MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared on NY1’s Mornings on 1 with Pat Kiernan and Jamie Stelter to discuss the proposal for free buses, Grand Central subway upgrades, delays caused by Amtrak to Metro-North’s Penn Station Access project, and other transportation issues.
A transcript of the interview appears below.
Pat Kiernan: We're now less than a week away from the general election, and the candidates for mayor have all shared lots of plans to try to improve the city's roads and transit. Zohran Mamdani has made his proposal for faster free buses one of his central campaign themes. Mamdani says funding for the free buses could come from tax increases or from other revenue sources, but even if he secures the money, it's the MTA and not the mayor who actually has to make decisions about the subways and buses. MTA Chair and CEO, Janno Lieber, is with us now. We'll talk about some ways the MTA could address some of the concerns raised in the mayor's race. Good morning.
Janno Lieber: Good morning.
Kiernan: This is very much front and center because transit is so essential to New York City. But you're actually faced with trying to make sense of all the politics and come on the other side with some changes in service, if that's what the people want.
Lieber: Yeah. I mean, listen, the good news is, as you said, people are talking about transit and mayoral campaign, that's great. We love that. But any change of the scale that's being talked about, taking a section of our incredibly important transit system and changing it entirely has to be studied. We studied congestion pricing for five years, and when we implemented it, we knew where there might be impacts, and it was a huge success. You have to give the kind of serious study to some of these proposals that we did with congestion pricing.
Kiernan: So, when the candidates throw out budget numbers of what they think it would cost to add free service is that in consultation with the MTA?
Lieber: No. They're looking at farebox revenue that we got from buses last year, but you know, our projection is that bus revenue is going to start to push closer to a billion dollars a year in the next couple of years, as we've gotten customers back and frankly, as we push back on fare evasion on buses. And what's not being discussed is the possibility that if a lot more people are riding the bus, are we going to need more buses? Are we going to need more bus drivers? Will we need extra depots? What will be the impact on subway fare revenue if everyone moves to or some people move to the bus?
Kiernan: Right.
Lieber: Those need to be studied. But the bigger issue that for me is I want to make sure that people of limited income get priority in this discussion that we're not just giving a ton of money to people who are riding the 104 on the on the Upper West Side where I grew up, who take the bus on Broadway instead of taking the subway.
Kiernan: Because a lot of them can afford to pay for the bus.
Lieber: Exactly, so we have to talk about how are we going to make sure that the folks who are riding the bus to the subway, those folks wouldn't get a benefit under this idea of free buses. So, we have to study all of this and make sure that we're prioritizing people of limited income. I love the fair fares program. We've got 2 million people in New York who are getting free or half fares. Let's focus on people who need the help.
Jamie Stelter: So that's mostly a Mamdani proposal. When you look at Sliwa and Cuomo, they talk a lot about subway safety. Do you feel like the way they talk about what it's like to ride the subway is fair and accurate?
Lieber: No. I mean, I think, you know, Jamie, we’ve made enormous strides, and I give Governor Hochul enormous credit. She helped us to invest in a lot of cameras and a lot of the physical changes to the turnstiles, and also staff and cops that have allowed us to both push back on fare evasion, but also to make the subway safer. We're 12½% down versus pre-covid numbers in terms of crime, and we're, I think, 4% down versus last year. So, we made a lot of progress. Assaults, which people talk about sometime as being concerned, are down this year versus last year. So, progress has been made. It ain't perfect, but when people start to try to put the fear on subway riders, I'm not buying it.
Kiernan: We're going to continue our conversation with MTA Chair Janno Lieber in just a couple of minutes, as we focus on some of the other announcements that the MTA has made recently. Hope you can stay with us for that.
Commercial break
Kiernan: We're back continuing our interview with MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber. You've been touting the completion of the renovations in the underground subway portion of Grand Central, the 42nd Street-Grand Central, which is and shuttle trains. The Dear New York exhibit was in that space, in the above ground space, at Grand Central. So, I was just there a couple of weeks ago walking through – this is the upstairs in the Metro-North area. Tremendous changes there in the way that that subway station flows.
Lieber: Yeah, I mean this: This was one of those classic projects where there were five different parts of the MTA that each had projects going. They're running into each other, and the riders are saying, “When is all this blue plywood coming down?” We brought to, we created one project. We brought, when we created MTA Construction & Development, we knocked it out, $46 million under budget, all of the stairs and escalators replaced. We're now on a normal cycle for state of good repair in our entire subway system, so stairs and escalators are not living beyond their useful life and breaking down more. And the Grand Central subway complex, which has got a low ceiling, but it's a lot more manageable, both in terms of circulation. You can get in and out lots of different ways and also just the basic esthetics of it. No more pooling of water. It's a big success. It proves that, you know, if you organize well, you can get projects done on time and on budget. We're doing that all over the system.
Kiernan: I've also noticed that in some cases, there will be, in a newer, upgraded installation, three escalators instead of two, so that if one's down, there can still be one left for up and one left for down. I mean, things like that are thoughtful.
Lieber: Yeah, I mean, you got your new stuff. We have to deal with the reality that our system just gets pounded. We have so many riders, which is great, but you have to be able to maintain. But that Humans of New York thing was exciting. People loved it. And you know what's amazing, we got paid $2 million for that. It was actually an advertising campaign, not an art campaign, and our commercial team made a deal with those guys are putting out a book, and then the public got $2 million.
Kieran: Did they get a discount?
Lieber: Well, no discount. They paid $2 million to put their photography on the wall.
Kiernan: There was a, it was nicer than a typical advertising campaign. I would like to see more of that.
Lieber: Okay, well, you know, we'll keep trying, but as long as they pay, we're going to keep asking for top dollar.
Stelter: Let's talk about the news that we just got yesterday or the day before, about Penn Access. How frustrated are you? It seems like you are at Amtrak, at delaying this project now.
Lieber: You know, Amtrak is important for the country, for the eastern seaboard, but here's the bottom line, and this has been going on for years. When you put a project out – the people in the Bronx who have been having Amtrak trains flying through the Bronx not stopping for like, 100 years. And we said, okay, we're going to have four stations in the Bronx. Those people can get to jobs and education and opportunity. But, lo and behold, Amtrak promised 56 outages in the first two years. They gave us seven, so you can't get the work done. Then when we get the outages, the people don't show up and on, and on, and on. So, the project is delayed. Here's the amazing thing, Jamie, you guys, we've talked about the Third Track Project in Long Island, almost exactly the same project – more track, more power, more signal repairs. Same contractor as what's doing on the pen access project in the Bronx, same contractor, and that project was done on time, $100 million under budget. This one's delayed. What we said to Amtrak is we're going to fight it out in arbitration, how much you owe us and what you did. But the bottom line is, we want a plan that allows that service to start. So, people in Co-op City and Park Chester and Morris Park get the service now, so they got to let us run service on their railroad as it exists now, in a temporary configuration. That's what we're pushing for. The elected officials in the Bronx are supporting it.
Kiernan: You touched on fare evasion earlier. We have seen, over the course of the last few months, the installation of all of these barriers, the turnstile barriers, the separators, to stop you from jumping over the side of the turnstile. People have complained that it, it feels like you're really hitting them with a sledgehammer on this. Are those things working because they have not made the subway stations prettier?
Lieber: Yeah. Well, you know, I understand. We all are – these public spaces, and we want the esthetics to work, and I'm respectful of people's reaction. The bottom line is we are not going to, we're not going to stop pushing back against fare evasion. It is too important, not just to the economics of the MTA, but to the basic sense of fairness in the public space. People are getting demoralized when they see five people walk in through the gate. So, we did make all those physical changes, especially with the exit gate, which you've heard me say, is the super-highway fare evasion. Lo and behold, we're down in a single year 30% on subway fare evasion. We're going to keep pushing back. But the good news, Pat, is in a couple years, we're going to have the brand-new turnstiles that are like the ones you see in Europe and Asia with the full-length barriers that are translucent, and we hope that that will make unnecessary some of these more, less esthetically pleasing type of interventions. But in the meantime, we're not going to stop pushing back because this is a fairness issue, and a rider morale issue, as well as an economic issue.
Kiernan: The security guards who you've been paying to stand by the emergency exits.
Lieber: Yeah.
Kiernan: They're not supposed to tackle somebody?
Lieber: No. They don't have police powers. But what they do is, but if you keep the gate closed, yeah, they're going to be people who jump over less now that we put those fins in and the sleeves that make the turnstiles a little higher. But the biggest impact has been not just the gate guards or the turnstile changes, but having delayed egress on the exit gate, so that people don't – the exiting riders – don't just routinely pop out the exit gate, which they're not supposed to do.
Stelter: Quickly before we let you go, coming up almost on a year of congestion pricing, do you still think it's a success?
Kiernan: It's an amazing success. It produced exactly the benefits that we all projected and New Yorkers wanted. And you know what's amazing, Jamie? In the recent polling, you know who's liking congestion pricing the most? The drivers because they value their time. They're saving time. They're saving 50% of the time to get through the Lincoln Tunnel. The Williamsburg Bridge has similar numbers. People really value a faster commute for the people who, for whatever reason, have to drive.
Kiernan: Why do I still get in a traffic jam on Eighth Avenue at 40th Street?
Lieber: First of all, we track it. It is always 10 to 15% better than it was the same week a year ago. But the major impacts have been at the entry points, and people are seeing huge benefits. Pat, if you're driving on Eighth Avenue, I want to talk to you about the , the and the train service. We need to talk.
Stelter: I was gonna say, tell him to bug off. We're not eradicating traffic.
Lieber: There are these trains underground. Pat.
Kiernan: You know that I am a subway rider. Got daily proof of that on my OMNY card.
Lieber: Yeah. Amen. And thank you for your business. All right, today, I just want you guys to know 13th anniversary of Sandy. We're going to be talking about what you guys are always covering, which is the fact that all that water that sometimes happens with torrential rainfall at the street level is getting down into the subway system. We need the City of New York to increase its stormwater system capacity. We'll be talking about that at our board meeting today.
Kiernan: Good. We'll follow up on that.
Lieber: You bet.
Kiernan: Thanks for coming in.
Stelter: I got special word from rail control that subways and buses are on or close to schedule. Direct line to rail control is here in the building, and here we are, subways and buses are on or close to schedule, straight from the boss's mouth. Here we are looking at a nice, easy ride out there. no major problems this morning. FDR drive looks good. Even the Gowanus is moving along a little better than usual.
Lieber: Traffic is good.
Kiernan: You know, when traffic may not be light is on Sunday morning. We want to remind you that the New York City Marathon, while being a great New York City event is a big traffic disruption on Marathon Sunday. The Department of Transportation, as always, has gone out to paint the blue line to mark the 26-mile route. So, they got started at Lafayette and Ashland in Brooklyn yesterday.
Stelter: Yeah. Nearly 50 gallons of marathon blue paint. We are so excited about Sunday. Alyssa has been in Central Park this morning checking out the finish line and where they're going to finish that later this morning.
Kiernan: When you’ve got fall weekend track work or does Marathon Sunday qualify?
Lieber: Yeah, we definitely reduce the track work and try to make sure the system is there for everyone to move around. I did that race nine times, can't do it anymore, but it is literally one of the best days in New York of the whole year.