Avenue,” an MTA spokesperson told Streetsblog. “This would be a full-fledged SBS route with all the features offered by the Bx12 and the M15.”

Running down Webster, the Bx41 has relatively high ridership — 7.6 million annual riders — but was ranked the most unreliable bus in the borough this year by the Straphangers Campaign. Perhaps in part because of all that bus bunching, ridership on the route has been in free fall. The Bx41 saw one million fewer trips in 2010 than in 2009, according to the MTA.

There’s no roll-out date for the Bx41 yet, according to the MTA, and any eventual route will need to go through a public review process.

Though there’s no mention of Webster Avenue on the joint NYC DOT/MTA website dedicated to SBS, there is a new page on that site marking the start of planning for bus improvements along Brooklyn’s Utica Avenue.

Both Webster and Utica Avenues were identified as targets for bus improvements in a 2009 joint DOT/MTA study mapping out potential routs for the second phase of Select Bus Service. Each was considered an “underserved area”: a corridor that was far from the subway yet densely developed.

Along Utica, it’s not yet clear what shape the bus improvements would take. DOT started conducting a study on both transit and traffic safety conditions this October — in addition to carrying 16 million annual bus riders, Utica is also one of Brooklyn’s most dangerous streets — and the study will be complete this spring, according to the website. The study only covers a stretch of Utica a bit longer than a mile, however, between St. John’s Place and Church Avenue. Once the study is complete, DOT will develop a menu of options to improve safety and transit service and present them to the public.

Governor Andrew Cuomo's tax package could leave straphangers stuck with longer subway trips and more crowding. Photo: ianqui/Flickr

To gauge the impact, I entered $320 million worth of cuts in subway operations into my Balanced Transportation Analyzer (BTA) spreadsheet, which combines New York City traffic, transit and revenues into a single model. Here’s what it predicts for city residents, workers and visitors in a worst-case scenario, in which Albany breaks its promise to replace the money, and all of the resulting cuts fall on subway service:

• A nearly 3 percent lengthening in the average duration of subway trips, as maintenance is curbed and service curtailed.
• A 2 percent drop in subway ridership triggered by the poorer service.
• An additional 13,000 more cars driven into the Manhattan Central Business District each weekday, as some frustrated subway riders elect to drive rather than wait for trains.
• An average 2 percent drop in vehicle speeds within the CBD and 0.5 to 1 percent on the approaches, a consequence of cramming more vehicles onto already jammed streets, highways and bridges.
• More pollution and traffic crashes, and less biking and walking, caused by the rise in driving.
• An estimated 27,000 fewer people journeying to the Manhattan CBD on a typical day — a drop of 0.8 percent — because only some of the lost subway trips are replaced by cars and taxicabs.
• A further shortfall of $40 million in MTA revenues as subway ridership declines.

Drivers’ and straphangers’ lost time — an estimated 23 million hours a year — can be expressed in dollar terms; so can the environmental consequences from the increased gridlock. Through a set of calculations that reflect the spectrum of “values of time” — more for an 18-wheeler than a car, for example — the BTA calculates the lost time at $450 million a year ($260 million for drivers and truckers, $190 milion for subway and bus riders). Tack on to that $90 million in worsened health due to the increased pollution and decreased biking and walking, plus the $40 million in reduced farebox revenues. Lost business income and tax revenues from the nearly 1 percent drop in person-trips to the CBD would compound these figures.

Under this scenario, New Yorkers’ $320 million in tax savings are swamped almost two-to-one by the $580 million in costs detailed above.

While belt-tightening by the MTA might soften the blow, the cost-cutting in recent years means that new cuts are likely to take out muscle instead of fat. The rise in congestion costs might also be eased by cutting bus service instead of subways, since most bus trips are outside the CBD, where gridlock is less endemic. But insofar as bus riders have lower average incomes than subway riders, the equity impacts would be even worse.

In the modeling, reduced transit budgets translate to longer transit travel times, which depress transit use. Some of the lost transit trips switch to autos (the conversion rate is around 70 percent for commute trips and 40 percent for other trips). In turn, the rise in auto trips is tempered somewhat by the tendency of some drivers to stay home rather than battle the increased traffic.

Contrary to voguish notions of tipping points, the modeling in the BTA — drawn from empirical data and embodied in a host of interactive equations — assumes that any change in travel cost or time evokes a commensurate change in behavior. Though it may seem surprising that tacking a mere minute onto a 20- or 30-minute subway journey should cause anyone to forego the ride, the fact is that many travel choices are balanced on a fine edge between transit or car or cab or bike or walk or stay home. At “the margin” where choices are made, changed service quality makes a difference.

Disturbingly, no State Senator or Assembly member asked last week whether cutting the MTA payroll tax might worsen transit service and compound highway gridlock. Then again, Governor Cuomo didn’t give them much time, handing them what was essentially a done deal. (The Times reported a NYPIRG source saying the bill was posted 26 minutes before voting began.) Legislators may also not have grasped that households earning $300,000 to $2 million a year would get steeper tax cuts than the middle- or working-class families that were touted as the main beneficiaries.

Could Albany have paid for the payroll tax cut and kept transit whole simply by zeroing out the tax break for incomes over $300,000? The governor and legislative leaders sealed their deal with such haste, shielding details from scrutiny, that even as of this writing there’s no way to tell.

A deal negotiated by Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver will endanger $320 million in MTA funding. Photo: Philip Kamrass/ Times Union

Essentially, Cuomo seems set to turn $320 million in dedicated MTA revenue into discretionary funding, a recipe for it to disappear in the future. While Cuomo has repeatedly promised that the state will pay the MTA back for all the dedicated tax revenue it will no longer collect, the reimbursement mechanism will make the transit agency more vulnerable to future cuts.

The plan, which got Senate Republicans to sign on to Cuomo’s tax reform package, will exempt private schools from paying the 0.34 percent MTA payroll tax. Small businesses will either be exempted from the tax entirely or given a rate reduction, depending on their size. Those changes will cost $250 million, which Cuomo’s office has promised will be reimbursed to the MTA.

The governor could ensure that the MTA will recoup that money largely without risk to transit riders. Currently, public schools pay the full payroll tax upfront, the MTA gets the money, and then the state repays the schools. The new exemptions could be structured the same way, insulating the MTA from the risk that state leaders won’t follow through on their promise.

According to Capital Tonight, however, the new exemptions will work differently. Schools (and presumably small businesses) won’t pay the tax at all. Instead of reimbursing the schools at the end of the process, the state will reimburse the MTA. So the MTA won’t be collecting this money from the dedicated payroll mobility tax, but from the state’s general fund. Since the public schools will also switch to the new system, the state will have to repay the MTA a projected $320 million every year.

This is a dangerous way to fund transit. General fund commitments to the MTA have a way of vanishing. Over time the state’s general fund contribution to the MTA has dwindled to all of $7 million per year (the MTA’s annual budget is over $12 billion).

While dedicated funds can be raided (the state has stolen $260 million in dedicated funds from the MTA over the last two years alone), they’re a whole lot safer than general fund allocations. The dedicated fund raids clearly violate a prior legislative promise, and they are starting to carry more of a political price.

Moreover, Senate Republicans negotiated a sunset provision for the payroll tax cuts out of the original language. That means there’s all the time in the world for Albany to cut its transit funding back to nothing.

Already, transit advocates are sounding the alarm over Cuomo’s MTA tax deal. Wrote the New York Times in an editorial:

Although the Albany leaders say that the state will make up any lost revenue, they have not determined a secure source of financing. Mr. Cuomo needs to make certain that the already cash-starved transportation authority doesn’t suffer. The last thing New York needs is to downgrade the system that gets so many millions of people to and from their jobs.

A press release put out jointly by the Straphangers Campaign, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, the Regional Plan Association, and the General Contractors Association explained concisely the problem with the tax deal.

The problem with this approach is three-fold:

• estimates of what’s needed can be incorrect, exposing the MTA to serious financial risk;
• payrolls can grow over time, subsidies do not; and
• subsidies can be lowered over time, as was the appropriation for student MetroCards;

A better way can be found in the way public schools are being treated right now. These schools now pay the PMT and then apply for reimbursement from the State. This rebate approach assures that the MTA gets the PMT money up front and there’s no need for estimates.

Stakeholders in the MTA called on the state leadership to use the old reimbursement system to ensure that the transit system doesn’t get harmed as a result of the tax deal. “Trading dedicated public transit funds for a spoken promise from Albany to offset those losses is inadequate,” said Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelsen in a statement. “The deal must be structured so that the flow of Payroll Mobility Tax funds to the MTA is uninterrupted.”

General Contractors Association Managing Director Denise Richardson had even stronger words in an article in the Wall Street Journal. “They are sowing the seeds of the MTA returning back to the conditions of the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” she said.

Bus riders waited at least 15 minutes for this crowded B61 during the morning rush today. A practically empty B61 was bunched up right behind it. Photo: Ben Fried

Toward the end of a press conference at the corner of Fourth Avenue and 9th Street this morning, Council Member Brad Lander remarked that not a single B61 bus came by during the 15-minute event. This was only fitting, since Lander was unveiling a new report from his office that found most rush hour B61 buses don’t arrive within the guidelines established by the MTA.

During rush hours, the B61 is supposed to arrive every eight to ten minutes, but the service is anything but reliable, according to the report, “Next Bus Please.” Fully 57 percent of buses are either spaced at least three minutes farther apart than they’re supposed to be, or bunched at least three minutes tighter together. For straphangers this translates into long waits, crowded buses, and the frustration of watching an empty B61 pull up right as you’re boarding that jam-packed bus.

“It gets really packed every morning,” said Vian Hernandez, a senior at South Brooklyn Community High School in Red Hook, who transfers from the train to the B61 to get to school. “Sometimes it comes really late.”

The current B61 route is the byproduct of the 2010 MTA service cuts (themselves a byproduct of Albany budget raids, the mounting cost of MTA debt service, and the collapse of the real estate market). The line was extended east from Red Hook to Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, absorbing passengers who used to take the now-defunct B75 and B77. The nearby B37 and B71, which served parallel routes, were also eliminated, and the Smith-9th Street subway stop has been closed for maintenance since June, further increasing reliance on the B61.

A year and a half after the cuts took effect, the study from Lander, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, and City Council Member Sara Gonzalez documents the strain on the riders who depend on this line, which is now the only bus or subway route that directly serves Red Hook.

Service seems to be deteriorating. A November, 2010 New York City Transit study of the B61 found that 36 percent of buses were arriving outside the MTA’s service guidelines. While NYCT was looking at all buses, not just rush hour service, the authors of “Next Bus Please” say their measurements — 57 percent of rush hour buses failing to meet the guidelines — indicate things have gotten worse on the B61 since then.

They outline a package of improvements for the bus line, including additional peak-hour service, limited stop service for the most popular stops, real-time arrival info, and better contingency routes in the event that a ship passes through the Gowanus Canal at the 9th Street Bridge, a drawbridge that can delay B61s for up to 15 minutes.

Some of those recommendations should come at little or no cost to the financially strapped MTA. (One recommendation, for instance, calls for merging bus stops that are too close together, which could actually cut the cost of operating the B61.) While adding peak hour service won’t be free, the MTA has restored service on several lines since the 2010 cuts in response to rider demand and political pressure. “Next Bus Please” is, I believe, the most rigorous and thorough attempt to document why additional service would benefit a specific bus line.

Velazquez said that Red Hook’s dependence on the B61 justifies the increased service. “The MTA has to prioritize needs,” she said. “Red Hook suffers from a lack of transportation options.”

The authors have shown the report to the MTA and are awaiting a response.

Private financing may expedite the replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge, but it doesn't eliminate the need for infrastructure funding streams. Photo: Wikimedia

Governor Andrew Cuomo sent out an “editorial” this weekend putting infrastructure investment at the center of his job creation agenda. In a rough outline, the governor touted public-private partnerships (or PPPs, as they’re known) as a key mechanism to pay for “the repair and development of highways, bridges and major construction projects.”

It also happens that major players in the state’s construction industry were discussing the very question of how to fund infrastructure at a conference last Friday. Since Cuomo revealed the week before that he wants union pension funds to finance the new Tappan Zee Bridge, PPPs were the hot topic. Most speakers agreed that PPPs won’t solve the state’s transportation funding crisis.

New York’s transportation system is essentially broke, with both transit and road networks in precarious condition. PPPs can be politically appealing as a way to pay for transportation projects without directly tapping public budgets. But while certain kinds of PPPs might help speed projects along or reduce costs, the private sector doesn’t provide something for nothing. The public will eventually pay for these projects somehow.

“We need to guarantee those private investors, especially if they’re a pension fund, a rate of return,” explained Denise Richardson, the managing director of the General Contractors Association. “Without a discussion of where the revenue stream to fund those loans is coming from,” she said, “we mislead the public.”

The New York Times, for example, reported that Cuomo plans to fund the new Tappan Zee Bridge with $3 billion in bonds backed by toll revenue and $2.2 billion with loans from union pension funds and the federal government. It is not clear, however, how pension funds would be repaid.

“We try to pretend that the bill will never come due,” said Richardson. “We need to find a way to fund, not finance, these incredibly important projects.”

With the state’s gas tax frozen for years, officials unwilling to implement tolls or other forms of road pricing, and Cuomo shunting the cost of the MTA’s capital plan onto straphangers’ credit cards, both New York’s transit and highway systems are increasingly bankrupt. Revenue of some kind is necessary, whether it pays back traditional bondholders or direct investors.

Though not a panacea, new ways of involving the private sector can benefit transportation projects.

One form of PPP, the “design-build” contract, had the support of every panelist, nearly all of whom work in the private sector. Design-build allows the same company to develop the plans for a project and construct it, hopefully providing more accountability and allowing for a faster and more integrated process. New York is one of only five states that does not allow design-build. According to Gannett’s Albany Bureau, the state’s recently-issued request for qualifications for the Tappan Zee called for a design-build contract, suggesting that the Cuomo administration will push the legislature to change that law shortly.

Some panelists touted private financing highly. Christophe Petit, president of infrastructure investing firm Star America Infrastructure Partners, claimed that in Canada, PPPs of all kinds proved to be on average 30 percent cheaper than traditionally managed projects. The big savings, he argued, come from ensuring that the risk of cost overruns falls on those most able to prevent them and from speeding up the construction timeline, not from private capital per se. “The private sector cost of financing will always be more expensive than the public sector cost of financing,” said Petit. “PPPs are about getting the project done.”

Tawan Davis, the VP for real estate transaction services at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, had a similar assessment. He estimated that private equity costs around five percentage points more than public financing but that it was often worth it, especially for more complicated and risky projects. “If you put in cheap money, you haven’t made the risk go away,” he argued. “It’s more expensive to pay for [cost overruns] than to pay for more expensive debt up front.”

In addition, private financing might make fiscal sense if cheaper bonding isn’t an option. In rebuilding the Goethals Bridge, for example, the Port Authority opted for a partnership in which the private sector will design, build, maintain and finance the new span. The price tag for the bridge actually went up between $30 and $100 million as a result of the partnership, but the Port Authority believes it will save money in the long-term. The PPP allowed the Port to build the bridge sooner — the authority doesn’t have the capacity right now for more bonding — saving money on upkeep in the interim. “The Port Authority can finance it cheaper, that’s always the case, but the Port Authority is constrained,” said Tony Cracchiolo, a senior VP at engineering firm STV.

When successfully applied — not always the case — those benefits are real. As Richardson argued, however, they aren’t a substitute for public funding. “At the end of the day, these monies need to be paid back,” said Ira Levy, an executive with engineering company AECOM. “This is not funding, this is financing.”

Taking a step back, Baruch College professor Jack Nyman urged the state to think as much about long-term goals as about financial mechanisms. “The obvious things are we want to increase mass transit funding,” he said.

Moreover, private financing is primarily of use for projects like toll roads or airport terminals that produce revenue streams. “We don’t have tolls on any of our state highways, so we don’t have revenue generating mechanisms for many of the projects,” said Robert Zerrillo, the acting director of policy and planning for the state Department of Transportation. “PPPs will not be a panacea for the types of projects we are doing at NYS DOT.”

There’s definitely room for new ways to finance infrastructure or contract out projects. But as Cuomo prepares for a major infrastructure push, New Yorkers need to ask, “Where’s the money?”

Friday’s conference also indirectly touched on major questions surrounding the financing of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which Streetsblog will explore in a follow-up post.

Considering how much progress has been made toward sustainable transportation since 2006, it seemed like an odd question at first. But a closer look shows that nearly all of that progress has been made by one agency: NYC DOT.

DOT has re-designed and re-engineered miles of city streets for safety. DOT has created acres of new public spaces, a new urban art program and programs like Summer Streets and Weekend Walks that have helped redefine the way New Yorkers see their streets. The agency has given people better transportation options by installing 260 miles of bike lanes in the past four years alone, and launching three new Select Bus Service routes with the MTA.

Aside from SBS, the MTA’s recent innovations and improvements for transit riders have been few and far between: the addition of real-time arrival signage in 153 stations, real-time bus information on a few pilot routes, and in-station transfers at a handful of stations. The positive changes have been overwhelmed by severe service cuts and round after round of fare hikes.

It is tempting to say the difference between the effectiveness of the DOT and the MTA is due to budget alone. The MTA has had to cope with a continuing budget crisis brought on by the economic collapse, repeated Albany raids, and a crushing debt load. But Ward’s answer might be more telling: “Wars are lost when the people fighting them lose the capacity to see the outcome they desire. Runners don’t stop running because they are tired, they stop when they don’t think they’ll be able to reach the finish line.”

The Bloomberg administration was already laying the groundwork for its long-term sustainability plan, PlaNYC 2030, during Stringer’s first conference in 2006. PlaNYC laid out an ambitious set of goals to meet the challenges posed by the city’s growth and simultaneously improve the city’s environmental sustainability. Shortly after the Mayor announced PlaNYC in 2007, he appointed Janette Sadik-Khan as the new Commissioner of NYC DOT, to ensure that the plan’s meaty transportation goals would be met. Building on PlaNYC, Sadik-Khan worked with her staff to create a strategic plan with even more concrete goals, many of which were entirely within the power of DOT to implement. The vision set forth in Sustainable Streets has helped guide the agency and encourage its staff to press ahead.

Stability and excellence in leadership matter. The city has had one mayor since 2006 and DOT has had essentially one commissioner (though Iris Weinshall spoke at Stringer’s 2006 conference, it was already clear to most insiders that she was on her way out). In contrast, the state has had three governors and the MTA has had four different executives since the 2006 conference.

The MTA has struggled through these repeated changes in leadership. Neither Governor Andrew Cuomo nor incoming MTA Chair Joe Lhota have articulated much vision beyond performing triage on a hemorrhaging budget. Even Jay Walder, the previous MTA chair who made some crucial progress at the agency, articulated his policy vision in a document entitled “Making Every Dollar Count.”

Both the MTA and the DOT are enormous agencies. Some would liken them to cruise ships. It takes strong, consistent leadership and a clearly articulated vision to steer these ships and to keep them — and the staff who comprise them — on course. Politics will always be challenging, and it seems like budgets will be tight for a long time to come. How do we avoid the failure that Ward talks about? The government executives and transportation leaders who can create a strategic vision for getting things done even in trying economic times are the ones who will not just finish the race, but win it.

Dani Simons has worked as communications director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and Transportation Alternatives, and is the former director of strategic communications for NYC DOT.

When Scott Stringer held his first transportation conference five years ago, streets like this didn't exist in NYC. Photo of First Avenue: NYC DOT

Times have changed since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer hosted a conference on transportation reform in 2006. Five years ago, New York City appeared to be on the verge of shaking off the traffic-first approach to street engineering that had dominated city transportation policy for decades. Whispers were in the air about a push to tame city traffic and fund the transit system by putting a price on congestion-plagued streets. Since then, plenty of innovation has come to NYC streets, while traffic congestion and transit funding remain core challenges.

Last Friday, Stringer’s office organized a sequel, providing an opportunity to take stock of the last five years and recalibrate the transportation reform agenda going forward.

As it happened, former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall made brief remarks at the outset of the event, hosted at John Jay College, in her capacity as a vice chancellor of CUNY. The moment was ripe with irony. Five years ago, then-commissioner Weinshall made a splash at the first Stringer transportation conference, calling for bus rapid transit, parking reform, safe routes to schools, and new public spaces. In the past two years, Weinshall’s dogged attempts to eradicate the Prospect Park West protected bike lane have, if nothing else, underscored why she had to leave the department before progress could be achieved on all the promises she made in 2006.

On Friday morning, the stage belonged to her successor, Janette Sadik-Khan, who highlighted DOT’s long list of achievements and innovations:

• Select Bus Service: Though the roll-out has been slower than originally anticipated and true bus rapid transit has eluded NYC DOT and the MTA, NYC now has three operating corridors of Select Bus Service, including 34th Street and First and Second Avenues in Manhattan and on Fordham Road in the Bronx, improving transit for tens of thousands of riders each day and attracting thousands more.
• Bicycling: In 2006, the city promised to add 200 new miles of bike lanes, a pledge that has since been fulfilled and surpassed. Now New York sets its sights not only on advancing the number of bike lane miles, but creating innovative street designs that lead the nation in making cycling accessible to a wide array of city residents.
• Parking: The DOT has piloted Park Smart, time-of-day variable pricing for parking spots in Park Slope and Greenwich Village and is on its way to expanding it into other parts of the city.
• Safe routes to schools: The city has a robust program to improve safety near 135 schools in all five boroughs.
• Public plazas: The big public space news of 2006 was that the city would add a ribbon of pedestrian space to the Times Square bowtie. No one could have predicted the city would add substantial public plazas at Times Square and Herald Square by reclaiming lanes from traffic.

For all the reasons to celebrate the progress on NYC streets, the conference also provided some sobering perspective on the state of the transit system.

Stringer focused on the high price of MTA capital construction – what former MTA Charman Jay Walder dubbed “the MTA premium” on construction costs compared to other world cities. New York suffers from a much higher cost per mile for expanding its subway network – nearly quadruple the cost of subway expansion in London and more than five times as expensive as in Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.

The borough president pointed to costly work rules and excessive regulation as causes. He also mentioned that not knowing the location of underground utility lines has slowed the Second Avenue Subway and driven up costs.

Stringer proposed an “underground census” that would help capital construction stay on time and under budget by using all our available technology to map the city’s entire subsurface infrastructure network. He claimed such a tool would have saved $80 million on the Second Avenue Subway project. Unfortunately, given the project’s multi-billion dollar pricetag, even $80 million amounts to a drop in the bucket.

Former Port Authority chief Chris Ward – always known as a frank pragmatist – could truly speak his mind, having left his post earlier this fall. He focused on the continued irrationality of New York’s road pricing and the failure to properly fund infrastructure, saying that the region is not going to get anywhere without tolling the East River bridges and developing a more general tolling structure that reflects when and how people use crossings. Crossing the Tappen Zee Bridge during the times of day when traffic moves freely should cost less than driving across the Brooklyn Bridge into the most congested part of the region. According to Ward, we need to assess user fees to reinvest in our infrastructure.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign agreed. “Someday we’ll have to move to a system of congestion pricing or bridge tolls. It’s politically very hard but it makes extremely rational sense as a source of funding,” he said, while adding that right now is a very difficult time to be talking about taxes or new revenues.

Albany’s failure to enact congestion pricing or bridge tolls has put transit advocates in a very hard place. Without those revenue streams, the MTA will have to borrow vast sums to pay for its current capital program — a lose-lose proposition. While on the one hand increased borrowing means that the pressure on the fare is only going to go up in the future, on the other hand rejecting borrowing means cutbacks in the capital program that would send the system back to the days of frequent train breakdowns and crumbling stations, said Russianoff.

After several rounds of fare hikes and service cuts in the past five years, there is a consensus that transit funding is the primary transportation issue New York City needs to face. What will it take to celebrate progress on that challenge when the next borough president’s transportation conference rolls around in 2016?

More passengers are taking the M15 along First and Second Avenues, where Select Bus Service launched last year, while overall ridership in Manhattan is down. Image: NYCDOT/MTA

Yesterday, we reported on the impressive gains in speed and ridership along the First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service route. Since then, NYC DOT and the MTA released their official progress report on the project. It’s full of graphics that show the boost for bus riders even more clearly.

Along the full M15 route, Select Bus Service shaves nearly seven minutes off the time spent at bus stops and five minutes off the time stuck in traffic. Image: NYCDOT/MTA

Select Bus Service cut the length of a full trip down the M15 route by 12 minutes. Seven of those minutes were saved at bus stops thanks to faster, all-door boarding, while five were thanks to dedicated, camera-enforced lanes keeping buses clear of traffic.

Those improvements have attracted about 10,000 more daily riders to the SBS than the old M15 limited, while ridership on the M15 local is down about 5,000. All told, it comes out to a nine percent increase in ridership on the corridor, suggesting the SBS buses are picking up some former M15 local riders as well as thousands of New Yorkers who didn’t care to wait for the old limited.

Ridership is actually down slightly on the local, with Select Bus Service is far more popular than the limited was. Image: NYCDOT/MTA

Photo: CUNY

The most striking difference between Lhota and outgoing chair Jay Walder is the discrepancy in experience specific to transit. Walder came to the job after a long career as a public transit executive in New York and London, and during his two-year stint he was widely praised for improving aspects of the rider experience while grappling with a budget crisis and repeated Albany raids that led to sweeping service cuts. Lhota brings no prior experience as a transit executive to the job.

Cuomo’s statement announcing the Lhota appointment steered clear of specifics, sticking to generalities about cutting costs and improving service. David Paterson sounded similar notes when he nominated Walder in 2009, citing the need to improve “efficiency and transparency.” Within days of that announcement, however, Walder was telling reporters about his ambitions for improving the New York City bus system.

Cuomo made two other transportation appointments this afternoon. Nuria Fernandez, an executive at engineering firm CH2M Hill, will take over as chief operating officer at the MTA. Fernandez replaces Charles Monheim, a widely-respected member of Walder’s team who came over from Transport for London with the former chair in 2009. Cuomo also appointed Karen Rae, a veteran of several state DOTs and currently an official with the Federal Railroad Administration, to the post of deputy secretary of transportation in the governor’s office.

In statements, transit advocates lauded Lhota’s managerial experience and cited his forthrightness as a cause for optimism. Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, said that under Giuliani, Lhota stood out as “thoughtful and a straight-shooter” during the clashes between environmental justice groups and the administration.

With the MTA poised to take on billions in new debt to finance its five-year capital program, Cuomo and Lhota have their work cut out for them just to keep fares affordable and prevent the system from deteriorating. As summarized by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, the challenges they face include:

• Ensuring dedicated taxes for transit, such as the payroll tax, remain intact and are not diverted to non-transit uses;
• Ensuring federal support for transit projects is not reduced;
• Fully executing the remaining three years (2012-2014) of the MTA’s construction and rebuilding program;
• The maintenance, and expansion, of service levels for the system’s subways, buses, and rails; and
• Keeping fares affordable despite growing agency debt.

Joe Lhota. Photo: SI Advance

Top transit leaders are urging Lhota to use his first day in the spotlight to vocally make the case for a strong, well-funded transit authority. Ignore the advice to “do more with less,” wrote Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign in a pitch-perfect op-ed, urging the incoming MTA chair to advocate for new revenues in the form of congestion pricing. Richard Ravitch, the former MTA chair widely credited with saving the transit system in the early 1980s, said the new chair should push for bridge tolls.

Two years ago, Jay Walder arrived at the MTA emphasizing the importance of investing in the transit system. “We must have a long-term financial solution for the MTA,” Walder said when nominated, calling for a fully funded capital plan. “It’s critically important to have a capital program.” Today, the MTA’s fiscal situation is even more dire. But so far Cuomo has given no indication that he intends to address the problem, identifying no new revenues to invest in the maintenance and expansion of the system. As a result, the MTA is taking on billions of dollars in debt, which riders will be paying off for decades in the form of higher fares.

When he was nominated, Walder brought much more to the table than a call for new revenues. A highly-respected transit official with a long resume at Transport for London and New York City Transit, Walder came to the job with a clear plan to improve the system in cost-effective ways. The day he was nominated, Walder said he wanted to upgrade from the MetroCard payment system to cost-saving smart card technology. Soon after taking the reins, Walder had developed a full-fledged platform for his time at the helm of the MTA.

From day one, Walder made it a priority to improve bus service, install countdown clocks, and modernize the agency’s open data policies — all low-cost improvements to the system. In some cases he was building on programs set in motion by his predecessors, and in other cases (especially the open data initiative) he was charting a new course. The common thread: He identified what could be done quickly and made tangible progress on those initiatives, bringing a measure of credibility to an agency that’s often used as a punching bag by politicians and the local press.

What will Joe Lhota say on his first day? If nominated, he won’t bring the experience that transit professionals like Walder and Lee Sander relied on to advance cost-effective system improvements. Lhota’s resume shows a much more worrisome engagement with transit. While he served as Giuliani’s budget director and deputy mayor, city support for the MTA decreased significantly, according to a report by the Fiscal Policy Institute. While city contributions made up 14 percent of the 1992-1996 capital program, by the year 2000 the city was only paying for two percent of the capital program.

With Walder and Sander in the top spot, subway and bus riders benefited from four years of intelligent MTA governance aimed at improving their experience. Will Governor Cuomo and his MTA chief continue that record?

Communications-Based Train Control can relieve crowding throughout the subway system, Albany permitting. Photo: ianqui/Flickr

As the Times and Second Avenue Sagas reported, L train riders will start benefiting from more frequent service next summer, when the MTA adds trains on the weekends, which have seen an 84 percent jump in ridership since 2005. But the major advance in service, which promises to relieve crowding on some of the most jam-packed rush-hour trains in the system, will come at the end of 2012, when the new CBTC signaling system is slated to be completed.

Like most transit improvements here, the implementation will be slow and will come with some service disruptions. But the short-term pains will be well worth this major upgrade to NYCT’s antiquated signal technology. Whereas the century-old system now in use relies on block signals with colored lights alongside the track to tell operators if they’re too close to the train ahead, CBTC uses radio signals to locate all of the trains on the line. With this information, on-board computers can calculate the distance between trains precisely and in real time, letting operators run trains closer together without compromising safety.

With more trains per hour, wait times will diminish and trains should be less crowded — allowing for increased ridership as the experience of riding the subway becomes more convenient and pleasant. Adding just one train per hour adds space to move another 2,640 people. That translates to fewer times waiting while a packed train goes by, and fewer elbows in your ear when you board.

Unlike service changes that can be put in place virtually overnight, CBTC requires years of investment via the MTA’s capital program. The new signaling system on the L is the product of substantial investment starting in the mid-1990s and continuing today. Along with investments in new subway cars and buses, station repairs and upgrades (including elevators), and track replacements, CBTC is one of the “workhorse” projects that together require far more MTA capital expenditures than megaprojects such as East Side Access and the Second Avenue Subway. And rightly so — CBTC is destined to improve the speed and comfort of rides all over the city.

The L train improvements, in fact, don’t fully convey what CBTC can accomplish. The line doesn’t have the “tail tracks” (extra space for turning trains around) at Eighth Avenue that would be needed to allow double-digit percent increases in train throughput.

The next two CBTC installations do have room, and these shouldn’t be made to wait any longer for the extra capacity CBTC will allow. Riders on the 7 train desperately need the added service, especially now that the Flushing Main Street station is the city’s tenth busiest with 18.6 million rides last year. The current five-year capital program includes funds to fully equip 7 train tracks and cars for CBTC. The MTA has also targeted the Queens Boulevard lines (E, F, M, and R trains) for CBTC installation — a process starting in 2013 and intended for completion during the next capital program, which is supposed to begin in 2015. Some stations on this line are among the system’s most crowded, with over 6 million rides per year. Jamaica Center teems with over 11 million. The MTA can complete these improvements, provided it gets financial support from the governor and the legislature and escapes the budget raids that Albany has imposed with alarming regularity lately.

Although the seeds for implementing CBTC and improved service on the L train were planted almost two decades ago, the project wouldn’t be coming to fruition without the watchdog efforts of legislators like Sen. Daniel Squadron, who has made transit provision a priority and called on the MTA in July to address weekend overcrowding on the L train. The MTA’s thoughtful response to Sen. Squadron, which highlights CBTC, could mean that the authority is turning a corner in responding to riders’ needs. Perhaps the impact of this project will help other elected officials and the public at large to grasp their interest in supporting the capital program with a sustainable funding stream — one that lets innovations like CBTC take the pressure off jammed subway lines.

Police arrest a protestor on the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday. Transit workers say it's not their job to help. Photo: Reuters

But the bus drivers didn’t think helping cops suppress protestors’ first amendment rights was in their job description, and the Transport Workers Union took the NYPD to court this week to assert their rights to abstain from police activity. The union was unable to convince a judge, however, that city buses and bus drivers shouldn’t be utilized for police business.

“TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest — and shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” said Union President John Samuelsen, who called the police’s power play “a blatant act of political retaliation.” Three days before the mass arrests, TWU had declared their support for the Occupy Wall Street protests, with their demand for “Democracy Not Corporatocracy.”

Samuelsen says the drivers’ fourth amendment rights were violated, since the government may only compel a citizen to assist in law enforcement when there is imminent danger, and according to Samuelsen, there was no imminent danger.

MTA said the agency has “a long history of cooperating with the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies when they require vehicles to perform their duties” and that they “have no intention of changing [that] longstanding policy.”

Bus bulbs will improve bus service and the pedestrian experience along Nostrand Avenue as part of the new SBS service. Image: NYC DOT/MTA.

With Select Bus Service speeding trips and boosting ridership on Fordham Road and First and Second Avenue, the next route slated for an upgrade is Brooklyn’s Nostrand Avenue. The B44 bus runs over nine miles from the Williamsburg Bridge to Sheepshead Bay. It attracts 41,000 riders a day, making it the seventh busiest route in the city, despite running at an average speed or seven or eight miles per hour and having the least reliable service in the borough. Last night, the Department of Transportation and MTA held an open house to present an updated design for the corridor [PDF], one of the final revisions before construction begins next year.

Nostrand Avenue SBS will, as in the Bronx and Manhattan, create dedicated bus lanes enforced by automated cameras and use high-capacity buses and off-board fare payment. With fewer stops, the bus will also spend more time in motion and less time starting and stopping.

The Nostrand project will add another new feature: bus bulbs. By extending the sidewalk out to the street, bus bulbs mean that drivers don’t have to pull to the curb and back into the lane, resulting in a smoother and speedier ride. A raised curb means more level boarding onto the bus, advantageous for the elderly and the mobility-impaired. The extra space also means that the bus stop won’t crowd the sidewalk.

DOT and the MTA made a few revisions to the plan under the new design. A station was added at Avenue D/Newkirk Avenue in response to community requests. Bus lanes were removed on Bedford Avenue between Fulton and DeKalb — the agencies said bus speeds were already high there but the bus lane would have interfered with the bike lane — but lanes were added to a congested section of Nostrand between Farragut Road and Avenue I.

In order to preserve the same number of motor vehicle lanes during rush hour, where a bus lane is being installed DOT proposes turning the left parking lane into a through lane during the morning and evening peaks. This shouldn’t have too much of an impact on local merchants. At Nostrand and Empire Boulevard, only 14 percent of shoppers had driven to the area (and not all had parked on Nostrand). Further south, at Glenwood Road, only 13 percent of shoppers had arrived in a car.

Moreover, there’s a lot of room to add parking in other ways. On much of Nostrand and its cross streets, parking is currently free. The installation of meters will encourage drivers to move on once done shopping, freeing up space for others. The use of Muni-Meters will also allow more vehicles to park in the same area. Finally, loading zones and delivery windows will ensure that trucks have space at the curb rather than being forced to resort to double-parking. DOT’s presentation didn’t do the math, but it’s possible the neighborhood could actually gain parking capacity despite the rush hour restrictions.

Community boards will continue to weigh in through next week. If the plan goes forward, Select Bus Service will be up and operating on Nostrand Avenue next fall.

The route for proposed Hylan Boulevard Select Bus Service. Bus lanes are planned for the highlighted areas, where congestion is worst. Image: MTA/DOT

When it comes to Staten Island, the Department of Transportation and MTA are considering a different model for Select Bus Service.

The service planned for Hylan Boulevard will provide dedicated bus lanes for less of the route than on existing SBS lines, but high-tech features like transit-friendly traffic lights and even a possible pilot of smart card fare payment technology will be included.

Bus service along Hylan Boulevard is an essential lifeline for transit riders on Staten Island. Sixteen thousand local bus riders travel on the street every weekday, as do another 15,000 express bus riders. One-third of all Staten Island bus commuters live along the corridor. Those numbers might be even higher if transit service weren’t so slow. Almost three-quarters of transit commuters in the area have trips longer than an hour.

A final plan hasn’t been prepared for the new bus service, but DOT and the MTA presented the basic concept at a public meeting last Thursday [PDF]. The project is scheduled to be implemented in 2012 or 2013.

Unlike on the existing Select Bus Service routes on Fordham Road and First and Second Avenue, DOT is not planning to paint dedicated bus lanes along most of the route. Instead, they’re installing bus lanes in the three most congested areas: a roughly two-mile stretch toward the northern end of the route; the area where the S79 bus turns off Hylan and toward the Staten Island Mall; and near the entrance to the mall itself.

The Staten Island service will have a number of features not found in Manhattan and the Bronx, however. “Advance signals” will allow buses to stop a little further forward at an intersection than private vehicles. Currently, buses stopped at the curb and cars trying to turn right have to weave past each other; with advance signals, there’s room to separate the movements, speeding up traffic. The advance signal could also let buses jump to the front of the queue at certain red lights.

Another feature, transit signal priority, holds green lights a few extra seconds when a bus is approaching, giving precedence to vehicles carrying dozens of people rather than one or two. When tested out on Staten Island’s Victory Boulevard, it shaved ten percent of the time off bus trips (and five percent of the time off private automobile trips). This spring’s update of PlaNYC promised that eleven bus routes across the city will get transit signal priority. Hylan Boulevard will be one of them.

Advance signals let buses stop closer to the intersection than cars, allowing everyone to switch lanes more easily. Image: MTA/DOT

Perhaps even more intriguing, Hylan Boulevard might be the site for a pilot of the MTA’s long-awaited smart card fare payment system. Nothing’s been finalized yet, said a DOT spokesperson, but the pilot might start on the Hylan Boulevard SBS when it launches.

Real-time arrival information is also coming to all Staten Island buses by the end of the year, including Hylan Boulevard.

The MTA will replace the local S79 service with the Select Bus Service, which will stop less frequently in order to move faster. The S54 and S78 local buses, which run along the S79 route, will pick up the slack for the local, with service adjusted as necessary.

At the same time as it improves the bus service, DOT will also be using the corridor redesign as an opportunity to improve pedestrian safety. Along the route, DOT plans to extend existing medians into the crosswalk to create pedestrian refuges, and to add pedestrian ramps and sidewalks near bus stops that currently lack them.

Some bus stops will also be relocated to improve safety. The Brooklyn-bound bus stop at Richmond and Yukon Avenues, for example, might be moved from the side of the road to the center pedestrian island, a DOT representative said. Since the right side of the street has neither buildings nor a sidewalk, moving the stop to the median would allow for a better waiting area and reduce crossing distances for bus riders, who currently must cross the entire street.