Dogs and Weasels

MTA Cuts Service

DOT Doesn't Want

Private Operators

To Fill the Slack.


Daily News Calls 64

Legislators 'Weasels'


Today was the third workday New Yorkers have coped with more crowding in subways and buses, and delays at those bus stops that are still operating. These problems have been aggravated by the MTA's service cuts necessitated by its substantial deficit which, in part, is the result of reduced appropriations by the state legislature.

Service is highly unlikely to be restored by the MTA as long as the fiscal crisis continues, which will be a prolonged period of time.

We do not believe the public should be deprived of necessary service just because the MTA cannot operate without losing money.

Why don't the black cabs or other transit vehicles take over and serve the locations that the MTA has abandoned?

There are enough vehicles and enough drivers to serve the majority of the riders who have been shucked by the MTA, which incur much higher operating costs than necessity requires.

This is a field in which Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Taxi & Limousine Commissioner, former Councilmember David Yassky should take the initiative. (BTW, both these posts were held during portions of the Giuliani Administration by Christopher R. Lynn.)

Mayor Bloomberg's new Deputy Mayor, Stephen Goldsmith (former Mayor of Indianapolis) is noted for his past success in privatizing municipal services. What better area is there to try out privatization than one in which the public agency in charge has abandoned for financial reasons its commitment to provide service?

The advocates of 'planned shrinkage' a generation ago did not, as far as I know, actually withdraw services from neighborhoods they predicted would shrink. In this case, service is also being curtailed in stable or growing areas, simply because it is uneconomic for the MTA to operate it. The reason transit is a public service rather than a private operation is because service is assumed to be maintained as a basic civic amenity, whether it is profitable for the transit provider or not.

Three years ago the MTA acquired seven private bus lines which had received city subsidies, mostly in Queens, and assumed their obligations. Could their financial picture have changed so drastically that the lines the MTA (capital budget tax dollars) bought and paid for are now incapable of operating without substantially increasing the transit agency's deficit? Why buy the lines if you weren't going to operate them?

The entire affair undermines to some extent the credibility of the long-suffering MTA, which is wrongly accused as much as it is properly faulted. Whenever the MTA is short of money, existing subway and bus lines it operates are at risk of abandonment.

How do you build a community, or persuade home buyers to invest in it, if its lifeline of transportation is likely to be cut any year the agency has a fiscal shortfall - which, of course, will be every year since they appear incapable of containing their labor costs?

This is not to say that no lines should be eliminated. Some express buses are substantially underutilized. The MTA cannot provide taxi service for a handful of passengers. But when calculations begin after the number of reductions is fixed, some routes are likely to be abolished which provide valuable service. Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people, may now be more than a half-mile from a subway station. Think of the consequences in rain or snow, and on the disabled who cannot be accommodated by Access-a-Ride.

The picture is made more complex by the division of responsibility for the MTA between the state and the city. The governor has ten appointees on the board, plus fractionals. The Mayor has four. This enables the Mayor to escape responsibility for the decisions made by the agency, including resource allocation decisions for lines within the City of New York, which should be within his purview.

The City Council has used its budget authority to keep firehouses and senior centers open, and to reduce cuts for libraries. Yet it seems powerless to do anything about the MTA's abandonment of subway and bus service, although these cuts will have more impact on peoples' daily lives than the cuts that were restored. The MTA is insulated from elected officials, and the farcical 'hearings' held for each borough, although required by law, are no substitute for civic participation. The non-elected MTA board members, who are unknown to the public except for the lady who is dating Paul McCartney, either follow their own wishes, or the desires of the person who appointed them.

As Chris Lynn has suggested, the lines should be made available to private operators, who can determine whether the market will support them. One such entrepreneur, Joel Azumah of Brooklyn, says the MTA is discouraging riders from taking his buses.

The News reports the situation today in an article on p13 by Barry Paddock, CHARTER BIZMAN VOWS TO MOTOR ON:

"The young entrepreneur running private buses along discontinued MTA bus lines blames his lower than expected ridership on interference from the city. Joel Azumah says the Department of Transportation is scaring his customers away by claiming he’s not legally authorized to pick riders off the street."

We wondered whether and why this was so, and called DOT to find out. Here is the agency's response:

"We have asked the operator to submit documentation to show cause why they believe they can operate without the required authorizations and we await their reply. Until we have an opportunity to review their submissions, we have directed them to cease and desist from operation."

To us, this attitude evokes the story of the dog in the manger, one of Aesop's immortal fables. "One afternoon a dog lay down to sleep in a manger (a trough or open box in a stable designed to hold feed or fodder for livestock). When he woke up, he kept the cattle from eating the hay he had rested on, although he was unable to eat it himself. (Dogs don't eat hay.) A hungry ox uttered the moral: "People often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves." The MTA and the DOT should not try to prevent others from using a service that they are no longer able to provide.

As long as we are moralizing, allow us to call to your attention to a Daily News editorial from Monday, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY: These Pols Slashed Transit Funds Then Blamed the MTA. Click here, it reads much better than our synopsis.

Last December, both houses in Albany, with the governor's consent, reduced state aid to the MTA by $143 million. In order to make up for a portion of this newly-imposed addition to its deficit, the MTA board felt compelled to reduce operating costs by $93 million through service cuts. Then, the same legislators who voted to cut the MTA funds had the gall to denounce the agency for the service reductions necessitated by their actions. The News, irate at what it considers hypocrisy and showboating, lists the 64 members who voted to take $143 million from the MTA, and then denounced the agency for $93 million in service reductions.

We now quote the News editorial: "What these lawmakers excel at is deceiving their constituents.

"The MTA's service area is represented by 142 members of the assembly and senate. Fully 64 of them wrote letters, testified or issued statements railing about planned transit cuts, after voting to cut the MTA's funding.

"They had the gall to posture as champions of a furious public. Each of these weasels must be held to account. Here are all of their names in alphabetic order."

Click here to see if your Senator and Assemblymember are on this list.

What could the legislators' excuses be? Experience gives us some hints as to what they might say.

1) If we are all guilty, then none of us is guilty.

2) Albany, like Sodom, is a city of liars, why pick on us?

3) The devil (Speaker Silver) made us do it.

4) I thought the cuts would be in the other guy's district.

5) We'll make it up in a supplemental budget.

6) The MTA is no good anyway, why should you believe them instead of me?

7) I didn't make that statement. It was an error by staff.

8) Any combination of the previous seven excuses, whatever sticks to the wall.

Readers are invited to submit their excuses for the legislators who the Daily News dubs weasels. Actually, that characterization is unfair. The weasel is small (6 to 14 inches long, not counting their tails which can be just as long) and furry. It is a mammal that burrows underground. Their family includes ferrets, stoats and ermines. They eat frogs, toads and small rabbits, and are certainly no enemies of human beings.

Merriam-Webster defines a weasel as "a sneaky, untrustworthy or insincere person." This is rampant speciesism. Weasels of the world, unite. Help prevent hate speech about innocent creatures.

P.S. The budget is now 90 days late. The distance between bases in baseball is 90 feet. A right angle is 90 degrees. The latitude of the North and South Pole is 90 N or S. And as we now know, there are 90 minutes in a soccer match. When we were very young, 90 in school was a grade of A, and rarely achieved. Interstate 90 includes the Massachusetts Turnpike and the New York Thruway, which was named for Gov. Thomas E. Dewey (1943-54), whose reputation by comparison rises daily.

Incumbents Imperiled

Voters Want Change,

But Few New Yorkers

Are Entering Politics

By Henry J. Stern
May 19, 2010

Today, Wednesday, May 19, the New York State budget is 49 days late, but who's counting?

AN ABBREVIATED ALMANAC

The gold rush to California in 1849 inspired the name of the San Francisco football team, the 49ers. The East Coast equivalent is the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, which recalls the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 in a place also called the City of Brotherly Love.

The 49th state to be admitted to the union was Alaska. Statehood came in January 1959, just 92 years after the United States, through Secretary of State William H. Seward, purchased the land from the Russian Empire under Czar Alexander II for $7.2 million, which is a trifle less than two cents per acre. The state's area is 586,412 square miles, which is more than twice the size of Texas. The Census Bureau estimated its population in 2009 as 698,473. That is about 1.2 people per square mile.

We report to you on intercontinental visibility, which has been a public issue. On a clear day, it is possible to see across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia, but only from Little Diomede Island, which is 2 1 /2 miles from Big Diomede, part of Russia.

The Diomedes are located in the middle of the strait between the two countries. Little Diomede is home to about 170 Inuits of the Inupiat tribe. Big Diomede had an Inuit population as well, but they were deported by the Soviet authorities to the mainland, and the larger island now has a military presence. So saith Wikipedia.

VOTERS SHOW THEIR DISCONTENT

As the mainstream press has reported, the voters in primary states showed their discontent with incumbent politicians by the defeat of Senator Arlen Specter in Philadelphia and the victory of Dr. Rand Paul, son of Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, a former Presidential candidate. The relatively poor showing of Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Democratic primary has been called another example of the unpopularity of officeholders, although other issues were involved in her contest. Nationwide polls have repeatedly shown a low level of confidence in public officials, as well as a desire for change.

WHAT ABOUT NEW YORK?

For years, we have known that New York State has one of the most dysfunctional legislatures in the United States. The mutiny in the Senate last summer left no winners; the month-long spectacle, ending with victory for the pirates, was an embarrassment to both parties. This year the Assembly appears unusually supine. The inability of both houses and the governor to agree on a budget is but the most recent example of failure to transact business in a timely and reasonable manner.

One would think that with the failures of the legislature and the wave of discontent with the incumbents, there would be many newcomers challenging the status quo. However, there appear at this time to be relatively few, which means that most incumbents, unpopular as some may be, are likely to be re-elected.

The ballot access requirements in New York State are formidable, and designed to exclude competitors who do not have the support of political machines. To run for the Assembly, one must collect 500 valid signatures of voters in the party and in the district, and for the State Senate the requirement is 1000 signatures. In the past, many signatures have been excluded on technical grounds, or on some defect in the witnessing of the signatures. People who sign petitions can be dragged into court by hostile attorneys to explain the circumstances of their signing. The expensive and time-consuming process of defending petitions works a hardship on candidates with limited resources who are less well known than incumbents.

Although the facade is one of democracy and free and open elections, the reality is that it is difficult and costly to challenge an entrenched politician. Nonetheless it can be done. Many people would vote for change if they had an alternative to the incumbent.

It is said that incumbents are difficult to defeat, but in most cases this is conjecture. In fact, we do not know how vulnerable the majority of incumbents truly are, because no one attempts to run against them. If incumbents are impossible to topple, why do party machines across the nation go to great lengths to deter candidates from challenging their officeholders in primaries?

We do not endorse candidates or urge specific individuals to run or not to run for public office. But in America, people do have the opportunity to compete to try to effect change. The work of Mayor Ed Koch and New York Uprising in securing pledges to support reform from candidates for public office is an example of what can be done by individuals who unite to seek change.

The first day to collect signatures this year is June 8; the last day to submit them to the Board of Elections is July 15. Candidates are advised to collect at least twice as many signatures as required, preferably three times, because names may be challenged and signatures invalidated by opposition attorneys and operatives. If you are inclined to run for public office, and you have enough friends to help you, the stars are aligned.

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their state.