MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared on CBS-2’s The Point with Marcia Kramer this morning to discuss transportation issues.
A transcript of the interview appears below.
Marcia Kramer: Janno Lieber is the CEO and Chair of the MTA. I have to talk to you about an earthquake that hit New York City on Friday and the safety of the subways, the tunnels, and the bridges. The reason I ask that question is because I think we both know that the Ramapo Fault goes through northern New Jersey, but there are six fault lines in Manhattan, including one that goes across 125th Street. Another one that goes down the West Side of Central Park and cuts across at 32nd Street. So, I guess people are wondering are the subway tunnels safe, are the actual tunnels to New Jersey, the tunnels to Brooklyn and Queens safe? What do you think?
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber: Listen, the first thing we did within five minutes after the earthquake, we were checking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Hugh Carey-Battery Tunnel, the bridges as well, and there were literally no impacts, no discernable impacts. Those investigations continue with engineering professionals, but I have got to say, bridges and tunnels are designed for a much higher level of seismic activity than we received in this episode, so really comfortable about that. We have teams out doing inspections, always, of the tunnels, the subway tunnels and that continued as well, and the crews were under – the operating crews were all under instructions to report any abnormalities. It was a clean sweep as far as we were concerned.
Kramer: I’ve got to ask another question because you do plan, if you get the money, to take the Harlem line, the Second Avenue subway line, and take it across 125th Street, which is where the fault line is. So, will that affect how deep you dig and how you do that, if you get the money to do it?
Lieber: It’s a smart question. Listen, we're just in the early stages of investigating that. What's happening now, which is super important, is East Harlem is finally getting a subway line. You know, we promised, and all of us New Yorkers, in the 1940s when we started knocking down the elevated transit at Second and Third Avenue, promised East Harlem it could get a subway. That's finally happening now, and your point, Marcia, which is right, which is the next phase after that, and that’ll be some years from now, might be to take that line across 125th Street from 125th and Park where this next—
Kramer: Which is where the fault line is.
Lieber: Yeah, but you know what? The professionals, the geologists, the engineering professionals will absolutely study the heck out of that. And I'm not concerned that they're going to make dumb choices. If that becomes a project that we all want to do for good reasons, we're going to figure out how to do it safely.
Kramer: And you would make sure that the lines are fortified, so that they will be earthquake-proof if such a thing is possible?
Lieber: In this day and age, you don’t design a structure of that importance that’s going to carry people except to be really, really resilient to incredible seismic effects. There's not a safety issue that I'm concerned about here.
Kramer: Well, the next hot topic is the marathon and the decision that the MTA originally made to charge the Road Runners Club $750,000 to use the Verrazzano Bridge, which now the Governor has said “fix that mess,” that’s her words, not mine. And so, what are you going to do to fix the mess?
Lieber: We're going to do what the Governor asks – Kathy Hochul has been transit-riders’ biggest friend, and she plays on a much bigger playing field. I have 70,000 employees, we run the biggest mass transit system by a lot in the United States, and we're very proud of that, but she plays on a playing field of the whole state. So, we're obviously going to follow her requests and instructions. But I just always want to recognize: the staff who initiated this effort are just trying to do what I think is good government work. Just recognizing that when there’s a situation where taxpayer money is being used to subsidize an organization like the Road Runners Club that has $70 million in the bank, maybe that's something that taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing. But the Governor has to look at economic development and bigger issues. And this is an iconic event, I've run it eight times, my daughter ran it this year. I love the New York City Marathon, and we're going to follow the Governor’s instructions.
Kramer: So, does that mean that you’re going to go back to charging them what they charged last year which is $150,000?
Lieber: Yeah, and you know, listen, there’s been a good dialogue, the negotiation was far underway, and it’s possible that discussions might resume in the future, but obviously we're going to comply with the Governor's instructions on this one round and take it from there.
Kramer: The Governor also said that she wants the Road Runners to invest in advertising on trains and subways and buses. You think that’s going to come to fruition?
Lieber: That was a smart point. One of the parts of the discussion and the negotiation was the MTA saying to the Road Runners, “hey, if you buy advertising on the subways and buses and commuter rails, the MTA gets a slice of that, that is one way you could make good on this cost disagreement.” So, the Governor said that they should look into that and that might be one way of dealing with it in the future.
Kramer: So, does it actually cost the MTA $750,000 to let the Road Runners use the bridge for the half a day or whatever it takes?
Lieber: Yeah, I mean, listen, it's not complicated. It's just that's the revenue that on a normal Sunday, the tolls that come into the Verrazzano—
Kramer: $750,000 in one day?
Lieber: On a normal day. Listen, we have more traffic than ever in New York, you know, that. I'm sure we can talk about congestion pricing.
Kramer: I just have a feeling we’ll get to that.
Lieber: But yeah, $750,000. The good news is Staten Islanders get a discount on the price of the Verrazzano where it's less than a subway ride. But nevertheless, we do take in $750,000 on a normal Sunday and that was the basis of discussions that were underway.
Kramer: So, what happens to Bike New York, which is a smaller group, which uses the – it’s a five-borough bike tour which uses the bridge to get to the Staten Island portion?
Lieber: We'll figure that out. I think that, obviously, Bike New York is a less wealthy organization. And we're not going to treat them worse than the New York Road Runners Club, so we'll figure it out in a way that works for everybody.
Kramer: The reason I ask the question is because they said if they have to pay more money, they're going to have to cut some of their programs – one is free cycling – but the bigger problem is that they have a program that teaches the formerly incarcerated to become bike mechanics so they can get jobs with Citi Bike and another bike share programs and they’d hate to see that happen.
Lieber: All that, it’s all good stuff. I mean one of the challenges that we face is there's so many good causes. How do we decide which ones to fund through the MTA? The MTA is a transit agency and we're taking taxpayer money in tolls and fares to fund transit. We shouldn't be the decision-makers on which organizations get money. There are a lot of good causes in New York – that's where all this is coming from. But for the time being, we're standing pat and obviously going to do what Kathy Hochul wants us to do.
Kramer: So, let's change topics.
Lieber: Yeah.
Kramer: When Andy Byford, the “Train Daddy” was at the head of the Transit Authority, he said that he was going to fix the signals so that trains could run closer together, and so you could run more trains and relieve overcrowding. So that was before COVID, which is at least four years ago. And it seems like the trains are still overcrowded. So where are we in terms of resignaling so that we can have more trains and less overcrowding?
Lieber: So listen, it’s a great question. Here's what I want to tell you: number one, overcrowding on subway trains is way down since before COVID. We're thrilled that we have 80 plus percent—
Kramer: Yeah, but with congestion pricing, you’re going to get more people here.
Lieber: Let’s talk about that in a second. But right now, here's where we are: we're at roughly 80%, and we do – we have more service than we had before COVID. Thanks to the budget that the Governor engineered last year in Albany, we're actually running more service and it's better service. We have the best service in a dozen years. So that's great. But the point you’re making—
Kramer: Resignaling.
Lieber: Resignaling, great point. That is a big piece of our capital program, and it's actually being funded in large part by the revenues from congestion pricing.
Kramer: I knew we’d get to that.
Lieber: But you ask the right question, what signals – it sounds a little exotic, but what it does is that modern signaling allows more trains to run safely closer together, and that the computer knows exactly where they are and how to slow them down. So, we want to make more of those investments. We have it on the train and on the train, and lo and behold, those are by far the two most reliable lines. We've now almost finished putting it on the Queens Boulevard line, the , the , the and a little bit on the , and those are about to get dramatically better. The train project though is getting killed by the delay to congestion pricing, it’s one reason why we’ve got to get it going.
Kramer: What about the Lexington Avenue line, the people – does this plan work for them?
Lieber: Actually, since the Second Avenue Subway came in, the Lexington Avenue line crowding, in addition to the fact that ridership is actually down from pre-COVID, is much better than it used to be. We have newer trains, newer signals there. The trains that we're most concerned about, the lines are most concerned about are what we call the IND, those are the letter trains. That's where we’ve got to get the signaling going. The train is a top priority.
Kramer: Okay, we're going to have to leave right there for now, but we'll be right back and we will talk about congestion pricing.
[…]
Kramer: We're talking about trains with MTA boss Janno Lieber, and now the long-awaited conversation about congestion pricing.
Lieber: Always interesting.
Kramer: Here's the thing. The suit, the hearing in New Jersey, which has the most possibility of hurting congestion pricing is now over. The judge says he's going to rule, hopefully before June. Now, the thrust of the suit was that there are communities in New Jersey that are allegedly going to suffer from pollution, and they want money to compensate the communities for whatever's going on. My reaction was sort of like it since you've made arrangements to mitigate pollution in parts of New York. Why not just get rid of the suit and give them some money to mitigate the congestion concerns, if there are any, in the New Jersey communities.
Lieber: You're not wrong. We always planned to do that. But the way that this process worked out, is the Bronx had a concentration of what they call environmental justice communities. A lot of it around the South Bronx where the development of the Cross Bronx Expressway – remember in the Robert Moses era, this is a community that had so much impact, negative impact from transit and air quality issues, and they were really, really concentrated. There were a lot of them. So, we started to address those at an earlier stage. And what came out in the discussion earlier this week at court is unlike New Jersey, there are people in the Bronx in the environmental justice community who are ready to work that out. New Jersey had fewer environmental justice census tracts, and when they were moving around in the modeling, the computer modeling, so we said, “when those settle down, when it's clear which communities are going to be impacted, we will address those mitigations.” So, that will be part –that has always been the plan, that aspect of New Jersey’s suit I think was wrong.
The other point that I think is important to bear in mind here is the things that are being proposed for the Bronx actually benefit New Jersey. Deeper discounts for overnight, so the trucks come in and do their deliveries overnight, those are the same trucks that go through New Jersey as the ones that go through the Bronx. The whole program to invest in getting trucks throughout our region to switch from diesel to electric benefits everybody, so there were real benefits to New Jersey from the investments that were being contemplated that were portrayed as Bronx investments. But that said, we want to work with New Jersey and get mitigation for the communities that are impacted. That's always been the plan.
Kramer: So how long do you think it will take to find out where the communities are that are going to be impacted? I mean, couldn't you see that in your initial environmental impact study, and couldn't you have avoided this whole contretemps with New Jersey by making allowances in the original plan?
Lieber: You know, it’s a little technical but the bottom line is, it had to wait. The final model, the computer modeling that would tell you which traffic intersections, in which neighborhoods, in which roadways were really affected by getting more traffic had to wait for the final polling structure to be identified. We did that in the last few weeks. Now it's being modeled. It's going to be soon that we'll be able to finalize that, make a proposal to the Federal Highway Administration, and they get to decide whether we have addressed and mitigated the impacts properly in keeping with the prior ruling that – the feds ruled there was no significant impact from what we were probing to do, after the 4,000 pages and three years of work. We're going to see whether they still agree after we do this final analysis.
Kramer: So, what happens if a judge comes back and says we need to do another environmental impact study?
Lieber: That is a risk in any litigation, but we're confident – listen, you know, we followed every step that the feds told, the federal agencies who have jurisdiction here, the Federal Highway Administration, part of US DOT and the EPA is part of that as well – we followed every step, we wrote a 4,000-page document. We did countless computer modeling analyses, which take weeks and weeks and weeks. We're pretty sure that we have followed the law to a T and we're about to find out whether, you know, that every last aspect of it is satisfactory under the law, but we are confident that this meets the test.
Kramer: So, one of the arguments that the New Jersey people made was that this was an MTA cash grab. But I wonder if you think that their focus on the environmental impact as a cash grab for them and might be used to help their troubled, I should say very troubled, transit system.
Lieber: Listen there's no question that New Jersey's transit system has struggled, and it hasn't received investment. One of the great things about my job is that I work for a state and a governor that is passionate about transit and prioritizes it in allocating resources. Governor Hochul stepped up hugely. The MTA was looking at, coming out of COVID, a $3 billion annual budget deficit. She solved it with the legislature. New Jersey, they haven't really been able to address it and they have significant budget gaps. But as far as what New Jersey wants out of this, I'm not calling anybody a cash grab. You know when people say the MTA, the big bad MTA, is doing cash grab, you know what it is? It’s so that we can run more service or run service at all – buses, subways, commuter rail. So that we can pay, you know, 70,000 middle class New Yorkers. It’s so that we can keep the system in a state of good repair so when there's an earthquake, it doesn't fall apart suddenly. Cash grab is, you know, is an accusation that's kind of missing the point. This is all for investment in public transit.
Kramer: So, part of this whole discussion in Albany now, is that a number of lawmakers would like to see an increase in the pilot program that you did, allowing one free bus line in every borough. They'd like to see three free bus lines in every borough. Your thoughts about that?
Lieber: Listen, I’ve been honest with – the folks in the legislature pushing this are friends of transit, they are pro-transit, and they've been great partners for us. I have reservations, the MTA has reservations about free buses, expanding the free bus system because there is definitely some confusion coming out of COVID. For a long time during COVID, we weren't charging on buses because we wanted to protect the drivers, everybody got off on the back. And then fare evasion exploded on buses.
Kramer: $700 million.
Lieber: Yeah, we have a – what was a $200 million problem before COVID, which was too much to begin with, became a $700 million problem pretty quickly. And, Marcia, you and I have talked about it. You're a bus rider. All of a sudden people who play by the rules all over the rest of their lives are getting on the bus and they're not paying. And the drivers, in fairness, when I was a kid, they'd say, “hey, come on back you owe me a nickel” right, in the old days. That doesn't happen anymore because drivers have gotten attacked so we cannot continue confusing people about fare payment. I respect the folks who have proposed, it they are pro transit and they're trying to help people. But so far, the free bus experiment – there is a growth in ridership, but our analysis so far, and it’s still underway is there are not a lot of new riders. So, people who are coming from other lines, or other ways of getting around. I'm not sure that it's worth how much it costs to continue exploding the confusion about fare payment.
Kramer: The legislature said it would cost about $45 million. You think the $45 million can be spent other ways?
Lieber: Yeah, what I want to do is – I'm in the transit business. I want to grow service. So, we've expanded subway service on 11 subway lines since the budget last year which gave us that money. I want to grow subway service, make it more frequent. I want to make sure there are more buses out on the streets. Although part of the challenge with bus service is it's not how many buses you have there. It's whether the congestion is clear. We got to deal with that street congestion.
Kramer: And how fast they come.
Lieber: Exactly, how fast they come because all of a sudden, if they're backed up in traffic, they don't get where they're supposed to be in time. So, there are a bunch of things going on. One of them is congestion pricing, and the other is we need more bus lanes. The other is automatic camera enforcement – cameras on the buses. You block the bus lane, you get a ticket automatically like driving too fast through a school zone. We really have to focus on buses, not just the number of buses, but how quickly they can get around.
Kramer: Well we’re going to have to leave it right there for now.