Streetsblog New York City

Signal failures cause more significant delays than anything else on the subway system. The MTA plans to prioritize signal upgrades in its next capital plan, if Albany provides the money. Photo: Librado Romero/New York Times

Has your subway been delayed recently? Blame New York City’s aging transit infrastructure, especially its outdated signal system. Then start fighting to make sure Albany fully funds the MTA’s next capital plan.

A new report from the Straphangers Campaign shows just how prevalent signals failures are on the subway system. In 2011, the MTA sent out 4,580 e-mail and text message alerts informing riders of significant delays on the subway system (in general, these are delays of ten minutes or more; see the whole methodology in this PDF). Straphangers deemed around 3,000 of those under the MTA’s control, letting the agency off the hook for things like police investigations or water main breaks. Over a third, 1,062, were related to signals.

It’s perhaps no surprise that signals, which tell train operators when to stop and when to go, are causing delays across the system. They’re ancient. As of two years ago, a quarter of the system’s signals were more than 70 years old, according to New York City Transit chief engineer Fredrick Smith.

The good news is that the MTA has identified upgrading the subway system’s signals as a top priority. “It’s about signals,” MTA chief Joe Lhota told City And State last month. “If we’re going to have more throughput, we’re going to put more trains on the same track, and we’re going to have to have more modernized signals.”

The bad news is that upgrading signals is expensive work — the MTA is spending over $3 billion on New York City Transit signals and communications work in its current capital program — and there’s no plan yet for how to fund the next capital plan. The debt-saddled authority can’t afford to borrow billions, like Governor Cuomo did for the current round of spending, and put the next five years of upgrades and repairs on a credit card.

Some revenue stream, whether Sam Schwartz’s toll plan, James Brennan’s transportation bond issue, or Lhota’s own suggestion of a sales tax, will be needed. Otherwise, those signals are just going to get worse and the delays more frequent.

This is the first year that Straphangers has collected this data, which is also broken down by line and borough, but in the future it will also allow riders to measure changes in the reliability of the subway system over time.

Between Ninth Avenue and Third Avenue, the proposal for 34th Street calls for a curbside bus lane on one side of the street and an off-set bus lane with expanded pedestrian space and loading zones on the other. Nearer to the rivers, the bus lanes would be off-set on both sides of the street. Image: NYC DOT

Changes to bus service on 34th Street have improved travel times and bus frequencies and have increased ridership, according to MTA data presented to the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 6 last night. Even speedier and more reliable crosstown rides are expected after the next stages of the street redesign are phased in over the next two years.

The improvements to date are already speeding up these famously sluggish crosstown buses. (The M34 won a “Pokey Award” from the Straphangers Campaign in 2004.) Travel times are down 10 percent on 34th Street thanks to the addition of off-board fare payment, according to the MTA’s preliminary findings. By letting passengers pay their fare ahead of time, rather than queue up at the front of the bus to dip their MetroCards one-by-one, M34 and M34A Select Bus Service lines can spend more time in motion and less time at the curb.

Faster speeds don’t just mean quicker trips once you’re on the bus, either. “With that reduced travel time,” explained the MTA’s Joe Chiarmonte, “we’ve been able to increase frequency of the trips.” With off-board fare payment, the MTA has been able to add 24 more trips a day, except on Sunday, when 12 new trips were added.

Faster, more frequent buses mean more riders. At a time when bus ridership is decreasing across Manhattan, ridership on the two 34th Street routes has increased from around 18,000 passengers a day to 20,000 or 21,000. “It’s trending upwards,” said Chiarmonte.

Unlike other routes, 34th Street Select Bus Service is being rolled out feature by feature, and the plans aren’t complete yet. The corridor got bus lanes in 2008, but they’re next to the curb and are consistently blocked by stopped taxis, private cars, and parked police officers. The bus lanes will next be moved away from the curb under plans agreed upon last year, after a more ambitious redesign of the corridor was scuttled due to opposition from Midtown real estate interests.

Construction on the new 34th Street will take place in stages, said a DOT representative, with work west of Lexington Avenue completed by 2013 and work to the east finished by 2014. Once finished, curbside space will be reallocated to make room for a combination of bus bulbs, loading zones and turn lanes. One lane in each direction will remain for general traffic.

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It's great that Andrew Cuomo granted the MTA a reprieve from the state's absurd practice of charging it to borrow money. But it'll take more than nickels and dimes to restore bus service, including cuts in Staten Island. Image: The Eyes of New York via Flickr.

It’s not often that Andrew Cuomo is willing to spend a dime in support of mass transit, but the governor did offer the MTA a small respite yesterday.

Currently, the state steals money from transit riders in one particularly insulting way. First, Albany leaves the MTA capital plan drastically underfunded, forcing the authority to take on tens of billions of dollars in debt. Then, for every bond the MTA issues, the state charges it a fee for the privilege. Since 2006, the state has taken $100 million from the MTA in “bond issuance charges.”

Thanks to sustained lobbying from transit advocates, most notably MTA Board member Allen Cappelli, a Staten Islander appointed by David Paterson, Cuomo has agreed to waive the bond issuance charges for the next two years, though only on bonds being used to refinance old debt. Given the enormous amount of borrowing required by Cuomo’s own refusal to fund the rest of the MTA capital plan, even that limited reprieve will amount to $50 million more for the transit system.

“If we are to hold the MTA accountable for their spending practices, state government must do its part to solve the problem as well,” said State Assembly Member Nicole Malliotakis, who had pushed for the elimination of the fee, in a statement. “This policy was completely counterproductive as it was bleeding the MTA dry and contributing to the agency’s chronic failure to maintain adequate bus service and keep tolls and fares at a reasonable level,”

As an editorial by the Staten Island Advance notes, a partial waiver of the charge is only a small first step. “We urge the governor and the Legislature to grant a permanent exemption that will cover all of the MTA’s bonds, not just those used to refinance old debt,” wrote the Advance today. “There was never any rational justification for the state to claim a cut from bonds used to pay for public transportation. The state should be funding mass transit even more than it does, not appropriating a portion of the beleaguered MTA’s revenue.”

Indeed, this $50 million doesn’t even come close to making up for Cuomo’s past attacks on transit funding.
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A “shake-up” is underway at the top levels of the MTA, reported Crain’s Insider this morning. Two top executives, Charles Monheim and Linda Kleinbaum, are on their way out the door. Moving into the agency is Steve Morello, a political operative with deep ties to the Cuomo family.

Charles Monheim, a widely respected MTA executive, is leaving the agency. On the way in is a political insider with deep ties to the Cuomo family. Image: Adams IV for Daily News

The departure of Monheim represents a loss of institutional knowledge and energy that will have to be replaced. Monheim was brought back to the MTA, where he had previously worked, as chief operating officer under former chair Jay Walder. After Joe Lhota took the helm of the transit agency, he became the MTA’s director of strategic initiatives. In those roles, Monheim earned a reputation as a creative thinker and experienced transit operator. “I have a pretty high opinion of him,” said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. “I think of him as the generator of ideas and strategies.”

In his first run at the MTA, in the 1980s, Monheim helped oversee the rehabilitation of the decrepit subway system. More recently, he has been the force behind delivering riders real-time arrival information for subways and buses. He was also leading the efforts to move from the MetroCard to a new smart card fare payment system, having successfully done the same in London. An article from City and State last year titled Monheim “Mr. Fix-It.”

Kleinbaum, currently the MTA’s deputy executive director for administration, will be retiring, reported Crain’s. Current director of government affairs Hilary Ring will shift into her spot, with Morello moving into Ring’s position.

Morello, whom Transportation Nation called a “longtime political insider,” has served both the current and former Governor Cuomo. He was Mario Cuomo’s press secretary and most recently worked as Andrew Cuomo’s deputy director of communications before heading to the MTA.

Top transportation officials from three global cities — London, Singapore and Stockholm — shared their experiences in expanding the use of transit at a panel at the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference last Friday. Eyeing those cities, it’s easy for New Yorkers to get jealous.

“I was, in many ways, salivating,” said MTA chief Joe Lhota.

Singapore's massive transit expansion plans -- the dotted lines are all system expansions planned for the next ten years -- wouldn't be possible without congestion pricing. For a larger version, click here.

Singapore is doubling the size of its rail network in the next ten years, according to the Singapore Land Transport Authority’s Lew Yii Der. Using driverless technology, he added, Singapore will soon be running subway trains as little as 90 seconds apart.

London boosted bus ridership by 60 percent in a decade (in contrast, New York’s bus system is seeing fewer passengers year after year) and recently hit an all-time high for Underground use, said Transport for London’s Elaine Seagriff. Projects in the pipeline will add an entire new rail line through the heart of the city and boost capacity in the existing Underground system by 20 percent.

Stockholm plans to spend 8 billion Euros on expansion projects through 2020 for a region of only 2 million people, reported Stockholm Public Transport Managing Director Anders Lindström. In the New York region, per capita spending on that level would come out to $115.5 billion.

In a city where “mega-projects” mean three new stations for the Second Avenue Subway and one on the 7 line — and where it’s possible no system expansions at all will be included in the next five-year capital plan — it’s hard to imagine the cash-strapped MTA ever reaching such lofty levels. How did these other cities do it?

It’s foolish to call anything a silver bullet, but even so, it’s no coincidence that each of these cities do something New York hasn’t done: price the use of scarce road space.

London’s phenomenal growth in bus ridership, for example, can be significantly attributed to the fact that surface transit doesn’t have to sit in gridlocked traffic, thanks to the city’s congestion charge. Analyst Kenneth Small estimates that in the typical American city, bus ridership would jump 31 percent due to the introduction of congestion pricing, without bus service even receiving any of the revenues.

But the money certainly helps. London’s congestion charge generated approximately $240 million in 2009, all dedicated to transportation. Stockholm’s pricing scheme took in about $112 million in a much smaller region.

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A Transit Score map of Seattle, the nation's 7th-most transit-friendly major city according to new rankings. The city is buoyed by its dense urban core, where many transit lines converge. Image: Walk Score

Today, Walk Score — developer of the popular method for evaluating neighborhood walkability (and filling out NCAA tournament brackets) — announced its first ranking of cities by Transit Score, a measure of the “usefulness” of a city’s transit system. On a 100-point scale, New York and San Francisco took the top two spots with scores of 81 and 80 respectively, while Boston (74), Washington D.C. (69), and Philadelphia (68) round out the top five (see the full rankings).

Walk Score CEO Josh Herst believes this is an important time to begin evaluating cities in terms of transit, and all the Americans who rode transit 10.4 billion times in 2011 would likely agree with him. “Heading to the gas pump this season is about as much fun as getting a root canal,” Herst said in the official release [PDF]. “With gas prices expected to hit new highs, more people are riding transit, walking and biking to save money. And being able to leave your car at home more often is great for your wallet, your waistline and the environment.”

The company generates Transit Scores using data provided by transit agencies, and takes into account the number of nearby transit routes (weighted differently by mode), how often those routes run, and how far away the stations are from any given point. A city’s score is based on a population-weighted average of all individual point scores. For an excellent discussion of the Transit Score methodology, check out this exchange between transit expert Jarrett Walker and Walk Score’s Matt Lerner from early 2011.

Overall, it’s fair to say that few American cities score well on the system. Of the 25 largest cities that make their transit data available to the public, only ten topped a Transit Score of 50, which is the lowest score qualifying as “good transit,” described as “many transit options nearby.” Most (14) fall into the “some transit” bracket, and the 25th-highest Transit Score among the cities evaluated — Raleigh, NC — is a 23, the upper end of “minimal transit.”

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Bus bulbs were to be added to First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service in 2011, but will be coming this year instead. Image: NYC DOT

Since 2010, rapid bus service has been running on Manhattan’s First and Second Avenues. By nearly all accounts, it’s been a success. Bus speeds are up 15 percent. Faster trips mean that the M15 has defied the trend of sinking ridership on Manhattan buses, adding 4,000 more passengers per day.

But the bus could be running even more quickly and smoothly. When M15 Select Bus Service started running a year and a half ago, the Department of Transportation hadn’t yet installed the full package of improvements for the corridor. Two features in particular were scheduled to be added as follow-up items: bus bulbs and transit signal priority.

A presentation shown to the project’s community advisory committee last April promised that both those improvements would be added starting in 2011, with the installation of bus bulbs continuing through this year. That hasn’t happened yet, a DOT spokesperson confirmed, though the wait for further enhancements may not be much longer. DOT said the bus bulbs would be fully installed by the end of this year, but did not comment on the timeline for signal priority.

Once completed, the two improvements will make traveling on First and Second Avenue even better. Bus bulbs — sidewalk extensions into the street at bus stops — keep bus shelters and ticket machines out of the way of pedestrian traffic. And by allowing buses to load passengers without having to pull to the curb and back into traffic, they also make for faster rides. The MTA has estimated that adding bus bulbs would shave about 10 seconds off each stop along the planned Nostrand Avenue SBS route in Brooklyn.

Transit signal priority, planned for the M15 between Houston Street and South Ferry, gives buses approaching intersections a little more green time. The MTA predicted that signal priority would save Nostrand Avenue bus riders another half a minute for every mile they travel.

Those kinds of time savings, which add up quickly over a year’s worth of travel, are better late than never.

At a distracted driving event yesterday, Andrew Cuomo dodged his own responsibility for the politics of transit funding. Image: Brigid Bergin/WNYC

Andrew Cuomo knows he’s the governor of New York, right?

You couldn’t tell from this exchange about congestion pricing yesterday, via Transportation Nation:

Q: Have you seen Sam Schwartz’s revised congestion pricing plan? Do you support it?

A: I have not seen it. We’ve talked about congestion pricing for many years. We’ve tried to pass it in the past. It hasn’t passed. I don’t know that anything has happened to change that dynamic. I just don’t know if you have the political support to pass it.

That’s the kind of detached punditry that might be appropriate coming from Chris Cuomo, TV journalist, but not the governor. Andrew Cuomo, for better and for worse, practically defines political support in this state.

Let’s look back at one of Cuomo’s signature achievements, passing a law allowing same sex marriage in New York. Two years before Cuomo signed that bill into law, gay marriage didn’t have political support either. It died by a vote of 38-24 in the State Senate. That’s significantly less support than bridge tolls had in the same year, which only needed votes from four more state senators.

Cuomo didn’t sagely nod his head and tell New York’s gay couples that he didn’t know if there was enough political support for them to marry. He launched an all-out effort to, in his words, change the dynamic.

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In late 2008, then-Governor David Paterson stood with Richard Ravitch and Michael Bloomberg to announce his support for tolling the East and Harlem River bridges. Will Paterson continue to serve as a voice for road pricing and transit funding on the MTA board? Image: Seth Wenig/Associated Press

As first reported by the Daily News this morning, Governor Andrew Cuomo has nominated former Governor David Paterson to serve as the newest member of the MTA board.

Paterson is an unusually high-profile pick for the board — he will have nominated some of his fellow board members — and it’s not yet clear what the political implications are of Cuomo selecting his predecessor. Will Paterson’s status, for example, lend him more leeway to speak freely on transit issues than other gubernatorial nominees?

For transit advocates, there’s a lot of promise in the possibility of David Paterson turning his attention to the MTA. What the system needs right now is money, and there aren’t many public officials who know that better than Paterson.

It was Paterson that helped pass the payroll mobility tax, which brought in well over $1 billion a year for the MTA. That measure, unpopular with suburban lawmakers, has been absolutely critical in keeping the transit system afloat, though it wasn’t enough to prevent Paterson from presiding over an unprecedented series of service cuts and fare hikes. Now, the payroll tax is under attack. Just last December, Senate Republicans won a deal to eliminate part of the tax, removing $320 million from the dedicated funding stream Paterson helped establish and forcing the MTA to depend on unreliable annual appropriations from Albany.

Moreover, Paterson knew at the time that even the payroll tax wasn’t enough to pay for the aging transit system, and was perhaps the most important supporter of instituting tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges. Paterson first appointed Richard Ravitch to find a solution to the MTA’s fiscal woes, then backed the resulting plan, including bridge tolls. “It’s either going to be fare hikes or it’s going to be tolls and a combination of payroll taxes, but it’s the only way,” said Paterson in 2008.

Eventually, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver endorsed bridge tolls, but the same amigos who temporarily handed control of the State Senate to Republicans also scuttled tolls in that chamber. Even after bridge tolls were officially dead, however, Paterson stayed firm in his support for them.

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Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said today that funding transit adequately is "one of the biggest challenges we face." Image: Borough President's Office

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer made the state of New York City’s transit system one of his top policy issues in the run-up to next year’s local elections, saying in a speech this morning that finding new revenues for transit would be his top priority in Albany if elected mayor.

“I believe we need to get back to an era in which public transportation is acknowledged as an essential civic responsibility — right alongside public safety and education,” he said. ”Today, the MTA is being held together with a combination of unprecedented borrowing, and fare hikes as far as the eye can see… The fundamental problem is a lack of reliable funding streams for transit.”

Speaking to the Association for a Better New York, a civic association tied to the city’s business elites, Stringer called for new dedicated transit revenues (specifically, reinstating the commuter tax), and the creation of an infrastructure bank just for transit, and the creation of new bus, light rail and subway lines. “This is about building the infrastructure for our success,” said Stringer. “It’s about attracting talent and keeping it here. It’s about minimizing the frustration of getting to work and the uncertainties of getting home.”

On the revenue side, Stringer called for bringing back the commuter tax, which would be levied on incomes of suburban residents working in New York City. A commuter tax dedicated to the city’s general fund was collected until 1999, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver allowed the repeal to pass in order to win suburban support for Democrats. According to Stringer, reinstating the tax at the same rate of 0.45 percent would raise $725 million annually, which he said should be dedicated entirely to the MTA.

Stringer admitted that getting suburban legislators in Albany to agree to tax themselves to pay for transit would be a tough lift, but that doing nothing isn’t an option. “The politicians can put their heads in the sand,” said Stringer. “We’re going to end up collapsing our mass transit system.”

He also promised that it would be his top legislative priority if elected mayor, akin to Mayor Bloomberg’s push for mayoral control upon taking office. “Every mayor, when they’re elected, gets one big ticket from Albany,” he said.

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