Jaybird Flies

Jay Walder Is Not Casey Jones,

Jumps From NYC to Hong Kong

Because MTA Nears Fiscal Crash

Jay Walder is no Casey Jones.

Unlike the iconic railroad engineer, who kept his hand on the throttle while his train plunged down curving tracks to disaster, and by doing so saved the lives of many people, the MTA chief Jay Walder did not even complete two years at the helm of the transit authority before he jumped ship for a more secure and lucrative berth in a private, profitable transit system.

Walder was not shanghaied in the dead of night; he is going voluntarily to MTR (Mass Transit Railway), a railroad colossus headquartered in Hong Kong. Any idea where they might bank?

Actually, Walder had a number of good reasons for his secretive flight from New York and the MTA. The first is the impoverishment of the system he is leaving. The MTA has consistently been undersupported, not given enough money to operate, let alone to build and maintain the system in good repair. Before he came, they overspent wildly, in part because of bureaucracy, over-engineering, and weakness before unions, as well as traditional corruption, particularly in construction and real property. Walder did not want his reputation endangered by too many years presiding over a system subject to those perils.

Second is the apparent indifference of Governor Cuomo to the plight of the MTA, and the absence of any effort to develop a relationship with Walder. It was not nearly as bad as Governor Paterson, who refused to speak with Lee Sander, Walder's predecessor, or even to return his calls, because Sander had been appointed by his predecessor, Governor Spitzer. Sander did not have the luxury of another job offer as Walder did, so he hung around until he was dismissed by Paterson on May 7, 1999 on practically one day's notice, even though it took more than two months after that to find a successor (Walder).

Sander was not the only Paterson commissioner to be fired practically instantly. On October 21, 2010, just twelve days before the election of Governor Cuomo, the Environmental Protection Commissioner, Pete Grannis, who had served since the start of the Spitzer administration and before that, spent 32 years in the Assembly, was told to clear out immediately by Larry Schwartz, at the time a key aide to Governor Paterson. The trumped-up charge against Grannis was that he had sought to avoid budget cuts for his agency, which every commissioner worth anything does every year. Grannis was told that Paterson would not speak to him about the matter and that his dismissal was final. He got the news as he was preparing to deliver a speech and receive an award from an environmental group at what became his last supper in office.

The question arose as to why Grannis was fired just then. Why not leave it to the incoming governor (Cuomo) to choose his cabinet? Why should Grannis' 36 years of state service end in peremptory dismissal? One plausible explanation is based on where Larry Schwartz is now. Governor Cuomo has appointed him Secretary to the Governor, which is the equivalent to chief of staff on the national level and the same post Schwartz held in the Paterson administration.

It is likely that, in firing Grannis on the spot, Schwartz was serving his new master, Cuomo, and sparing the governor-elect the embarrassment of firing an environmental icon. Cuomo has the right to choose his own commissioners, and Joe Martens is a good choice for the position, with a fine environmental record. Nonetheless, we recount the story now to tell you how it was done, which is in accord with the important Rule 26, "No prints."

Walder chose to accept what could be the best transit job in the world, at a multiple of the salary which was begrudged to him in New York. He thus avoided the fate of his predecessor Sander and his colleague Grannis.

Last night, I watched The Call on New York 1. People called and emailed the station to express their views on Walder. Almost all were very negative, with the exception of Richard Ravitch, the former lieutenant governor, as well as MTA chair. Ravitch was highly complimentary, as was Mayor Bloomberg. The hostile attitude of the public came because of the service and personnel reductions that Walder was obliged to make because of the lack of public funds and steadily rising expenses, most but not all of which were uncontrollable. How many years should one devote to serving people who think you are doing a lousy job, when in fact you are doing a very competent job at an obviously thankless task?

One could tell that many of the disgruntled callers were transit employees or union activists. Even so, there were precious few callers who admired the service they received from the MTA or its departing chairman. If there were an attempt to jam the switchboard, it succeeded. If there were not, the negative sentiment was more authentic. Of course, no one likes waiting for a train on a hot platform, being squeezed or crushed inside a car, or being delayed for an indefinite period, whether by "the dispatcher" or by "train traffic ahead".

The underlying fact is that the transit system is in a financial bind comparable to that which faces the United States, except that it cannot run up fourteen trillion dollars in deficits and then ask for more. Sooner or later, probably sooner, fares will rise and interest on the MTA's indebtedness will increase. The State and City, traditional sources of additional funding, are, as we know, undergoing severe fiscal problems and highly unlikely to substantially increase transit subsidies, if indeed they are willing to retain them. One cannot mention state aid without recalling with sorrow the disgraceful decision of the New York State Assembly to eliminate the commuter tax on May 17, 1999, a date which will live in infamy in mass transit history. How long should Walder remain at the helm of a ship which takes on more water each year?

We believe that Jay Walder is, by and large, a decent, honorable, hard-working and competent bureaucrat, who will be missed after he is gone. He is not an inspirational figure, nor did he attempt to be one. Nicole Gelinas, giving Walder a mixed review, asks today in The Post: "Can the next MTA chief be a fighter?" One answer to that question is that the MTA chief is an appointed, rather than an elected official. Major funding decisions are made by the elected, and it is the job of the appointed to do the best they can with the resources that they have been given.

Of course, they can and should demand more; that is what Commissioner Pete Grannis (who was from 1974 to 2005 an elected official, given to expressing his own opinions) did in October 2010, for which he was summarily politically beheaded in what appears to be a pre-election housecleaning. Fortunately, Grannis has found a new job in what appears to be a more congenial setting, so his public service can continue and his pension clock keep running.

"Speak truth to power" is a noble slogan, but truth is better spoken by those with no power than by those with some. People with intermediate degrees of power are likely to lose what little they have if they engage in unappreciated candor. Those outside the Beltway (or its local equivalent) are less subject to the whims of the authorities.

We wish Walder the best in his new adventure, which we hope will be excellent, for the sake of the millions of Chinese and others who will benefit from his services. The search for a successor should begin at once. It will be a real challenge to the Governor and the MTA to find someone as knowledgeable and professionally skilled as Walder. But once such a person is hired, s/he must be given the appropriation that is needed for the MTA to do the job right.

P.S. It is ironic that people now go from New York to Hong Kong in order to triple their wages.

Four Wheels Bad

Today, we are told, is the one hundredth anniversary of the removal of tolls from the East River bridges, which at the time ranged from one to ten cents.

One would think that such an occasion would be a day of celebration, people rejoicing at the freedom to travel from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens and to return without stopping to pay a toll to a troll. A bridge is a street over water was the prevailing philosophy when the city was young and growing.

For most of us, that is our sentiment today, but a cadre of transit activists insistently desires a return to the days of the toll collector on the bridge, as well as charging motorists to go from one neighborhood to another in Manhattan.

There is a politically correct sentiment that the automobile is an evil contraption, similar to the feeling in the 19th century that horseless carriages were infernal machines, whereas horse droppings, which are organic, were no problem. The truly committed car-haters try one scheme after another to make using a car in the city expensive, uncomfortable and, where they can, illegal. These nanny-staters want you to travel their way or not at all. Their credo: two wheels good, four wheels bad.

One technique the Luddites employ is to expand vastly a network of lanes reserved exclusively for bicyclists, even in narrow streets of lower Manhattan, where there is barely room for one lane of traffic alongside the parked vehicles. This experiment was tried on a much more modest scale in the Koch administration; it ended with the mayor over-ruling the transportation commissioner, declaring the experiment unsuccessful and closing down the lanes. Bicycling on city streets is desirable, but it can have tragic outcomes, with the death of the gifted Marilyn Dershowitz, mowed down by a mail truck on West 29th Street in Manhattan, the most recent example.

We recognize that there are various modes of transportation in New York City: railroads, subways, buses, cars and trucks, taxicabs, motorcycles, ferries, pedicabs, bicycles and travel by foot. They should all be encouraged and supported where their use is appropriate because they are needed to take New Yorkers where they want to go. One type of vehicle should not be considered as the enemy of every other.

Three years ago, the Assembly defeated a proposal to charge fees for travel on the city streets. It was called "congestion pricing", as if it were a remedy for a disease, congestion of the lung or the throat. In fact, once such a scheme is adopted, toll gates could be placed anywhere, at any hours, if not immediately, then by amendment of the law, which would be much easier to achieve than its adoption. The income tax began in 1913 ranging from 1 to 7 per cent.

London has already raised its congestion fee from 5 to 12 pounds, and increased the area in which it is charged. If the purpose of the plan is to meet the capital or operating deficits of the transit system, a new revenue stream will lead to increased expenditures, both for labor and for capital costs.

The recent construction history of the MTA is exemplified by the 2 Broadway fiasco, which in terms of wasted money, adjusted for inflation, exceeds CityTime in the annals of municipal scandal. A prime office building location, in the financial district at the southern tip of Manhattan, was selected for back-office use, when space could have been acquired in Brooklyn or Queens for far less money. Then, extensive renovations, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, were paid for by the MTA. People from the MTA and union officials were convicted and sent to jail for their role in the corruption. On top of all that, the MTA does not even own the building; it leases it from one Tamir Sapir, an immigrant from the Soviet Union who drove a taxicab and later became a real estate magnate. Sapir is a good example of the opportunities available in America, but leasing from him is by no means the best way to spend public funds, which have to be made up out of the farebox or taxation revenues. Google Sapir for information about his legal and political connections.

The concept of observing 2011 by regressing to a system discarded in 1911 is simply a method for a wasteful free-spending agency to meet its chronic financial needs by imposing additional taxes on the people. Here are ideas the MTA does not seem to have thought of yet: impose a sales tax on transit fares; put odometers on automobiles and charge for each mile the streets are used; increase municipal garage fees to the level of privately-owned garages and parking lots. In case you didn't know, the last sentence is irony, like Swift's "A Modest Proposal", but not as well done.

The extravagant reconstruction of the Fulton Street subway connection is a prime example of overbuilding at public expense, which exceeded a billion dollars for what is essentially a pre-existing subway interchange. The excuse here was that there was Federal money available which had to be spent in lower Manhattan. The half-billion dollar reconstruction of the South Ferry station was marginally more useful, but also over-engineered. The wholesale destruction of trees in Battery Park has yet to be remedied.

Mass transit is important and needs adequate support. The lockbox should be kept locked. The MTA, however, does not deserve a blank check, nor should it acquire a new revenue streams by burdening New Yorkers whose only taxable act is trying to go from one part of the city to another.

Public officials who oppose new taxes should realize that this scheme is a particularly burdensome tax whose impact will be felt by people whose jobs require local travel. Whatever costs accrue to business will be passed on to consumers in the form of price increases.

New York City did the right thing a century ago. Let us not undo the good work of our ancestors.

MTA Minions Face Axe

BREAKING NEWS: Just as we are about to publish, Crain's New York informs us that the MTA's budget deficit is $105 million greater than the agency had previously estimated. Real estate tax revenues based on property transfers were far short of expectations for the first six months of 2010. This will further stress the financially beleaguered agency, which this Sunday will impose substantial service reductions.

MTA Running On Fumes

More Cuts Are Predicted

What About Big Earners?

Fares to Rise in January

The service cuts on bus and subway lines that will take effect Sunday morning have received less attention than they deserve. Apart from the usual suspects, transit buffs, local elected officials and neighborhood activists, there was no popular uprising in protest of the substantial reductions in bus routes. Nor did the mainstream media focus on what was being lost in the five boroughs.

The MTA is complying with fiscal realities in trying to balance its budget by the end of its fiscal year, June 30. To plug its $761 million shortfall - $378 million of which the MTA claims to have been made aware of only in February when it received revised State aid projections - the MTA has devised a multi-pronged, cost-cutting approach that calls for the elimination of 141 of 280 projects in the 2010 operating budget, renegotiating vendor and supply contracts, improving inventory management, and, of course, staff and service reductions.

The MTA told us that the authority would be reducing the size of its administrative staff by 15% - in terms of payroll, not necessarily people, across the MTA's constituent agencies - and 20% at MTA headquarters. All in all, the agency is expecting to lay off, buy out, or allow to leave by attrition around 3,000 employees, out of about 70,000 total. This total includes the nearly 500 station agents whose layoffs are currently pending due to a court order, 270 bus drivers whose positions will be eliminated by the service cuts, and 600 administrative and clerical workers.

How much the cuts will impact the MTA's leadership at 347 Madison Avenue, 2 Broadway and 130 Livingston Street - the hydra-headed agency’s triple set of headquarters buildings - is difficult to gauge. For most of us, it is a question of trust in the MTA's new executive director and chairman, Jay Walder, who was nominated by Governor Paterson on July 14, 2009 and confirmed by the State Senate eight weeks later.

On the surface, Walder appears highly qualified. Clearly not a political appointee, he is a mature professional who most recently was a partner in the consulting firm of McKinsey & Co. He began his career at the MTA in 1983, heading its capital program budget office before becoming the agency's chief of staff and ultimately executive director and chief financial officer. From 2001 to 2007 Walder was managing director for finance and planning at Transport for London (their MTA). He is credited with leading the development of the transportation plans for London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics, and introducing the Oyster card, their electronic ticket for public transportation.

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

From the worm's eye view of New York Civic, we have lost our bus route on Park Avenue South. The M1 has been cut back so that it goes south on Fifth Avenue and north on Madison. How much money will be saved by rerouting a handful of buses each hour from Park to Fifth is not clear. It is likely that the number of buses on existing routes will also be reduced, because savings come from cutting the number of buses, more than by changing a route to a parallel avenue two blocks east.

It is true that there is a 6 train underneath Park Avenue South (Fourth Avenue until 1950), making local stops at 33rd, 28th and 23rd Streets. The stairs from the platform to the street range from twenty (32nd northbound) to 40 (33rd southbound). There are no elevators at these stations. The buses about to disappear are handicapped-accessible. Bus riders headed north will have to walk west to Madison Avenue, those going south can walk east to Lexington Avenue.

We do not maintain that this reduction is the most onerous of all those being imposed. In fact, we heartily approve the elimination of certain express routes in Manhattan, where we have never seen more than a handful of people on board. We understand the MTA's tactic that, if one must make reductions, let them all take effect immediately to minimize the length of time that the issue will be open for discussion, and limit the controversy that could arise.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

DIGRESSION: Immediate action also results from the use of the guillotine, an instrument devised by a French physician and professor of anatomy at the faculty of medicine in Paris, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814). He designed the machine as a humanitarian device to protect the condemned from pain resulting from protracted swipes by a clumsy axeman, or one using a dull blade.

We read in Wikipedia that in 1784, when Dr. Franz Mesmer (who, like Dr. Guillotin, Nicolas Chauvin, Jean Martinet, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the Marquis de Sade, lives on in a word) publicized his theory of animal magnetism, Louis XVI, later to be a subject of Dr. Guillotin's machine, appointed a commission to investigate the theory, which some considered offensive. Dr. G was appointed a member of the royal commission, along with one Benjamin Franklin, who was Ambassador to France at the time. Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, was also a member of the commission, but that did not save him from the guillotine in 1794, during the Reign of Terror.

You can click here to learn more about the commission, its findings, and the history of the dealings of Lavoisier and the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, who had been dismissed by Lavoisier as a young scientist and blocked by the great chemist from becoming a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

The slight understandably earned Marat’s ire, and years later when Lavoisier was denounced as a public enemy for serving as a tax collector for the deposed king, Marat fanned the flames of public outrage by accusing Lavoisier of diluting commercial tobacco and cutting off Paris’s air supply by building a defensive wall around the city.

The additional charges assured Lavoisier's eventual beheading, although Marat did not get to enjoy the spectacle, having already been assassinated, stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday in July 1793.

The execution of Lavoisier has a tragic counterpart in the United States: the 1804 killing of former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton by Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel. One case was state action and the other was a private slaying, but both were outrageous. Burr’s side of the story is told by Gore Vidal in "Burr".

BILLIONS WASTED, NO PENALTIES

RETURNING to the MTA, we have over the years been highly critical of their capital program, which has been extravagant and wasteful. The Fulton Street Transit Center has consumed over a billion dollars and is far from complete. It does not add significant new service, but generally reconnects the platforms and prettifies the tunnels at enormous expense. The spur to Eleventh Avenue and 34th Street, constructed solely at City expense, lacks a station at Tenth Avenue and 42nd Street, which would serve many more riders and accommodate the new residences in Midtown West.

We will go no further here into the mismanagement of the MTA over the years, its inability to deal with its unions and its overstaffing in some areas. These shortcomings are not yet the fault of the current management. Lee Sander tried to clean up the mess as best he could, but he got no help from the unions or from Governor Paterson, who refused even to speak to him.

If you look in the Starchives, you will find numerous articles on the MTA we have written in the past seven years. Now the agency is strained by a financial crisis over which it has little control. Its overreaching problem is its deficit, caused in part by a militant and aggressive union, timid political management, and improvident allocation of resources.

The MTA is blamed for events that are beyond its control, and escapes responsibility for matters it has mishandled. Governors and mayors, through their apathy and inaction, have contributed to the continuing transit crisis. Basic responsibility, however, lies with the offices and board of the authority, some of whom are empty suits.

Chairman Walder will be judged in large part on how he deals with a crisis he did not create. He demanded and received his own golden parachute if he is forced to leave the job early. At this point we hope he stays with it.

I Came, I Saw, I Waited

"Si Ves Algo, Di Algo"

37-Minute Wait for M31,

The M72 That Glided By

By Henry J. Stern
May 18, 2010

There are numerous signs throughout the New York City transit system advising, "If you see something, say something." The slogan was coined by advertising guru Allen Kay, who is noted for public service commercials. It is far pithier in Spanish, "Si ves algo, di algo."

The message encourages riders to alert the authorities to potential terrorist acts. But the words should also apply to conditions in the transit system which are created internally.

In that spirit, I relate the following events which took place this weekend. They are not tragedies; no one was injured or killed. But they highlight the inconveniences to which many people are subjected every day.

At 4:15 pm on Saturday, May 15, I arrived at the bus stop on the southeast corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue, intending to take the M31 bus to my apartment on the Upper East Side. The Saturday schedule, posted on a pole at the bus stop, indicated that buses would arrive at 4:18, 4:28, 4:38 and 4:50. I waited, along with a growing number of other would-be riders. Time passed. The view of the Fuller Building across the street was pleasant, but that was not the reason we were there. Eventually, at 4:40, two M57 buses arrived. The M57 is a crosstown bus, which goes east/west on 57th Street, and north/south from Eleventh Avenue to West End Avenue to 72nd Street. I asked one driver when the M31 bus would arrive and she said the bus was coming soon. They always say that.

When an M31 bus finally arrived at 4:52, thirty-seven minutes after I had reached the bus stop, I asked the driver why the bus was so late. He politely explained that there was a large street fair on Ninth Avenue, and that crosstown traffic on 57th Street was seriously delayed. Vehicles going south on Columbus/Ninth Avenues could not proceed beyond 57th Street, and were diverted to the east or west. In either case, they caused substantial congestion on 57th Street, and the MTA buses were trapped by the overload of cars and trucks.

The normal route of the M57 is west on 57th Street to Eleventh Avenue, then south to 54th Street, and west to the middle of the block, which is the end of the line. The bus then proceeds on 54th Street to Tenth Avenue, north to 57th Street, and then east for the crosstown trip to First Avenue. The M57 does not take you to the Upper East Side, although I suppose one could change at Third Avenue or First Avenue, which both have northbound bus routes. The M57 that arrived last Saturday afternoon was at least 25 minutes late.

The city's Street Activity Permit Office, located in the Office of the Mayor, posts street fair notices in advance on a city website, and the MTA is presumably aware of such events, and has the opportunity to make adjustments in routes and schedules when circumstances warrant.

The Ninth Avenue Fair, specializing in food, is one of the city's major street festivals, and attracts substantial crowds in May of each year. The necessary two-day closure of Ninth Avenue for the fair creates substantial traffic congestion, aggravated by the fact that both Eighth and Tenth Avenues are one-way northbound, and consequently there is no southbound route between Seventh and Eleventh Avenues.

The M31 bus that arrived at Madison Avenue at 4:52 was the one that was due at 4:38. It was 14 minutes late, not bad considering the congestion. But what about the buses that were due at 4:18 and 4:28? They could not have been running ahead of schedule, so where were they? And how could they have been delayed by congestion that much longer than the bus due at 4:38? We ask the MTA to tell us what happened.

OUR PROPOSALS TO THE MTA

We can suggest two ways that this particular situation could have been avoided, or at least alleviated, without interfering with the popular street fair.

One is to route the westbound M31 and M57 northbound on Eighth Avenue and Broadway to 66th Street, and then westbound to West End Avenue. The M57 would then proceed northbound as it now does, and the M31 would proceed southbound to 54th Street, east to Tenth or Eighth Avenue, north to 57th Street, and then resume its eastbound route to Sutton Place. This should be done during the times that 57th Street is seriously congested.

The second is to turn the M31 buses around at Eighth Avenue, going north to 58th Street, east to Broadway, south to 57th Street, and then east to Sutton Place. The M57 line would either provide westbound service on 57th Street to Eleventh Avenue, where it turns north to 72nd Street and West End Avenue, or it could be routed north on Eighth Avenue/Broadway to 66th Street and west to West End.

A dispatcher located at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street could make routing decisions during the day based on the degree of congestion and delay.

We will publish the MTA's response to these suggestions. It is likely that similar adjustments in route would ease congestion problems caused by other street fairs.

THE SECOND MISADVENTURE

On Sunday, May 16, at 3:30 pm, I set forth to visit my son and his wife and children, who live on the west side. I took the M31 bus south on York Avenue, which reached 72nd Street at 3:42, where it stopped for a traffic light. After the bus stopped, we saw an MTA bus on the M72 crosstown route. The southeast corner of 72nd and York is the customary resting place of the M72, the end of the line eastbound and the start of the route westbound. Northbound or southbound passengers on the M31 transfer to the M72 if they want to go crosstown.

What happened Sunday is that, with the southbound M31 in plain sight, waiting at the light, the M72 bus took off and made the right turn on York Avenue, making it impossible for M31 passengers to transfer. The headway on the M72 at that time is fifteen minutes, so the passengers traveling west had to wait around for that time.

Although it may be difficult to ask one bus to wait until another arrives so passengers can transfer, in a case like this where the bus is waiting at the light for the intersection, it is simply wrong not to allow passengers one light cycle so they can get off one bus, walk a few feet, and get on the next.

One feels that the conscious disregard by the M72 driver for the comfort and convenience of the M31 passengers should not be tolerated. Although the weather was warm and the wait bearable, it was simply not right for the driver to do what he did. We wonder whether he violated any MTA regulation, or whether there should be a regulation requiring him to wait in these circumstances. Or are these matters best not handled by rules, because they are issues of common courtesy?

This case describes a situation which no doubt occurs on other routes at other times. We will ask the MTA to respond, and publish whatever they say.

CONCLUSION

The MTA is a large organization, whose employees do many things right and some things wrong. We believe that citizen vigilance is one way to see that more things are done right and fewer things are done wrong. We invite your suggestions on other ways to stimulate the MTA to perform better, given the limitations on its resources.