City & State New York
July 31, 2017
SHUTTERSTOCK
MTA to maintain a state of good repair is the responsibility of the board.” All eyes are on Joe Lhota, newly reappointed to lead the MTA as its chairman. He’s offered an action plan to fix the subways, along with a price tag – $836 million in the short term, followed by an additional $8 billion in the next capital plan. But he’s also seeding doubt that the MTA’s leadership will act independently from Cuomo; at a July press conference, Lhota forcefully echoed the governor’s line that the city is responsible for funding the subways. Cuomo is known to use a strong hand at the MTA when it’s politically advantageous, taking credit for the New Year’s opening of the Second Avenue subway and directing the authority’s board to lower tolls for Staten Island residents during an election year, fast-track his plan to replace toll booths with cashless tolls, and approve the installation of LED lights on its bridges. But as the subways are falling apart, Cuomo attempted a disappearing act in June, when he said he had no control over the authority. Editorial boards and advocates, led by Riders Alliance – which at one point cre-
stitutional fixes are not going to find the amount of revenue that’s necessary to fix the system,” she said. “They have to be coupled together.” Before fixes can even be considered, Ravitch said, the MTA needs to do an accurate assessment of its maintenance and operational needs, directed by a truly independent board that’s not simply following orders from the governor. “How do you know what should be spent? How do you know how much money you need? Nobody’s asking the right questions,” he said. “The failure of the
ated a cardboard cutout of the governor so straphangers could vent their frustrations – kept the focus on Cuomo. His recent attempts to point the finger at the city notwithstanding, Cuomo has responded to this pressure - though advocates are less than inspired by his genius grant competition and ephemeral promises of more funding for the MTA. Where things go from here is anybody’s guess. When Ravitch led the MTA in the 1980s, the city’s business titans were key to building support for fixing the subways, but
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that force is missing today. “They became big advocates of enacting taxes in Albany to support the MTA,” he said. “Different era, different kind of people in the business community, I guess.” Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul Steely White also wants a more vocal business leadership. “There’s this old mythology of Rockefeller and Ravitch and others going down into the tunnels and showing their business cohort the deterioration firsthand,” he said. “We need that moment again, when there’s a new coalition of businesses. A whole flock of private sector interests are still on the sidelines. I’m talking about tech, primarily, but there are others. They need to be activated. They need to be politicized around this issue because right now a lot of their employees are up in arms.” Continued deterioration in subway service could force Cuomo’s hand, bringing him to endorse something like congestion pricing if the political costs of not doing so become untenable. The governor’s approval rating is already starting to dip as voters give him poor grades on his handling of the MTA. “I strongly suspect that there has to be a complete level of rage from the transit-riding public in order to make this happen. Maybe we’re approaching that,” said John Kaehny, executive director of government transparency watchdog Reinvent Albany. “We’ve got the crisis because the MTA is in crisis, but we don’t have the champion.” Until that champion steps forward, people advocating for change like Slevin are frustrated by de Blasio and Cuomo. “I’m somewhat baffled by the fact that neither the mayor nor the governor have taken this up at this point, given the daily experience of riders throughout the region,” she said. “They could be a hero and show that they are going to be a leader that fixes the subway, fixes the bus system, fixes the commuter rail system.” Without a state or city executive that embraces congestion pricing, Move NY proponents are fed up. “Sometimes you’ve got all the right ingredients – you’ve got funders, you’ve got polling showing New Yorkers support it, you’ve got editorial boards, you’ve got elected officials – and yet if you don’t have the governor and the mayor, it makes it hard to do something like this. But that doesn’t mean there’s not huge value in seeding the ground,” Matthiessen said. “We’ve done everything we need to do.” Stephen Miller is a freelance journalist covering transportation.