Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared live today on ABC-7’s Eyewitness News Mornings @ 10 with Shirleen Allicot, Mike Marza, and Sam Champion to discuss the MTA’s 20-Year Needs Assessment, record ridership, and other transportation-related topics.
A transcript of the interview appears below.
Shirleen Allicot: Can we deliver? That is the big question. All those requests that you’ve had, right? Well, joining us now, MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber. We have so many questions to ask you.
Janno Lieber: I’m here to answer.
Allicot: And if you could possibly deliver, because I really feel that there is this big goal especially with congestion pricing, that plan, to get people out of their cars and onto mass transit but what are we really doing to entice them?
Lieber: It's a good point. Let's just bear in mind, congestion pricing is anticipated to add only 75,000 to 100,000 people to mass transit. We’re down two million from before COVID. We have plenty of room. The question you're asking, which is the right one, is: How do we maintain and even improve service? Number one – where the rest of the country, because of reduced ridership, they’re talking about cutting service and raising fares dramatically – here, we're not only maintaining service, we're adding service. This was part of Governor Hochul’s budget last year. Where we solved the MTA’s financial crisis coming out of COVID, really solved it for five years, and we're adding service. So, we're adding service in the off hours, not just in the peak, like nights weekends, because what we're seeing is people, when they have choices about how to move around the city, they're choosing transit, so we want to make that more attractive. That's part of the answer.
Mike Marza: We've seen some of these challenges. We put them up on the screen there. We all saw it last week. We were talking right here on this show about the impacts of these heavy rains and things that we're going to see more frequently. So, some of these challenges are coinciding with the pandemic, the drop in ridership. So how do you tackle that? Maintain the service but also continue to lure people back to the system that maybe have not returned yet?
Lieber: Well, hybrid work is here to stay. But we are making progress. This last Monday was the best Monday since pre-COVID. I mean, literally we are seeing significant growth. We had close to 80%.
Sam Champion: That is a brand new stat I hadn't heard yet.
Lieber: So, Mondays. Mondays are moving. Now, the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday, basically every day is 4 million riders, which was a milestone but took us two years to get to. So there's definitely a movement back. And I think people are seeing service, subway service literally on the numbers – best it's been in 10 years. So there are incentives that we're developing but part of what we talked about yesterday, and you guys covered it, is that we have to keep investing in the system. It's 100 years old. It wants to fall down. Water, chemicals applied to concrete, and—
Champion: All bad for everything you have.
Lieber: And Sam can tell us all about where climate change has taken us, so we have to keep investing in this.
Champion: But I want to throw that at you, because on top of everything and everyone says aging infrastructure, these trains are how old? This is how old? We got to fix it. And yeah, I mean there's a little frustration within that and we did another study for it. But I'm gonna throw something at you that no one expected, eight inches of rain draining into the system and in a regular fashion, not just one time but we just did it a couple of years ago as well. How do you even tackle this problem of climate change? What are you guys looking at?
Lieber: Well, listen, number one, we got to acknowledge the system is very resilient. You know, we pump, on a dry day, we pump what? 13 million gallons of water out of the system just from underground water and stuff. We had to do like 20 million on the day, on that last Friday. You guys covered it so well.
The challenges: We're not going to keep water out of the system. The first thing that we need to talk about, honestly, is the City storm sewer capacity. This is New York City, not the MTA. But when we get backed up, it's usually because the city's sewer system can only take an inch to three quarters in an hour, and we get two and a half to three inches.
Champion: And that water over tops into you.
Lieber: Exactly. So, that's the number one issue. But we are making huge investments to protect our infrastructure. Number one, the Hudson Line, that beautiful line along the Hudson River, Metro-North up to Poughkeepsie and Albany, it's, you know, with rising seas, rising water levels, it's very much under risk. We're going to have to continue to make strategic investments. We're not going to keep all the water out of the system, but we're gonna have to work on making sure that we don't have conditions at the street level that just pour water down the stairs, which is what you saw last year. We can do it, you know. We have some time. But part of the reason we put that report out yesterday is to alert everybody that we got to start investing.
Allicot: I was just about to ask you that, because I mean $1.5 trillion, this is a very intricate report and it seems like you kind of really had to prove why you need that kind of money over the next 20 years.
Lieber: Listen, with the $1.5 trillion, thank you for mentioning it, that is the value of the system that we all own. We all own this industrial asset that our foremothers and forefathers left us. It's worth a trillion and a half dollars. Basic business principles say you would be investing billions and billions to maintain that. So that's the point we were trying to make yesterday. We have 8,000 subway cars, 6,000 buses, 2,000 miles of track. We have power stations and rail yards and maintenance facilities that are completely neglected that look like the Land That Time Forgot. We love this system. We love this system and it is New York's lifeblood. I always say for New Yorkers transit is like air and water. We need it to survive. You got to keep it going.
Champion: I love Shirleen's, I love your point though, because people think they can just look at you and say, “spend money, make it better.” But you use a report like this to go to the people who have the money to say give us the money and they may say yes, and they may say no. How you spend the money, we may agree with you or not, but you need that to get the money. Am I right?
Lieber: You're absolutely right. This is the first step. Remember the new capital program we're going to do – the current one expires at the end of 24 – so, we have to have a new one in about 15 months. And that's going to take leadership from the Governor who has been great on transit, but also the Legislature, all the stakeholders, all the communities. We want to start the discussion so everybody can have their say about what are we prioritizing. Sam, you got it right.
Allicot: Well, we want to say we all use the subway.
Lieber: God bless you, thank you for the business. [inaudible]
Allicot: These folks use the subway. And you know there's a lot of things as you just saw, a lot of people, a lot of viewers have specific things that they really want to see fixed. So, I figured Mike, you, um?
Marza: Well, no, I mean, you heard the air conditioner situation, how much of a reality is that to get air conditioning on the platforms?
Lieber: Listen, number one the best thing we can do, honestly, is add a lot of service so people get on those air-conditioned trains, they don't spend a lot of time in the platforms.
Marza: In all fairness, they do.
Lieber: Putting AC in these open-air systems is pretty tough. The new stations we're building do have what they call air tempering, which does bring the temperature down a little bit. But in the era of climate change, we have to look at the possibility that we may have so many 90-degree days that we have to add more AC, more air tempering. So we actually put out a request for a study of options on how to do that just last week.
Marza: So, timeframe-wise, what do you think?
Lieber: Well, you've got to study it, you've got to figure out how you would do it, then you have to figure out what it would cost. We're talking a lot of money. I'm still an old New Yorker who says I want those trains to come by every couple of minutes, so you get on there and it's well air conditioned.
Marza: That would save us on the subway smell.
Allicot: Game changer!
Champion: And thank you for coming in and just being you and talking about this as a passion thing because again, we as New Yorkers and New Jersey and Connecticut, we may agree with how you spend the money or we may disagree with it but knowing that you're a passionate individual about it helps us. I like getting to know you, I like people at least getting to know you.
Lieber: Well, thanks. It's always fun to talk. Every New Yorker cares about this passionately, so I'm here to listen.
Allicot: Chairman, thank you.
Marza: Thanks for coming in.