MTA's Presentation Calls for Massive Cuts to Bus Service

[Deucey]

50 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

A lot of people voted for Trump because they are sick of the Democrats and their BS. They don't represent the middle class (middle or upper middle) anymore.

I'm gonna stop you right there. Since the Republicans took over in 1995, only 4 years total have the Democrats controlled the entirety of Congress. And only two of those did Democrats control Congress and the White House. So for all the complaining Republicans have about the state of America, they keep voting for the same Republicans who created and maintained that sorry state of America.

And they buy into the excuses those same Republicans make, and fully sign up to the aspersions those Republicans cast.

That's why I said what I said. Folk wisdom says that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I stand by my earlier post.

[Deucey]

1 hour ago, JAzumah said:

The bottom line is that President Trump does not allocate money. The Senate Republicans do and they believe that there is a lot of pork in that budget.

Congress, if it doesn't make a specific line item in a bill with a direct mention, allocates money categorically, and the relevant federal agencies (FTA, in the case of transit) apportions it.

The President, via the secretary of transportation, apportions it.

(Where I'd insert a salient but snide and petty remark if I did such things here.)

[JAzumah]

33 minutes ago, Deucey said:

Congress, if it doesn't make a specific line item in a bill with a direct mention, allocates money categorically, and the relevant federal agencies (FTA, in the case of transit) apportions it.

The President, via the secretary of transportation, apportions it.

(Where I'd insert a salient but snide and petty remark if I did such things here.)

They allocate money to a particular program or function (a bit narrower than just a general category). The president can hold it up for a good reason, but not forever.

There is no money allocated to any agency for the current round. The impediment is the Senate Republicans. If President Trump had his way, the bill would have gone through. He needs money flowing to lubricate the economy. Money in pockets makes people feel good and in light of the current economy, it is absolutely necessary. I maintain that part of the Senate Republican impetus was to push President Trump out of office by making people suffer and beg for change. When President Trump is certified as the winner, he is going to pay a bunch of those guys back in 2022.

Corporate Republican types don't like their fingerprints on the knife when they stab you in the back.

The MTA's secondary $4B request is the right number. That is what they should be asking for. In addition, the MTA needs to detail their cuts in its entirety while we are talking about fares. In my opinion, the fare increase should be ZERO if 40% of bus and subway service is disappearing. These discussions need to happen together and I am going to make sure that is the case.

[JAzumah]

2 hours ago, Brillant93 said:

Bruh were not blaming Trump for the lack of money but his leadership and his god forsaken stupid mouth is influencing these things to not pass. The fact they’re dangeling a carrot at many underprivileged Americans at this moment in a pandemic is just beyond sadist. 
 

Also Biden has won the election, the sore loser of the hot cheeto man needs to get it through his head. 
 

p.s. no matter who or what you vote for make sure you have politicians that can stand out in a respectful manner not pettiness. 

You are talking about decorum and leadership and you are calling him "hot cheeto man". We should not ask for anything from anyone else that we ourselves are not willing to do.

That is the problem with the current environment. Your energy should be devoted towards getting Pat Foye to get on a train and go meet with the Senate Republicans. He should take a nice binder showing the locations of all of the vendors with MTA capital contracts. He could show how supporting the MTA is stimulative to the entire country. He could show how Kawasaki is dead in Nebraska without further MTA orders. That would go a long way to showing how consumption in NYC is still important to the nation. Instead, he is being a whiny little soy boy and that is NOT what is needed right now.

[Brillant93]

13 minutes ago, JAzumah said:

You are talking about decorum and leadership and you are calling him "hot cheeto man". We should not ask for anything from anyone else that we ourselves are not willing to do.

That is the problem with the current environment. Your energy should be devoted towards getting Pat Foye to get on a train and go meet with the Senate Republicans. He should take a nice binder showing the locations of all of the vendors with MTA capital contracts. He could show how supporting the MTA is stimulative to the entire country. He could show how Kawasaki is dead in Nebraska without further MTA orders. That would go a long way to showing how consumption in NYC is still important to the nation. Instead, he is being a whiny little soy boy and that is NOT what is needed right now.

No, what is needed right now is financial relief. Regardless of what is going on with the MTA is more so up to the governor and local governments to get that under control. This isn't just the MTA but almost everyone else who is unemployed at the moment and need extra money, but unfortunately the republicans would much rather drag it out. I find it ironic how we are on a transit forum and people are acting as if the MTA having these type of cuts won't hurt the city. 

What we need right now is people to understand we need government to actually work not be a petty mess. 

[Via Garibaldi 8]

7 hours ago, Deucey said:

I'm gonna stop you right there. Since the Republicans took over in 1995, only 4 years total have the Democrats controlled the entirety of Congress. And only two of those did Democrats control Congress and the White House. So for all the complaining Republicans have about the state of America, they keep voting for the same Republicans who created and maintained that sorry state of America.

And they buy into the excuses those same Republicans make, and fully sign up to the aspersions those Republicans cast.

That's why I said what I said. Folk wisdom says that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I stand by my earlier post.

Republicans have shifted over the years just like Democrats have. Remember that there are sub parties within our parties now. Not all Democrats are the same either. 

[Via Garibaldi 8]

5 hours ago, Brillant93 said:

No, what is needed right now is financial relief. Regardless of what is going on with the MTA is more so up to the governor and local governments to get that under control. This isn't just the MTA but almost everyone else who is unemployed at the moment and need extra money, but unfortunately the republicans would much rather drag it out. I find it ironic how we are on a transit forum and people are acting as if the MTA having these type of cuts won't hurt the city. 

What we need right now is people to understand we need government to actually work not be a petty mess. 

I agree with @JAzumah. Foye should do just what @JAzumah said. The governor can't do much because the State has its own fiscal issues, so the local government can't do anything. It's up to the Feds.

[Lex]

2 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

I agree with @JAzumah. Foye should do just what @JAzumah said. The governor can't do much because the State has its own fiscal issues, so the local government can't do anything. It's up to the Feds.

It won't matter. The Democrats (on the whole) are trying to play both sides, while the Republicans are too self-centered to try to do anything helpful.

 

2 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Republicans have shifted over the years just like Democrats have. Remember that there are sub parties within our parties now. Not all Democrats are the same either. 

The Republicans have been pushing further right while dragging the Democrats along with them.

[Via Garibaldi 8]

6 hours ago, Lex said:

It won't matter. The Democrats (on the whole) are trying to play both sides, while the Republicans are too self-centered to try to do anything helpful.

 

The Republicans have been pushing further right while dragging the Democrats along with them.

The Democrats to the right? Please. The Democrats have been moving too far to the left if anything. Need more moderate Democrats. 

[Brillant93]

11 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

I agree with @JAzumah. Foye should do just what @JAzumah said. The governor can't do much because the State has its own fiscal issues, so the local government can't do anything. It's up to the Feds.

And the feds aren’t doing anything because they don’t want to. 

[paulrivera]

6 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

The Democrats to the right? Please. The Democrats have been moving too far to the left if anything. Need more moderate Democrats. 

California's gone so far to the left that they're halfway to Hawaii.

Those nanny state laws coming out of San Francisco in particular are something else... Soda taxes, smoking bans in your own house, wars on plastic, can't use your fireplace... ugh... (and I'm a democrat)

[GojiMet86]

2 hours ago, paulrivera said:

California's gone so far to the left that they're halfway to Hawaii.

Those nanny state laws coming out of San Francisco in particular are something else... Soda taxes, smoking bans in your own house, wars on plastic, can't use your fireplace... ugh... (and I'm a democrat)

 

And what's wrong with that?......

[checkmatechamp13]

On 11/19/2020 at 2:42 PM, MHV9218 said:

Nearly every part of this comment is wrong or misinformed.

"Meanwhile they didn't scale back on the buses or subways and they could have reduced service in some places. You don't spend like a drunken sailor when the revenue isn't coming in"

The buses and subways were scaled back as much as possible given the necessity of getting essential workers from place to place with social distancing. Did you really want a city where healthcare workers and delivery workers couldn't get anywhere, or that they had to be packed together and unable to distance?

 

On 11/19/2020 at 2:45 PM, MHV9218 said:

And again, why weren't they cut any more? Because essential workers had to get places, and because it would have dangerous and unethical to cram people like cattle into subway cars during a pandemic. He doesn't even pretend to understand the subway.

 

On 11/19/2020 at 2:49 PM, MHV9218 said:

I will say it for the third time.  

Buses and subways were scaled back as much as possible given the necessity of getting essential workers from place to place with social distancing. It would have been dangerous and immoral to cram essential workers into cars like cattle. Did you really want a city where healthcare workers and delivery workers couldn't get anywhere, or that they had to be packed together and unable to distance?

I'm actually with VG8 on this one. Out here on Staten Island, their copy-pasting of the Sunday schedule resulted in loss of service to the major hospital-oriented stop at 23rd Street & 1st Avenue and the loss of early morning and late evening service to a lot of areas (on both the express and local side). When we tried to get them to keep some of the busier peak-only routes (which would've saved them money due to the shorter runtimes), their response was to add a few more trips to the less efficient Sunday routes and call it a day.

And for all this about not wanting to pack in essential workers together...take a look at the Victory Blvd corridor in the Castleton Corners area....you see all the express and local routes in that area? During the early morning hours, they took all those riders and packed them onto one single route (the S62) running every 30 minutes and wondered why the buses were overcrowded.

And even after the buses went back to the normal schedule, they basically copy-pasted their original planned schedules for the Spring Pick and called it a day. The SIM2 running every 6 minutes during the AM rush (an increase from 8-10 minutes) would've absolutely been necessary before, but is a complete waste now. The S93 (which sees heavy ridership from both CSI students and middle/high school students) running every 12 minutes for the whole day was a great idea back when it was included in the Fast Forward plan, but with school out of session, it is a complete waste (and keep in mind that even if they were expecting things to change after Labor Day, they had the whole Summer Pick with all of this extra service). 

On 11/19/2020 at 3:10 PM, GojiMet86 said:

Does VG8 even remember that the MTA had 24/7 service? That was cut in May, about a month and a quarter after the March cuts.

The trains are still physically running. They're just for employees and first responders only. That's another huge waste (and combined with the fact that they had to have all that extra overnight bus service and the Essential Connector program to waste more money on top of that). 

On 11/19/2020 at 8:35 PM, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

I don't question that, but most of us express bus riders will be fine. Worst case scenario we drive into Manhattan. If the fare goes up to $7.50 or $8.00 each way with no express bus pass, it would make more sense to drive in the days that I need to, but I'm not worried about it. I've been working from home for months and just go in here and there to the office when I want or need to.

The highest proposed fare would be $7.25, and they may bring back the bonus which would make the effective fare even lower. In any case, there's not as much of a need for weekly passes considering that most people aren't in the office 5 days a week like they were. (I absolutely agree with keeping the weekly pass, though, and maybe even adding a 3-day pass like SEPTA did for workers who are in the office 3 days a week, or healthcare workers who tend to work 3-4 long shifts per week). 

[Lex]

10 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

The Democrats to the right? Please. The Democrats have been moving too far to the left if anything. Need more moderate Democrats. 

So a few support policies already enacted in other developed countries.

Look at the sheer number attempting to appease Republicans (hell, look at Biden's nomination). If you can still say that they're "too far to the left" after that, I don't know what to tell you.

[Deucey]

10 hours ago, paulrivera said:

California's gone so far to the left that they're halfway to Hawaii.

Those nanny state laws coming out of San Francisco in particular are something else... Soda taxes, smoking bans in your own house, wars on plastic, can't use your fireplace... ugh... (and I'm a democrat)

Soda taxes/war on plastic = reimbursement for Diabetes and obesity related costs, and plastic waste & cleanup & prevention of the growth of the oceanic garbage patches

Smoking bans - since SF is like NY with thin ass walls between apartments and shared ventilation ducts, it's not that hard to be a better neighbor and go outside - since snow is 120 miles away so it doesn't actually get cold in SF.

And with skies being orange most of the time in summer, plus the damn smog problem (including smog plumes from Japan and China making its way to NorCal), and that like NY every place in SF has electric or gas heat, not burning a duraflame isn't a huge sacrifice - especially when the Mennonites make electric fireplaces that make heat.

And it's not like folks actually sweep the chimneys in NorCal either.

[MHV9218]

7 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

I'm actually with VG8 on this one. Out here on Staten Island, their copy-pasting of the Sunday schedule resulted in loss of service to the major hospital-oriented stop at 23rd Street & 1st Avenue and the loss of early morning and late evening service to a lot of areas (on both the express and local side). When we tried to get them to keep some of the busier peak-only routes (which would've saved them money due to the shorter runtimes), their response was to add a few more trips to the less efficient Sunday routes and call it a day.

And for all this about not wanting to pack in essential workers together...take a look at the Victory Blvd corridor in the Castleton Corners area....you see all the express and local routes in that area? During the early morning hours, they took all those riders and packed them onto one single route (the S62) running every 30 minutes and wondered why the buses were overcrowded.

And even after the buses went back to the normal schedule, they basically copy-pasted their original planned schedules for the Spring Pick and called it a day. The SIM2 running every 6 minutes during the AM rush (an increase from 8-10 minutes) would've absolutely been necessary before, but is a complete waste now. The S93 (which sees heavy ridership from both CSI students and middle/high school students) running every 12 minutes for the whole day was a great idea back when it was included in the Fast Forward plan, but with school out of session, it is a complete waste (and keep in mind that even if they were expecting things to change after Labor Day, they had the whole Summer Pick with all of this extra service). 

The trains are still physically running. They're just for employees and first responders only. That's another huge waste (and combined with the fact that they had to have all that extra overnight bus service and the Essential Connector program to waste more money on top of that). 

I wouldn't call that agreeing. Look over what he said. Your comment is that the cutting of service wasn't done as effectively as possible (not surprising, given it was done on such short notice without adequate planning).

Generally, citywide, the MTA managed to avoid too many incidents of overcrowding, and that's a good thing. You know as well as anybody that the trains cannot be 'stopped,' and technically that overnight curfew is not a service cut but rather a facet of Cuomo's 'sanitizing' plan. So yes, it's a waste to run an empty train, but it's a tradeoff that was made to allow for the sanitizing, which was initially federally funded. So kind of apples to oranges here. 

[JAzumah]

15 minutes ago, MHV9218 said:

So yes, it's a waste to run an empty train, but it's a tradeoff that was made to allow for the sanitizing, which was initially federally funded. So kind of apples to oranges here. 

The trains were being sanitized before shutting the system down. No one wanted to deal with the policy of kicking homeless people off of the trains, so they kicked everyone off. That is NOT a good policy.

 

14 hours ago, Brillant93 said:

And the feds aren’t doing anything because they don’t want to. 

The Senate Republicans believe that the stimulus bill was packed with overinflated requests for money. The MTA asked for $12B when they need about $4B. Were they right?

We NEED a stimulus bill, but we do not need a looting operation. We should not allow an emergency situation to allow us to make bad decisions because of public backlash. If this issue is not addressed, there will be nothing going forward.

[MHV9218]

21 minutes ago, JAzumah said:

The trains were being sanitized before shutting the system down. No one wanted to deal with the policy of kicking homeless people off of the trains, so they kicked everyone off. That is NOT a good policy.

The Senate Republicans believe that the stimulus bill was packed with overinflated requests for money. The MTA asked for $12B when they need about $4B. Were they right?

We NEED a stimulus bill, but we do not need a looting operation. We should not allow an emergency situation to allow us to make bad decisions because of public backlash. If this issue is not addressed, there will be nothing going forward.

1) I happen to agree with you that the overnight shutdown is a bad idea, but no, technically the origin of the full shutdown was to allow for sanitizing at a frequency/comprehensiveness that the barns couldn't achieve themselves. This was couple with the hiring of contractors to clean and funded by federal money (which ran out).

2) But the MTA does need $12b. Those deficits are year-by-year, the consequence of diminished ridership for a roughly 48-month span, and debt only accumulates if they can't pay back what's already owed. It's better policy to fund the whole covid-based gap over a 3-year span than it is to repeatedly go to Congress for money, along the way failing to make a dent in existing debts.

[Lex]

10 hours ago, JAzumah said:

The trains were being sanitized before shutting the system down. No one wanted to deal with the policy of kicking homeless people off of the trains, so they kicked everyone off. That is NOT a good policy.

 

The Senate Republicans believe that the stimulus bill was packed with overinflated requests for money. The MTA asked for $12B when they need about $4B. Were they right?

We NEED a stimulus bill, but we do not need a looting operation. We should not allow an emergency situation to allow us to make bad decisions because of public backlash. If this issue is not addressed, there will be nothing going forward.

Yeah, we don't. That's why the bills already passed and what the Treasury did suck so much. The bulk of the funds went to these large corporations with little oversight to be had.

The Senate Republicans always want to claim that federal aid is too expensive because they have no interest in anything beyond control,. The people who best exemplify this are Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

[JAzumah]

5 hours ago, Lex said:

Yeah, we don't. That's why the bills already passed and what the Treasury did suck so much. The bulk of the funds went to these large corporations with little oversight to be had.

The Senate Republicans always want to claim that federal aid is too expensive because they have no interest in anything beyond control,. The people who best exemplify this are Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

And Pat Foye, for asking for $12B when he needs $4B. He just proved the Senate Republican point about how municipalities and states are making wish lists instead of need lists. We hand out money one year at a time.

[JAzumah]

16 hours ago, MHV9218 said:

But the MTA does need $12b. Those deficits are year-by-year, the consequence of diminished ridership for a roughly 48-month span, and debt only accumulates if they can't pay back what's already owed. It's better policy to fund the whole covid-based gap over a 3-year span than it is to repeatedly go to Congress for money, along the way failing to make a dent in existing debts.

We hand out cash one year at a time. No one is going to hand the MTA four years of cash so it can only last three years and lose the forth year in a staff "boating accident".

[Lex]

2 hours ago, JAzumah said:

And Pat Foye, for asking for $12B when he needs $4B. He just proved the Senate Republican point about how municipalities and states are making wish lists instead of need lists. We hand out money one year at a time.

And that can be set up as an annual payment plan over three years. It's not rocket science, but an issue of will, and Republicans have shown no will to address common issues (they've had repeated opportunities and have opted for ego-driven control every damn time, while the Democrats on the whole are trying and failing to please everyone).

[checkmatechamp13]

19 hours ago, MHV9218 said:

I wouldn't call that agreeing. Look over what he said. Your comment is that the cutting of service wasn't done as effectively as possible (not surprising, given it was done on such short notice without adequate planning).

Generally, citywide, the MTA managed to avoid too many incidents of overcrowding, and that's a good thing. You know as well as anybody that the trains cannot be 'stopped,' and technically that overnight curfew is not a service cut but rather a facet of Cuomo's 'sanitizing' plan. So yes, it's a waste to run an empty train, but it's a tradeoff that was made to allow for the sanitizing, which was initially federally funded. So kind of apples to oranges here. 

And that's the problem. There are too many cases (in general) of inadequate planning. The whole copy-pasting of schedules has gone on since the SIM redesign, and they apparently didn't learn from that (and this time around, they have a more established relationship with the transit advocates). To expect that they're suddenly going to learn how to manage their money more effectively is just wishful thinking. (I honestly wish they would). To say it wasn't as bad as it could've been is a low bar to clear.

As for the sanitizing, I don't believe all that about "There's no space in the yards" or any of that. It makes absolutely no sense to be deadheading trains from Far Rockaway to Inwood while you deadhead trains in the opposite direction (and that also applies to buses. There's no reason any bus should be deadheading from Staten Island to Manhattan at 9am, or from Manhattan to Staten Island at 7pm). They could've short-turned trains at different terminals at 1am and had them ready to pick up at 5am. (So for example, you have an train at 207th, one at 168th Street, one at 34th Street, etc). Or they could've just tried what they were doing in the week or two preceding the shutdown (had police officers and social workers meet the trains at the terminals and try to remove the homeless so they could clean the trains).

[MHV9218]

2 hours ago, JAzumah said:

And Pat Foye, for asking for $12B when he needs $4B. He just proved the Senate Republican point about how municipalities and states are making wish lists instead of need lists. We hand out money one year at a time.

Surely you recognize the negative externalities of years of accumulating debt and the inability to pay back existing debt service payments? I'm not buying the argument that the MTA "needs" only $4b. It seems pretty clear that what they need is to fill the gap covid caused, including for the years and months ahead. And when it comes to disaster relief, which is really what this is, not really...that generally tends to be a one-off bill. 

4 minutes ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

As for the sanitizing, I don't believe all that about "There's no space in the yards" or any of that. It makes absolutely no sense to be deadheading trains from Far Rockaway to Inwood while you deadhead trains in the opposite direction (and that also applies to buses. There's no reason any bus should be deadheading from Staten Island to Manhattan at 9am, or from Manhattan to Staten Island at 7pm). They could've short-turned trains at different terminals at 1am and had them ready to pick up at 5am. (So for example, you have an train at 207th, one at 168th Street, one at 34th Street, etc). Or they could've just tried what they were doing in the week or two preceding the shutdown (had police officers and social workers meet the trains at the terminals and try to remove the homeless so they could clean the trains).

I mean, as the cold weather plans prove, you simply cannot put the entire fleet in yards, and even if you found some way to jerry-rig this (putting trains on wash tracks or whatever, who knows), there is no way you would be able to restore full service within a matter of hours. I don't think Cuomo's overnight shutdown idea was a good one, but I don't think the MTA's execution of it was particularly terrible. The bus deadheading probably has more to do with getting operators to the right place than getting equipment to the right place, and there are union rules about who reports where, how far, and who runs what route. So it may be byzantine, but again I do not think it's entirely avoidable.

And still, absolutely none of this is VG8's point, which was that the MTA conspired to waste money by not cutting service, when all of us have now explained a dozen times in detail exactly how they cut service.

[Via Garibaldi 8]

16 minutes ago, MHV9218 said:

And still, absolutely none of this is VG8's point, which was that the MTA conspired to waste money by not cutting service, when all of us have now explained a dozen times in detail exactly how they cut service.

Don't put words in my mouth. It's called mismanagement, period. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're incompetent. It means people are entitled to have different opinions. We are in the USA, not some totalitarian state somewhere. You have a habit of trying to talk down to people you disagree with, especially if they don't share your views politically. It's disturbing.

Edited November 22, 2020 by Via Garibaldi 8