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New Yorker: Can Andy Byford Save the Subways?


Deucey

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I like how this article gave a summary about Andy Byford and the corruption of the (MTA) , and of course the good ol' DeBlasio vs. Cuomo feud. What I didn't like was the length of the Article, oh can some one tell me why this of all thing's causes a delay  (see below in quotation marks)

"Female Threw Shopping Cart on Roadbed."

I'm typing on a mobile phone so I'm unable to access the quote feature.

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It shows how much of an effort he wants to put into fixing the MTA when the first hire he has in New York is for communications. It is an area that is relatively easy to perform compared to analytics, logistics, construction, and engineering, yet for some reason, the MTA has lagged behind. So good on his part. I can also see where that disabilities group has an influence, with the wheelchair friendly MCI.

Also, that part where Byford had to come down to for that photo shoot with Cuomo just made me laugh. Imagine having to come down just for a guy waving a metal wand.

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Mr. Byford must have felt that dealing  with the late mayor of  Toronto, Mr. Ford and Kathleen Wynne, The former leader of the Ontario province government. was an absolute trip.  That is until he ran into either DeBlasio and Cuomo who make both Ford and Wynne look like  "saints" in the true sense of the word.

Mr. Byford (based on my readings in the Toronto Star) comes across as one with a good heart and would like to see the system change for the better for everyone concerned. This means that the system needs money otherwise it will continue to deteriorate even further,  I feel that he listens to the public and would like to make the changes that will improve service but it needs the money up front which will have to come from the governor and the mayor's pet programs. If you add that these two know it all's were top guns in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton and did nothing. Now the city may have to pay 31 billion dollars to repair public housing so the question becomes where is the city going to find the money for transit with the bill to fix up public housing?

The reason that neither of these two "leaders" want to face Mr. Byford is that he will ask them the right questions but neither of these leaders will have any answers as transit does not fit their political agenda. Both Cuomo and DeBlasio aspire to a higher office and neither of them cannot deal with the trivialities of make sure that the lifeblood of the city does not fall apart.

 

 

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Just now, Interested Rider said:

Mr. Byford must have felt that dealing  with the late mayor of  Toronto, Mr. Ford and Kathleen Wynne, The former leader of the Ontario province government. was an absolute trip.  That is until he ran into either DeBlasio and Cuomo who make both Ford and Wynne look like  "saints" in the true sense of the word.

Mr. Byford (based on my readings in the Toronto Star) comes across as one with a good heart and would like to see the system change for the better for everyone concerned. This means that the system needs money otherwise it will continue to deteriorate even further,  I feel that he listens to the public and would like to make the changes that will improve service but it needs the money up front which will have to come from the governor and the mayor's pet programs. If you add that these two know it all's were top guns in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton and did nothing. Now the city may have to pay 31 billion dollars to repair public housing so the question becomes where is the city going to find the money for transit with the bill to fix up public housing?

The reason that neither of these two "leaders" want to face Mr. Byford is that he will ask them the right questions but neither of these leaders will have any answers as transit does not fit their political agenda. Both Cuomo and DeBlasio aspire to a higher office and neither of them cannot deal with the trivialities of make sure that the lifeblood of the city does not fall apart.

Agreed, though as a footnote, at least BdB is not a literal crackhead.

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If Byford is looking for an easy win, they should retrain T/Os to not come to a complete stop at every yellow before a timer but I digress...

8 hours ago, GojiMet86 said:

It shows how much of an effort he wants to put into fixing the MTA when the first hire he has in New York is for communications. It is an area that is relatively easy to perform compared to analytics, logistics, construction, and engineering, yet for some reason, the MTA has lagged behind. So good on his part. I can also see where that disabilities group has an influence, with the wheelchair friendly MCI.

Oh definitely...

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Byford wants people to imagine an “Under New Management” sign hanging across the system. It can be a tough sell.

Illustration by Ben Wiseman

On a cold Tuesday morning in March, Andy Byford, the president of the New York City Transit Authority, was working the subway turnstiles—the gates, as he calls them—at the Chambers Street station, in Tribeca. Byford was seven weeks into the job, which had come with a seemingly impossible mission: to rebuild the city’s beleaguered public-transit system, after years of chaotic decline and stark dysfunction. He had vowed to visit every one of New York’s subway stations—there are four hundred and seventy-two—and to ride every bus route, in an effort that was part good-will tour, part reconnaissance mission.

“How was your trip?” he asked a commuter.

No reply. Waves of passengers rumbled past. He reminded himself to look for people who weren’t wearing earphones. Making eye contact was key.

“How was your trip?”

A young woman, not breaking stride, did a double take. “Uh, good,” she said.

Between customers, Byford straightened a pile of free newspapers. He had already introduced himself to the station agent, several platform cleaners, and the conductors on a couple of downtown trains. Each employee stared at the metal nametag pinned to his navy-blue suit. Yep, it was the president, the new guy. “Everything O.K.?” he asked. The employees seemed disarmed by his enthusiasm and his English accent. He shook hands and told people, “We’re one team.”

Byford was new to the city—new to the country—and was still perturbed by things that most locals accepted as inevitable. “That brown tiling,” he said, pointing at a rust-streaked wall. He took a photograph with his phone. Down on the platform, Byford regarded the track bed. It looked, as nature intended, like hell: filthy water, strewn garbage. “My customers shouldn’t have to look at that,” he said. “We’ve ordered three vacuum cars. They’ll suck up all of this.”

Byford, who is fifty-two, got his start in mass transit as a station foreman on the London Underground. The work ran in his family. His grandfather drove a bus for London Transport for forty years; his father worked there for twelve. Byford earned degrees in German and French, but after college he went to work for the Underground, learning car maintenance, operations, customer service, safety. He later worked on Britain’s main-line railways, and then ran mass transit in Sydney, Australia. His last stop before New York was Toronto, where, by nearly all accounts, he turned around a troubled transit system with spectacular results.

Toronto’s troubles, however, seem quaint compared with New York’s. With eight million passengers a day, the city has the largest public-transit system in North America, and, by every important metric—financial, operational, mechanical—it is in crisis. Some days, on a crosstown bus or a stalled train or a jam-packed platform, with your nose pressed into a stranger’s sweat-beaded neck and the appointed hour of your business lunch, your second date, your big job interview long past, it can feel like the system is in a death spiral. Train delays now occur roughly seventy thousand times a month, up from twenty-eight thousand in 2012. The system’s on-time rate, already among the nation’s worst, fell to fifty-eight per cent in January, down from ninety a decade ago. Bus ridership is in steep decline, caught in a negative-feedback loop with increasing car and truck traffic, slower buses, and less reliable service.

This is where Byford comes in. “New York is really lucky to have Andy,” Mike Brown, the transport commissioner of London, told me. “If anybody can take on the combination of the complex politics and the service challenge, it’s Andy Byford.” That’s not a small “if.” The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that hired Byford, is a huge and much maligned organization. The New York City Transit Authority—the M.T.A.’s largest division, with fifty thousand employees—handles subways, buses, and paratransit. Other divisions oversee commuter-rail services, tunnels, and bridges.

Physically, Byford is not imposing. He has the build of a distance runner, stands five-nine, shaves his head. If there were a contest for the palest man in the five boroughs, he would be a contender. He has blue eyes, a prominent nose, a sprightly step—he often takes stairs two at a time. A public-transportation purist, he has never owned a car. He and his wife, Alison, met while working for the Tube, and he proposed to her on a high-speed train. She’s a bank systems analyst, from Ottawa, and their vacations, he says, are nearly always “busman’s holidays—in every city, I have to check out the mass transit.” In our rambles together by subway and bus through the arteries and capillaries of what he calls, with a straight face, New York City’s “quite fabulous system,” I never saw him sit down. “The seats are for customers,” he says. More often than not, he’d start conducting customer-satisfaction surveys with randomly selected travellers, listening to their tales of riderly woe.

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On the platform at Chambers Street, he studied a small group of workers, all in high-visibility orange vests, idling in a dim corner. “I wonder what they’re doing, or supposed to be doing,” he said. He decided against inquiring. “I’ve learned that it’s sometimes best not to just go steaming in.” But, when it comes to fixing the subways and buses, his approach will very much be to go steaming in. He wants to transform New York City’s mass transit—and had already committed himself to delivering acomprehensive plan within a hundred working days. “I don’t think they hired me to tweak things here and there,” he said. “This company needs a complete modernization.”

In Byford’s office, on the thirtieth floor of a building in lower Manhattan, an oversized monitor displays a real-time list of subway incidents and significant delays. It’s a detailed, constantly updated vision of Hell:

Fire on Roof of 2 Train, Smoke Issuing.

Person in Altercation Fell Roadbed.

Fire on Track.

Debris on Track.

Sick Customer.

Unruly Customer.

Brown Suitcase w/White Powder.

Person Struck by Train.

No Designation for Crew.

Switch Trouble.

Door Trouble.

Female Threw Shopping Cart on Roadbed.

“There’s something new every twenty minutes,” Byford said. “It’s not acceptable. I want to get this down to a couple of incidents per morning.”

Head-banging seemed to be the order of the day. “I’ve just had a robust conversation with Neu”—the French transportation company, which is more than a year behind schedule on the delivery of those vacuum trains. “They told me shipping would take six weeks. I said, ‘No way. We need them now.’ Put them in a bloody Antonov and fly them over here.”

A green-and-white scarf was draped on a standing desk—the official scarf of the Plymouth Argyle Football Club. “That’s my team,” Byford said, brightening. “I’ve kept my season ticket, though I rarely get to a match.” Byford grew up in Plymouth, an old Navy city on the southwest coast of England. Argyle plays in the third tier of the English football leagues. “Strangely, I was the only Plymouth Argyle fan in my school,” he said. “All the other kids followed Liverpool or Man U. They were kids—they wanted to associate with winners. So I would wear my little green Plymouth Argyle kit, and I would be the only one wearing it, and they would all make fun of me.”

Byford seems not to mind uphill fights. “I like going into a mess, going in somewhere that’s kind of on its uppers,” he told me. He was talking about New York transit, which presents a vexing anomaly. The city is booming, with steady job growth since the financial crash, and the highest population in its history. In the past decade, even as the subways have deteriorated, ridership has steadily increased. Indeed, the M.T.A. has often cited “overcrowding” as the most common reason for delays. But, Byford points out, that is a meaningless measure. If you have more passengers, you send more trains. Byford is determined to identify the root causes of the subway’s unreliability and fix them.

The real problems go back decades—at least. Robert Moses, the city’s mid-century master planner, deliberately starved mass transit, in favor of highways, the automobile, the suburbs. As part of his legacy, New York’s subway system now has fewer miles of track than it had in the nineteen-forties. (It’s the only big city in the world that can make that claim.) In the seventies, things got progressively worse. Maintenance was neglected, and violent crime became so widespread that transit police took to closing the rear halves of trains after 8 p.m. In 1975, two men with sawed-off shotguns lined up and robbed forty passengers on the D train in between stops. Ridership shrank to barely half what it was at the end of the Second World War. Some three hundred train runs a day failed to reach their destinations. The near-death of the subways in those years is usually seen as a product of the near-bankruptcy of the city and the flight of the middle class. An alternative theory proposes the opposite: without functioning subways, the city couldn’t function.

Policymakers came to their senses in the early eighties; they hired better leaders, who demanded adequate budgets. In the next decade, nearly all of the system’s track was improved, half the stations were renovated, and thousands of cars were replaced. Crime fell, after a crackdown on, of all things, fare evasion. Reliable air-conditioning was installed. Ridership surged. Byford likes to point to the rescue of the system from its graffiti-slathered nadir as proof that it can be done again: “We’ve been here before. We can succeed.”

Part of the ongoing problem is the peculiar political status of the M.T.A., which is controlled by the governor but financed jointly by the city and the state. For governors, New York City’s transit budget is a huge expense that delivers few votes; for mayors, it is a kind of taxation without representation. Leaders in recent years, starting with Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have found it expedient to divert transit funds to other purposes. (Giuliani redirected four hundred million dollars from the M.T.A. in his first year in office.) Top officials have encouraged borrowing that has proved financially ruinous. This lack of political seriousness is a root cause. Deferred maintenance, increasingly decrepit tracks and signals and cars, and filthy stations are knock-on effects.

Lately, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have exacerbated the transit crisis with a bitter, prolonged feud. The two of them will fight over anything—snowstorms, schools, pizza, naps, a deer in Harlem—but their most ferocious differences seem to be over the subways. Cuomo believes that the city is not contributing enough to the transit budget. De Blasio points out that it is paying two and a half billion dollars toward the current five-year capital-improvement plan. He also argues that city residents already pay the greater share of the M.T.A.’s bills, through fares and state taxes.

In other cities, mayors tend to be heavily involved in mass transit, even hysterical about its deficiencies. Not in New York. Byford has not heard from de Blasio since his arrival, in January. “Bit weird. I should ring him up,” Byford said.

Cuomo’s attention to the M.T.A. has been intermittent. In 2016, he was keen on opening the first stretch of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, on the Upper East Side. Although the completed line cost nearly five billion dollars, and serves only three stops, Cuomo reportedly knocked heads and threatened contractors to get it done. But he has also continued the tradition of raiding the M.T.A. budget—a hundred million here, thirty million there. Two years ago, he ordered the M.T.A. to send five million dollars to ski areas upstate that had suffered a warm winter. As the Governor’s office points out, this was money that the M.T.A. owed the state. Still, it felt like a slight to subway riders.

Finally, last year, after a cascade of derailments and delays, riders became so angry that Cuomo declared a “state of emergency.” In search of a new leader for the M.T.A., he reached out to Joseph J. Lhota, who had headed the agency in 2012. Lhota accepted, on the condition that he could keep his day job, as chief of staff at the N.Y.U. Langone Health hospital network. In office, he developed a Subway Action Plan—a measure, costing eight hundred and thirty-six million dollars, that has so far consisted mainly of furious stopgap work, whose effectiveness is hard to measure. Lhota also went looking for a transit savior. Enter “the spotty kid from Plymouth,” as Byford sometimes calls himself.

Cuomo, like most of his predecessors, not to mention de Blasio, is too canny to want to be the face of the M.T.A. Byford, on the other hand, is happy to be out front, fully identified with the subways and buses and fully accountable. When he took the job, Cuomo asked him, “Are you sure you’re up for this?” He was. As he told me, with a grin, “I will give it a red-hot go.”

Down the hall from his office, Byford had commandeered a small, windowless “war room” in which to concentrate his thinking. The furniture was minimal, the lighting bright, and the walls, made of whiteboard, were covered with lists, charts, arrows, boxes, job titles, question marks, and exhortations in red and black and blue and green Sharpie. “I’m determined to change the structure of the organization, make it more lean and decisive,” Byford said, pointing at an ornate flowchart with numerous inscrutable acronyms. “I want to get it down to eight levels between the president and the front-line worker, allow for lateral movement, career advancement. You see?” I did not see. He directed my attention to a large planet labelled “Customer,” which was being orbited by boxes bearing “Capital” and “Ops Support” and other important cargo. “It’s a customer-centric continuous-improvement model,” he said.

Byford’s first hire in New York was for a position he created: chief customer officer. Sarah Meyer, who is thirty-four, came from Edelman, the global communications firm, and took a pay cut to join N.Y.C. Transit. She’s a native New Yorker, and the brick-and-mortar challenge appealed to her. “It’s real people,” she said. “They need to get to work.” Meyer rides the subways and buses, looking for annoyances, such as incomprehensible signage. If she has to ask what B/D means (“both directions”), then it should be spelled out. She’s having “Out of Order” signs made to use on rest rooms and MetroCard vending machines, replacing the endemic hand-scrawled notes. The subway’s Lost and Found turns out to be itself hard to find; she located it in Penn Station, behind a set of gates. “We’ll move it,” she said. “Make it easier. But it’s amazing what’s in there. Laptops, cell phones. I can’t believe how much cash is left in trains. Last week we thought we had an organ. It turned out to be a biohazardous spit sample.”

Much of Meyer’s work takes place online, where riders blow off steam. A typical tweet, from @TotoroVSBatman, on May 31st: “I want the #mta to stop thanking me for my patience. I’d prefer if they just told me to go f**k myself . . . because that’s what they really mean anyway.” It’s true that Meyer and her colleagues do more than their share of thanking and apologizing. But, she said, “the main thing is to explain things clearly and quickly, and to make sure the tech is working.”

Byford wants everybody, customers and staff, to imagine a big sign hanging across the whole system: “Under New Management.” For seen-it-all New Yorkers, that’s a tough sell. As Byford travels the city—introducing himself to train crews, bus drivers, tower operators, mechanics—he’s trying to fire people up. Some of his impromptu pep talks seem to delight front-line workers, others not so much. In a lunchroom for drivers at the Mother Clara Hale Bus Depot, in Harlem, he bombed with a sparse crowd of dudes who just wanted to get back to their backgammon. Byford, unfazed, headed into the next room, wherea general supervisor of transportation gave him a huge smile. “Where’d you start?” he asked her, a habitual question of his. Bus operator, she said. Twenty-two years ago. “Great!” They bumped knuckles. Byford often gets quizzical looks from employees when he talks about “this company.” The looks seem to say, “What company? I thought I worked for the M.T.A.”

The M.T.A.’s public board meetings, held each month, can be slightly rowdy. Byford’s first meeting came four days into the job, and he was greeted by protesters from Rise and Resist, a group that, among other things, advocates for people with disabilities. They presented him with a framed map of the subway system, with blue marks on the stations that are wheelchair-accessible—those amounted to fewer than one in four—and invited him to hang the map in his office. Byford was enthusiastic. He gave an upbeat speech about a “top-to-bottom modernization of every aspect of what we do.”

Some weeks later, Byford met in Times Square, at dawn, with three activists from Rise and Resist. They had offered to give him a tour of the subway from their perspective. The idea had alarmed some of his colleagues. He told me, “People at the office said, ‘They’re militants! They’re suing us!’ That’s the wrong attitude. I don’t want to call it ‘hand-wringing,’ but . . .” The meeting spot was a subway entrance on the south side of Forty-second Street. Three women appeared. April Coughlin, a suny New Paltz professor, was in a wheelchair. The others were Jennifer Bartlett, a poet who has cerebral palsy, and Jessica Murray, a doctoral student at City University. The area around the street-level elevator was immaculate and smelled of new paint. The activists sensed a setup. “I think you’re right,” Byford said. He made inquiries. In fact, the door frames of the Seventh Avenue entrance had been painted just hours before. “People can see into my calendar,” Byford said ruefully. “I didn’t know I had that much power. Tell you what—you set the route, so you won’t think we put all the elevators right.” That suited everyone. First, though, Bartlett wanted to point out that the button for opening the wheelchair-access gate to this station was around a corner, with no sign. Also, this very elevator had been out of service several times that week.

On the 7 train to Grand Central, the activists called attention to the gap between the train and the platform, which is problematic for a wheelchair. “That won’t do,” Byford said. “We can get rubber fill-ins for those horizontal gaps. For vertical gaps, which vary between lighter and heavier trains, we can install auto-adjustment. It’s expensive, but necessary.”

Coughlin was paralyzed below the waist in a car accident when she was six. Radiating self-possession, she told horror stories of broken elevators, broken intercoms, of having to be carried up flights of stairs by kind strangers. “Last week, I rolled into an elevator and realized too late that the floor was covered with excrement,” she said. “My wheels were coated. I use gloves, but come on.” Broken elevators were the bane of her route planning, she said. “Sometimes I just give up and push fifteen or twenty blocks to my destination. I’ve become a frustrated rider.” She smiled, not quite beatifically.

One model for saving New York’s subways is the London Underground. After the Second World War, the Tube suffered neglect and deterioration, a victim of capricious, bare-minimum, politics-driven public budgets. In 1987, a catastrophic fire started on an escalator at the King’s Cross station, and thirty-one people died; a painstaking official inquiry into its causes revealed the depth of the neglect. In the following years, Byford was heavily involved in a system-wide review, which helped start the modernization of London Transport. He also served as the group station manager at King’s Cross, the city’s busiest rail station. “To do that job, after the fire, you had to be very switched on,” Rob Mason, one of Byford’s superiors then, told me. “Football night, Friday night, he’d be out on the platforms.”

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https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22040

A series of reforms gave the Underground a secure, generous source of funds. The 2012 Olympics, which London hosted, also helped concentrate minds. Mike Brown, the transport commissioner, told me that the run-up to the Games provided an ideal opportunity to start changing the company culture—to encourage employees to take pride in their jobs and to be more responsive to customers. “I briefed all twenty thousand people who worked for me, in a hundred and one separate sessions,” Brown said. “We faced some skepticism. That’s London. ‘Oh, the Underground will never work. The Olympics will be an embarrassment.’ Nothing gave me more pleasure than to prove those people wrong.”

The transformation of the Tube has transformed London. Ridership is at an all-time high, and automobile traffic has declined. The Tube’s on-time rate is now above ninety-seven per cent. Its efficiency and capacity—thirty-six trains can run each way each hour on the Victoria Line, for example—are unimaginable in New York. A contactless fare system, which allows you to pay by tapping a credit card, was introduced in 2003. Boston, Chicago, and Mexico City have similar systems. New York is a generation behind.

For a modernization on the scale of London’s, Byford will need a budget that politicians cannot touch. In 2013, the New York State Legislature passed a “transit lockbox” bill, an attempt to limit the diversion of funds. Governor Cuomo vetoed it, and also rolled back other protections. His predecessor George Pataki, in 2000, borrowed billions from Wall Street to fund public transit, promising that the state would pay the service charges on the debt. Cuomo has retired that promise and compelled the M.T.A. to pay the charges.

Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have different ideas, naturally, about how to finance the great subway upgrade. De Blasio wants to impose a “millionaire’s tax” on the wealthy. Such a tax will need to be approved by the Legislature, and this seems unlikely, particularly without Cuomo’s assent. Cuomo supports congestion pricing, in which drivers would pay a stiff charge to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. Congestion pricing has worked well in London, Stockholm, and Singapore, but it hasn’t been tried in automobile-centric American cities. The Legislature is unpersuaded so far, and, though Cuomo seems to rule Albany without constraint or peer, his office maintains that he is unable to make it happen.

“I am agnostic,” Byford likes to say, when asked about congestion pricing. “I don’t care where the money comes from.” That’s what he told the annual conference of the Regional Plan Association, a high-octane civic group, in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt, in April. The conference’s keynote speaker was Hillary Clinton, but Byford had a full house in the morning. He gave the conference-goers, an affluent-looking tri-state business crowd, a swift tour of New York’s transit crisis. “People want to know how much a complete M.T.A. modernization will cost,” he said. “Be careful what you wish for.” The crowd stirred. “I’ve seen wacky politics before,” he went on. “I walked into the Rob Ford—may he rest in peace—mess in Toronto.” People who remembered Toronto’s erratic, crack-smoking, now deceased mayor laughed. “People ask me, ‘Are you on the Governor’s team? Are you on the Mayor’s team?’ I say, ‘I’m on the customer’s team.’ ”

The Canarsie local, a.k.a. the L train, runs from Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in Manhattan, to Canarsie, in southeastern Brooklyn. That’s ten miles, twenty-four stops, with a scheduled running time of thirty-seven minutes. The L train gets crowded, but its on-time rate, above ninety per cent, is by far the best of any line in the system. Its outstanding performance is apparently the result of a computerized signalling system, installed more than a decade ago, called communications-based train control. C.B.T.C. has provided transformative improvements to train service in cities throughout the world, but in New York the L is so far the only line using it.

Traditional signalling, known as fixed block, divides the track into segments, or blocks—on New York’s subways, they’re usually about a thousand feet long. As a train enters a block, it trips a circuit, which prevents following trains from entering until it has left. Fixed block has been around since the nineteenth century and, barring grievous human error, it is reliable and safe. But its understanding of the location of a train is crude. All it knows is whether a block is occupied or unoccupied. C.B.T.C., by contrast, uses radio signalling to create a moving block, which allows a controller to see each train’s precise location and speed. The moving block, constantly updated and reconfigured, is smaller than the old fixed block, which means that trains can travel closer together—exactly what is needed to solve “overcrowding.” C.B.T.C. signalling is also significantly cheaper to maintain and, according to most analysts, even safer than fixed block, because it removes the “human element.”

On a recent morning, a train operator named Philip Dominguez checked the brakes, tooted the horn, and tested the P.A. system. The Canarsie local was ready to leave Eighth Avenue. The conductor, whose cab was in the middle of the eight-car train, closed the doors, and the train accelerated smoothly out of the station, heading east. Dominguez sat in front of two screens that showed the train’s speed, its next stop, its destination. But, because these were C.B.T.C. screens, their overarching message was that there wasn’t much to do: an onboard computer was running the train. The red steel pillars of the station hurtled by, and then the grotty cavern walls of the tunnel, its bare light bulbs and heavy cables telescoping past.

Dominguez didn’t seem entirely smitten with the system. It was, after all, the competition. C.B.T.C. is supposed to make perfect stops at every station. As we traversed the L-train stations of Manhattan, following Fourteenth Street, Dominguez studied each of the computer’s stopping points critically, and then made a face that seemed to say, “Not bad.”

The M.T.A. first started looking into C.B.T.C. after a bad wreck, in 1991, just north of Union Square—five people killed, more than two hundred injured, in an accident attributed to operator inebriation and excessive speed. Eight years later, after a typically thorough set of studies, the M.T.A. hired Siemens, the German multinational, to install C.B.T.C. on the Canarsie line. The project went hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and missed a series of deadlines, but by luck it turned out to be well timed. An unanticipated population explosion had taken place along the L line in Brooklyn, as young people were driven out of Manhattan by high rents. Ridership on the L has tripled since 1990, to more than four hundred thousand trips a day. With C.B.T.C., capacity grew from fifteen trains an hour to twenty-four, and it is expected to go higher still.

We clattered through the Canarsie Tube, which passes under the East River and, like eight other subway tunnels, was flooded during Superstorm Sandy, in 2012. Seven million gallons of salt water found its way into the Canarsie Tube. The damage to subway cabling from corrosion was extensive, and the repairs have been strictly temporary patches.

From the Bedford Avenue station, in Williamsburg, the L line snakes across northern Brooklyn, with a number of tight, slow curves. Between the rails lay small, pale transponders. They let the system know, via a radio-frequency I.D. chip, exactly which point of track we were occupying. Our speed was calculated by a motion-detection system. Trackside processors were beaming instructions back to the computer driving the train. These systems contained sophisticated diagnostics, for when something went wrong. With fixed block, when there is signal trouble, workers basically head out into a dark tunnel with a wrench and a voltage meter. With C.B.T.C., the system tells you exactly where the problem is, and you can probably fix it from your laptop.

In some cities, C.B.T.C. has led to the introduction of driverless trains. The M.T.A. did experiment, in 2005, with running a few late-night L trains without conductors. The Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents the majority of the M.T.A.’s front-line workers, loudly objected. One-person train operation was unsafe, the union argued, not to mention job-killing. The unspoken subtext was that operators had been reduced to passive bystanders on their own trains. The M.T.A. backed down.

Another concern about driverless trains is that they usually operate in systems that have barriers at the platform edge, like the ones in most airport rail systems. In New York, the track beds are open, and platforms slope subtly toward them, so that water flows off. But that gentle slope has been known to cause strollers and wheelchairs to roll off as well, not to mention the intoxicated, the disoriented, wrestlers, and other unfortunates. A few years ago, Dominguez was driving a northbound A train into the 125th Street station when he saw a blind man and his Seeing Eye dog sprawled on the tracks. Dominguez hit the emergency brakes, but a four-hundred-ton train can’t stop quickly: the train skidded to a halt over the man and the dog. Fortunately, they had flattened themselves between the rails, and they weren’t seriously hurt. A robot train, unable to see anything ahead except another train, might not have stopped at all.

Byford has assured union leaders that he doesn’t plan to remove drivers from trains. “For a start, we’ve got very long trains, carrying lots of people, going under rivers,” he says. “New York is a major terror target. So I find this very scary.” In any case, walling off every platform in New York would be colossally expensive—perhaps even more expensive than installing C.B.T.C. system-wide, which is the M.T.A.’s plan. It’s currently being installed on the Flushing line, where there have once again been cost overruns and missed deadlines and years of service disruptions. Project managers are now saying that the work will be finished in the fall of 2018. At the current pace, converting the entire subway to C.B.T.C. will take another forty years, barring delays.

At several junctures, Dominguez put the train in manual mode and made stops as precise as C.B.T.C.’s. He studied the tracks ahead of us, reading the iron, watching the switch points. On the eastern edge of Bushwick, the train burst out of the ground, into daylight, and lumbered down a stretch that looked semirural, with cemeteries on the left. “In heavy rain and snow, the operator takes over from the automatic mode,” Dominguez said. “It can’t see the conditions like we can. It won’t make perfect stops. Maybe the next version.”

The L ran south, between Brownsville and East New York, past Feel Beauty Supply and Superstar Auto Sales. Beyond Linden Boulevard, we passed the Canarsie Yard, full of shining trains taking their midday naps. The Canarsie local eased into the Rockaway Parkway station, its southern terminus. Thirty-seven minutes, on the nose. “That’s how it’s done,” Dominguez said. “Then back to Manhattan.”

Byford was intent on assembling his master plan, which he was calling “Resurgam” (“I shall rise again,” in Latin), but he also had a railroad to run, with all its daily emergencies. In early May, he was at the Rail Control Center—the high command of the subway system—when one of those struck. The R.C.C., in midtown, is a bustling place, with dozens of dispatchers at consoles, studying two fifty-yard-long real-time schemas of the subway system on huge, curving walls. There is a permanently manned police desk, and a police radio broadcasting subway-related calls in the background: “Times Square, police, police, irate customer banging on operator’s door, no reason given.”

Byford was there with Sarah Meyer, at six-thirty on a Friday evening, when their phones started buzzing. Joseph Nugent, a former N.Y.P.D. lieutenant who is now N.Y.C. Transit’s police liaison, called across the mezzanine, “You two see this?”

They did.

“M.V.M.s”—MetroCard vending machines—“at forty stations can’t process debit or credit, only cash.”

“Now it’s system-wide.”

“You’re kidding.”

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https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a21946

“I’ll call my guys,” Nugent said. “No fare-beater arrests.”

Byford called I.T. and put the tech person on speaker. How quickly could they reboot the vending machines? The tech person spoke, haltingly, about a subprocessor and someone named Miguel.

“What’s that about Miguel?” Byford asked.

It seemed that only Miguel knew how to log in to the relevant subprocessor and do the reboot.

“Where is Miguel?”

He was in a car, apparently, on his way home. He wasn’t answering his cell. He lived in Port Jervis.

Byford looked at Meyer and Nugent. They shook their heads. Port Jervis was upstate, three hours away.

“Unbelievable.”

More calls were made, more cages rattled. Was it really possible that hundreds of vital machines, the main revenue engines of the subways, could be repaired by only one person at the M.T.A.? It seemed so.

“I want a dozen Miguels trained and up and running by Monday,” Byford said.

Meyer, on her phone, was watching Twitter explode with comments from enraged customers. “What should I tell them? We’ve been apologizing too much lately. ‘Thank you for your patience.’ Ugh.”

“God, I hate own goals,” Byford said.

Worse news came: New Jersey Transit had tweeted that debit- and credit-card functions were down, owing to an M.T.A. issue—at 3:56 p.m. That was nearly three hours before Byford and his team first heard about it.

“Unbelievable.”

This was why people called it More Trouble Ahead.

“You know, I think we should adopt the announcement-address form they use in the Royal Navy,” Byford told Meyer, who had been working on improving train and station announcements. “Every broadcast begins with the commander saying, ‘Now hear this.’ And it ends with ‘That is all.’ ”

Meyer gave Byford a heavy-lidded stare of silent hatred, which was pretty funny, under the circumstances.

“Couples are jumping turnstiles holding hands!” she exclaimed, waggling her phone. “Strangers are jumping turnstiles holding hands. I love New York!”

Miguel was found. Fists were pumped.

“We probably shouldn’t reboot the whole system all at once, because it might double-charge customers, like last time.”

Last time?

“There shall be a dozen Miguels,” Byford murmured.

“It’s back up!”

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The relief was general.

“Let all stations and officers know,” Byford told Nugent. “We don’t want this to extend.”

New York’s biggest transit-construction project in almost eighty years is currently under way. Called East Side Access, it is a three-and-a-half-mile tunnel connecting the Long Island Rail Road with Grand Central Terminal, where a long-needed new terminus will be built underneath the Metro-North tracks. The original plan called for East Side Access to be completed in 2009, with a price of $2.2 billion. The current date is December, 2022, for twelve billion. Even these goals seem unrealistic.

Late last year, the Times published an article, by Brian M. Rosenthal, that took a hard look at East Side Access. It revealed a world of graft and waste. There was, for example, the accountant who couldn’t understand how nine hundred people were on a project that had jobs for only seven hundred. The two hundred no-show positions were eliminated, but, according to a senior project manager, they had been costing a thousand dollars a day each for an unknown number of years. Another example, not itself news: work rules stipulate that twenty-five people must be present to run a tunnel-boring machine that in other cities is run by eight or nine workers. The bidding on major jobs is barely competitive—two or three construction companies may offer bids, in an industry where eight is standard. The favored construction companies and unions are usually big contributors to political campaigns, including Governor Cuomo’s. Consulting firms charge exorbitant fees, which the M.T.A. does not question. Subway construction in New York costs six times what it costs in Paris.

Commuter-rail projects are outside Byford’s ambit, but the M.T.A.’s ineptitude, or worse, on large projects saps the credibility of everyone working under its aegis. One morning this spring, Byford visited a reconstruction project: the Cortlandt Street station on the 1 line, which was destroyed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. The station is scheduled to reopen in October, fourteen years after work began.

Byford, wearing a hard hat and a high-visibility vest, toured the site with a project foreman, climbing makeshift ladders, asking detailed questions about engineering sign-offs and subcontractors. Byford wanted to know where he could help. His attention was directed to street level, where an elevator had not yet been installed. Apparently, there was a turf dispute about its placement, and the Port Authority still needed to pour the foundation.

“I will take this up immediately,” Byford said. “I don’t like to go public, but for this, if necessary, I will. I want that f**king foundation poured.” Here was a glimpse of the guy who had achieved the turnaround in Toronto. Byford told me that his greatest challenge there was completing a subway extension, which was behind schedule, over budget, and unpopular. He fired the chief project manager and the transit system’s head of engineering. He brought in new designers and engineers, and rode herd on them seven days a week. The line opened in December, 2017, two weeks before he left town. The mayor of Toronto, the premier of Ontario, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were all at the ribbon-cutting.

“My job is to make the politicians look good,” Byford says, cheerfully. In fact, his job is to make the trains run on time. But that seemingly simple goal requires keeping public officials committed to his initiatives. And the politicians can’t all look good at the same time, especially in New York.

After Cuomo announced his emergency plan, last summer, he said that the city would pay for half of it. De Blasio said that it would not. In the end, the state forced the city to pay—while Cuomo and Joe Lhota lambasted the hapless de Blasio for having wasted eight months.

Then, early this year, de Blasio seemed to get a small measure of revenge, by kneecapping one of Cuomo’s projects, the Enhanced Station Initiative. In 2016, Cuomo had the M.T.A. set aside a billion dollars to start renovating thirty-three subway stations. The results were sparkling, complete with USB charging ports and contemporary art, but the decline of subway service began to make Cuomo’s priorities seem misplaced. “The countdown clocks and the Wi-Fi and painting, having lights on bridges—all that stuff doesn’t matter compared to your subway actually arriving where it’s supposed to arrive on time,” de Blasio said. The M.T.A. board argued over whether the work should continue. The Mayor’s representatives on the board complained that they had never even seen the list of stations chosen for renovation.

Byford, who found himself in the middle of this squabble, was amazed by the fractiousness and the lack of transparency, or even basic information, at the top of the M.T.A. He suggested that a decision about the station enhancements be tabled for further study, and so it was.

Byford was trying to get to the bottom of the chronic unreliability of train service. Dwell times—the number of seconds that a train spends at a station—had been creeping up. Train crews had become less strict about closing doors, partly because people were complaining online about having doors closed on them. Byford was unsympathetic. “Customer-friendly as I am, I can’t agree with constant door reopening,” he said. “Sorry, that’s it. If reliability improves, they’ll know another train’s coming along in a couple of minutes and stop throwing themselves at the door.”

But dwell time is a small problem compared with running time. New York’s subways are slower today than they were a century ago. Kyle Kirschling, a performance analyst at N.Y.C. Transit, met with Byford for the first time this spring, and told him that he believes most delays are caused by train operators simply driving too slowly. “There’s not enough emphasis on the idea that every second counts,” he said. “We need clear, objective rules for operators. Never stop longer than three seconds at a yellow. Don’t brake till you’re in the station. Go to full power straight out of the station.” Kirschling, a rawboned young man from Wisconsin, had written a master’s thesis at Columbia about long-term productivity decline in New York City’s mass transit. Byford enlisted him on the spot to help him develop a new fact-based delay-attribution system.

The subways slowed down markedly in 1995, after a J train plowed into the back of an M train on the Williamsburg Bridge, killing the operator and injuring forty-five passengers. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that, while operator fatigue was the immediate cause, the system’s signals were also at fault. The M.T.A.’s response was a system-wide slowdown, and the installation of devices called timed signals, which measure trains’ speed. Some of the new timed signals seemed to be miscalibrated—ten miles per hour, people said, really meant five or six—so operators learned to approach them warily. One afternoon, I rode an uptown C train with a seasoned driver, who pointed at the tracks north of Columbus Circle. “Used to do sixty through here,” he said. “Had one train that could do seventy. Now it’s forty-five, tops.”

Accidents involving trains passing work crews, particularly two that caused worker fatalities in 2007, have led to further slowdowns. “It tends to be a one-way ratchet,” Byford said. Each tragedy lowered the speed limit, not always rationally. If safety were an absolute value in transportation policy, the national highway speed limit would be fifteen miles an hour.

In many areas, Byford thought, N.Y.C. Transit had an old-fashioned, coercive attitude toward its employees, which encouraged deceit and excessive caution. Operators were punished for speeding, but not recognized for good performance. Contemplating changes in the training of subway operators, Byford said, “I need to have a grownup conversation with the unions.” He hopes to convince them that speed and safety do not have to be in conflict. Mike Brown, the London transport commissioner, told me that the Tube, with its improved equipment, has never been faster and never been safer. One of Byford’s first instructions to Kirschling was to identify timed signals that were clearly pointless. “Give me the top ten,” he said. “Then I’ll take those to the union. We need their sign-off.”

Byford was feeling increasingly settled in his job, and in New York. He and Alison had signed a lease on an apartment, in east midtown, and he had found a soccer pub nearby, where he persuaded the owner to tune one of the televisions to Plymouth Argyle games. The team was in a slump, but he had seen worse. At one point, the team was nearly disbanded, and Byford and other diehard fans were personally supporting individual players. Then Argyle started winning again, and the game crowds increased. The diehards took to chanting at the newcomers, “Where were you when we were shit?” Byford laughed as he recalled the bitter, joyous chant. “Dunkirk spirit,” he likes to say. His grandfather drove his London Transport bus right through the Blitz.

In March, the actress Cynthia Nixon announced that she would challenge Cuomo for the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor this year. Nixon arrived late to her own campaign launch, and told the crowd that she had been delayed on the 1 train—another victim of “Cuomo’s M.T.A.” Hanging the neglected subways around the Governor’s neck has become a central theme of her campaign.

By April, Cuomo seemed to be feeling the heat. His staff called Byford’s staff, looking to schedule a fixing-the-subways press event. It would be the third such event in five weeks.

“Sometimes they just spring stuff on you,” Byford said. “That’s fine. You’re a public servant. But the day turns into Whac-a-Mole rather than strategic planning. It’s like little kids playing football. They’re all running around in a pack, chasing the ball, not playing their positions.” Byford grinned at the image.

It was decided to meet at the Ninth Avenue station on the D line, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The station has a set of disused tracks that provided an appealingly industrial setting. Cuomo would be introduced to a new magnetic wand that was used to clear metal filings from insulated track joints, where they can cause electrical shorts and signal outages.

Byford caught a 4 train at Bowling Green and then switched to the Coney Island-bound D. It was a swift, on-time ride on relatively clean trains. Byford, who often points out that most subway trips are successful and therefore forgettable, stood in a half-empty car and considered his position. “I need the Governor’s confidence that I will turn things around,” he said. “I sense the crest of my honeymoon period. It’s a gut feeling—a bit like political antennae. If I ignore it, I always regret it.”

Cuomo arrived, with his aides, in black S.U.V.s. Trackside, he greeted Byford warmly. The Governor, wearing pale chinos and a dark windbreaker, watched a worker demonstrate the magnetic wand, then squatted and ran the instrument under a rail flange himself. With news cameras recording the action, he came up, triumphantly, with a wandful of metal filings.

 

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A makeshift press conference followed, with the gaggle crouching in towpath weeds. “You have the most intense effort at repair and maintenance that the system has ever seen,” Cuomo said. “You will feel it incrementally. Certainly between now and the end of the year.” Turning to Byford, he said, “You think that’s fair, Andy?”

Byford said that it was. But Cuomo’s famous impatience was worrisome. Now that the subways had become a political liability, he seemed to want them fixed at a stroke. He had recently encouraged the M.T.A. to test a wireless communications technology called ultra-wide band, which, he seemed to believe, would provide a cheaper alternative to C.B.T.C. that would not take ages to install. In reality, ultra-wide band might help the components of C.B.T.C. communicate better, but it is not a signalling system. No mass-transit system in the world uses it, and its reliability is unknown. “It has potential—but it may not work,” Byford said. He added, “The Governor thinks, with some justification, that we move at too pedestrian a pace, that we study everything for three years.” But Byford wants to get moving now—order new cars, replace old track, resignal multiple lines. Rebuilding the subways is a monumental job. There is no silver bullet. And it will cost tens of billions of dollars.

The work isn’t just mechanical. “It’s a culture,” Byford says. “That’s what we need to change.” But is it possible to change the culture of a century-old, unloved organization? I asked two senior executives at the Toronto Transit Commission, Gemma Piemontese and Joan Taylor, about Byford’s five-year tenure there. “Things will probably get worse before they get better,” Taylor said, meaning things here in New York. “That’s what happened in Toronto.”

Toronto’s mass-transit system is a third the size of New York’s, in daily ridership, but the problems Byford found there were similar: low morale, a dilapidated infrastructure, the need to close subway lines to do the work required. “Our reputation with politicians was really low,” Piemontese said. A question lingered: Would Byford be able to get enough support for a total renewal? Before he took over, the Toronto Transit Commission had no real political visibility. “The T.T.C. for a long time didn’t have a face, a champion,” Taylor said. “Andy changed that. He had a profile I hadn’t seen in a public servant before.” Byford drew up a Customer Charter, setting benchmarks for the improvement of service, including thirty-one specific commitments in the first year. “He could have said, ‘We’re going to do this quietly,’ ” Taylor went on. “But he made it a public document, complete with timelines. It was on our Web site. We were going to be measured against it.” Byford also had to win over organized labor. “The unions are always suspicious of anybody nice,” Taylor said. “They thought Andy was there to privatize. But he wasn’t. He would fight to keep work in-house. He doesn’t tolerate poor performance, but he respects the union leaders.”

In New York, I sat in as Byford gave a group of union leaders his spiel. “We’re going to get new signalling, new trains, more operators and maintainers, more buses, more bus lanes,” he said. “This plan we’re putting together is meant to be provocative—though not so provocative that I’m on the next plane to Heathrow. I think we can do resignalling in ten years, not forty.” The men around the table—they were all men—looked at one another. These were experienced railroaders who knew exactly what was required to replace old signals with C.B.T.C. through hundreds of miles of tunnels. The pharaonic work being described meant, obviously, many jobs.

But, for New York subway riders, the work that Byford is proposing will require a hard-to-picture amount of patience. The system will continue operating 24/7, but many lines and stations will be shut down nights and weekends. “The work simply cannot be done with trains running through the tunnels,” Byford says. The installation of C.B.T.C. on the Flushing line has been intolerably slow and expensive. “But we only get to work, like, ten weekends a year,” a senior manager on the project told me. “If there’s a Mets game, we can’t work. It’s always something. We’ve had work weekends cancelled because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 World’s Fair, or there’s a car show at the Javits.”

The dress rehearsal for big shutdowns will start next April, when the Canarsie Tube will be closed for fifteen months, as the M.T.A. finishes repairing the damage inflicted by Superstorm Sandy. L service in Manhattan will cease, and travel in Brooklyn will end at Bedford Avenue, in Williamsburg. That will leave roughly two hundred and twenty-five thousand riders a day stranded and looking for alternatives. The M.T.A. has a mitigation plan—extra trains on other lines, a fleet of buses crossing the bridge, a car-free corridor halfway across Fourteenth Street—but some analysts consider it wholly inadequate. A lawsuit to stop the shutdown has been filed by community groups in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, who foresee horrendous congestion in their neighborhoods. Accessibility advocates have joined the suit, demanding that elevators be installed at every closed L stop. Meanwhile, rents are reportedly falling in affected neighborhoods.

When large-scale resignalling commences, the pain tolerance of M.T.A. staff will be tested along with that of subway riders. “There’s a possibility of people not wanting to go through these difficult five years ahead,” Byford said. “They may be able to take early retirement. I’m not sure. We offered voluntary severance, a good and honorable package, on the Tube, and many people took it.”

Byford presented his master plan on May 23rd, at the monthly public M.T.A. board meeting. It was a perfect-bound, seventy-four-page booklet, titled “Fast Forward: The Plan to Modernize New York City Transit.” (“Resurgam” had been rejected by cooler heads.) The plan was full of tight deadlines and ambitious specifics: six hundred and fifty new subway cars within five years, three thousand more in the next five; a new fare-payment system by 2020; more than fifty new stations made wheelchair-accessible; redesigned bus networks in all five boroughs. The most audacious item was installing C.B.T.C. in almost the entire subway system in ten years. The plan even included a couple of nods to the possible use of ultra-wide-band technology.

What was missing was the price. Joe Lhota, who spoke before Byford, said, “The costing of Andy’s plan is not complete.” It was unfortunate, he said, that some newspapers had published alarmist headlines, based on inaccurate leaks. (The Times reported nineteen billion dollars for the first five years; the Newshad thirty-seven billion over ten years.) Because the M.T.A. had suffered so much “ongoing criticism, if not ongoing ridicule” for its costing practices, Lhota said, its leaders were going to be “super-rigorous.” He mentioned that he had had a “very, very high-level discussion” about the plan with Governor Cuomo in recent days. “Today’s presentation is not about numbers,” Lhota said. Of course, Byford had promised to provide numbers when he unveiled his plan. Word was, he had been ordered, at the last minute, to pulp the first run of booklets and to rush out new versions, stripped of cost calculations.

Byford, in his remarks, dutifully promised an “update” on the cost. He also talked about New York in near-Churchillian terms. This was the city “renowned for the way it stares down a crisis,” the city that had survived the collapse of the nineteen-seventies, the attacks of September 11th, and Superstorm Sandy. “Decades of underinvestment cannot be corrected overnight,” he said. But the city would meet this challenge, too.

Every M.T.A. board member present spoke in support of Fast Forward. James Temples III, a station supervisor and a union official, said, “I’ve been with the Transit Authority for forty years. I’ve seen them come and go. But I’ve never seen anything like Mr. Byford’s plan.” Temples represents six hundred station supervisors. He promised to “encourage all of them to work with Mr. Byford in any way possible to get what he wants and get it done.” The next morning, the Regional Plan Association held a hastily organized meeting, at N.Y.U.’s Rudin Center for Transportation. Hundreds of people showed up. Scott Rechler, an M.T.A. board member and the chairman of the R.P.A., compared Byford to Superman. “He’s Clark Kent with a different accent, and a better hair style,” he said. (Rechler shaves his head, too.) “The kryptonite is politics. We have to protect Andy from that kryptonite.”

The politicians were less impressed. De Blasio’s office announced bluntly that the city was not willing to help pay for the plan. The Governor’s office issued an unenthusiastic statement, which said, “Our bottom line is that the plan needs to be expeditious and realistic.” Reached at a Democratic Party convention on Long Island, Cuomo said, contradicting Lhota, that he hadn’t reviewed the plan. But he added, “I want to get the best technology minds in this country to look at the technology in the subways.” He seemed uninterested in funding the ambitious plans of the expert he had hired. “I am not wed to that amount of money at all,” he said.

Cynthia Nixon, for her part, endorsed Fast Forward, and said that it should be funded by both congestion pricing and the millionaire’s tax, plus a new tax on polluting companies. She stepped up her attacks on Cuomo’s neglect of mass transit, declaring, “The way he’s handled this issue for his first two terms should completely disqualify him from a third.”

After a week or so, Cuomo came around to endorsing Fast Forward, and said that he would fund it by getting the Legislature to finally pass congestion pricing. But he would have plenty of time to reconsider his support. Byford’s proposals are meant to be funded by budget plans that take effect in 2020. Cuomo therefore has roughly a year (assuming he is reëlected) before he needs to make a real commitment.

In the meantime, Byford is feeling the kryptonite. He can’t even get meetings with the Mayor or the Governor. He’s been talking instead with City Council members and state representatives, trying to build support. Even if congestion pricing passes, it will finance no more than half the work that he wants to do, so he and his team are looking into bond issues and partnerships with investment houses. “No one’s saying it’s impossible,” he said, hopefully.

Byford told me his battle plan: “Over the next twelve months, I’m going to make this irresistible and unstoppable. Politicians like to be associated with success.” They also dislike being associated with failure. Byford said that he has been “shamelessly” exploiting each new infrastructure fiasco. In June, part of the ceiling collapsed in the Borough Hall station, in Brooklyn, showering hundreds of pounds of masonry and tile onto the platform in jagged hunks. There was one minor injury; if the accident had happened at rush hour, there could have been carnage. Byford rushed to the scene, oversaw the cleanup, and then talked to reporters at the station. “I said, ‘This is why we need Fast Forward,’ ” he told me. “ ‘Let’s stop messing about and get on with this.’ ” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the July 9 & 16, 2018, issue, with the headline “Tunnel Vision.”

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11 minutes ago, LGA Link N train said:

@Via Garibaldi 8 did you have to copy and paste THE WHOLE ARTICLE!?!??!

Yes.  If you don't have any free viewings left, you can't see the article...

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One thing that I like about this article is how it talks about the (MTA) tackling fare evasion and how that helped to stabilize the system.  It seems as if we're facing a similar obstacle that needs to be mitigated.

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Something else I'll add... When I have used the trains, they do seem to crawl less now.  That's an improvement.  The trains have also been cleaner, generally with GOOD AC. That's also an improvement.  Maybe Byford is on to something.  Hopefully this transfers to the buses. 

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12 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

One thing that I like about this article is how it talks about the (MTA) tackling fare evasion and how that helped to stabilize the system.  It seems as if we're facing a similar obstacle that needs to be mitigated.

I wonder how much money revenue (MTA) would get if they collected fares on SIRR after Stapleton...

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14 hours ago, Deucey said:

I wonder how much money revenue (MTA) would get if they collected fares on SIRR after Stapleton...

They'd have to make sure it's really enforced otherwise all you did was install hurtles to jump over.

This IS Staten Island after all and south shore peeps are bad in their own right.

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33 minutes ago, LTA1992 said:

They'd have to make sure it's really enforced otherwise all you did was install hurtles to jump over.

This IS Staten Island after all and south shore peeps are bad in their own right.

I just find it extremely "interesting" - to use a completely unsuitable adjective - that folks get records for jumping turnstiles but only folks going to/from Stapleton or further north don't ride the train for free.

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3 hours ago, LTA1992 said:

They'd have to make sure it's really enforced otherwise all you did was install hurtles to jump over.

This IS Staten Island after all and south shore peeps are bad in their own right.

There's also the issue that multiple stations don't have station houses or other easy places to put turnstiles.

Regarding the fare beating, I'd say to use only HEETs and no regular turnstiles. It wouldn't eliminate the issue, but it would at least help.

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2 hours ago, Deucey said:

I just find it extremely "interesting" - to use a completely unsuitable adjective - that folks get records for jumping turnstiles but only folks going to/from Stapleton or further north don't ride the train for free.

The logic is that the vast majority of riders take the train to St. George, and will therefore pay a fare in each direction, anyway.

In reality, there is a not-insignificant amount of intra-island ridership, which is a revenue source the (MTA) is definitely missing out on.

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9 hours ago, P3F said:

The logic is that the vast majority of riders take the train to St. George, and will therefore pay a fare in each direction, anyway.

In reality, there is a not-insignificant amount of intra-island ridership, which is a revenue source the (MTA) is definitely missing out on.

The real question is whether or not the cost of fare collection on all of those intermediate rides would actually be less than the amount of fares collected. There is a non-zero capital cost to installing ticket gates, or even SBS style machines at every single station. There are costs associated with handling all the additional transactions and money involved. And there is a cost to now having officers enforce farebeating on SIR.

Then there's the political cost. Staten Island managed to kill SBS lights for several years because they didn't like what was going on. With the constant grumbling about how the MTA is victimizing Staten Island (usually using the cost/unreliability of express bus service, or the lack of subway to other boroughs as examples), putting fares on the SIR would be a very unnecessary, costly fight.

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Byford will never be allowed to actually "save" the subways. 

 

One of the basic rules of politics is that complaining about a problem is always better than actually solving it — after a problem is solved, it's no longer there to complain about. Substandard transit service is essential for keeping advocacy groups in business and elected officials in constant campaign mode.

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8 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

The real question is whether or not the cost of fare collection on all of those intermediate rides would actually be less than the amount of fares collected. There is a non-zero capital cost to installing ticket gates, or even SBS style machines at every single station. There are costs associated with handling all the additional transactions and money involved. And there is a cost to now having officers enforce farebeating on SIR.

Then there's the political cost. Staten Island managed to kill SBS lights for several years because they didn't like what was going on. With the constant grumbling about how the MTA is victimizing Staten Island (usually using the cost/unreliability of express bus service, or the lack of subway to other boroughs as examples), putting fares on the SIR would be a very unnecessary, costly fight.

Speaking of, I saw a bus with those very flashing lights on the Bx12 last month. 

When I tell you I was taken back, I was taken BACK. I felt highschool all over me lol

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18 minutes ago, Gotham Bus Co. said:

Byford will never be allowed to actually "save" the subways. 

 

One of the basic rules of politics is that complaining about a problem is always better than actually solving it — after a problem is solved, it's no longer there to complain about. Substandard transit service is essential for keeping advocacy groups in business and elected officials in constant campaign mode.

By that logic, the Capital Programs and General Overhauls would have never happened in the 80s...

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4 hours ago, Around the Horn said:

By that logic, the Capital Programs and General Overhauls would have never happened in the 80s...

Yes, Straphangers Campaign did try to stop the first Capital Program. In the end, MTA made sure that there would always be something to complain about.

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2 hours ago, Gotham Bus Co. said:

Yes, Straphangers Campaign did try to stop the first Capital Program. In the end, MTA made sure that there would always be something to complain about.

No one gives two shits about Straphangers Campaign.

I also find this whole notion that there would be nothing to complain about if the system starts functioning again extremely narrowminded. Beyond our system's operational issues, we still have massive problems regarding a lack of modal integration, transit deserts, high fares, stone-age service patterns, little coordination between transit and development, and inefficient transportational governance (to name a few). In short, there is so much more wrong with transit than just the way it runs today. 

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13 minutes ago, RR503 said:

No one gives two shits about Straphangers Campaign.

I also find this whole notion that there would be nothing to complain about if the system starts functioning again extremely narrowminded. Beyond our system's operational issues, we still have massive problems regarding a lack of modal integration, transit deserts, high fares, stone-age service patterns, little coordination between transit and development, and inefficient transportational governance (to name a few). In short, there is so much more wrong with transit than just the way it runs today. 

He loves singing the same tune over and over again. It's nauseating.

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16 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

Staten Island managed to kill SBS lights for several years because they didn't like what was going on.

I'm still not clear on what the flashing orange lights next to the destination signs are for, nor why flashing blue lights were needed/picked instead of wrapping or painting SBS units in a vastly different color scheme from non-SBS units (like some other cities do).

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1 minute ago, Deucey said:

I'm still not clear on what the flashing orange lights next to the destination signs are for, nor why flashing blue lights were needed/picked instead of wrapping or painting SBS units in a vastly different color scheme from non-SBS units (like some other cities do).

Neither was a necessity. I think the (MTA) wanted to use those things as a marketing tool to make the buses really stand out from afar.  I found the whole thing far too painful on the eyes.  The current set up is more tolerable.  You have to be blind not to see them coming.

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