What To Expect From New Plan To Overhaul NYC's Subways

NEW YORK, NY — Even as the MTA has tried to patch up the subways, straphangers have demanded to know how officials plan to fix them for good. The clearest answers yet may come at Wednesday's MTA Board meeting when Andy Byford, the president of New York City Transit, unveils his corporate plan to overhaul the agency that helps New Yorkers get around the city.

Since taking the helm of the MTA in January, Byford has promised a "radical" plan to modernize the subway system and tackle its myriad problems. He offered a taste last month with his vision for turning around the city’s bus system, which advocates praised as ambitious.

But Byford has said the corporate plan will take on all facets of the city's transit system, from its infrastructure to its operations.

"It will be bold. It will be wide-reaching, even controversial in its ambition," Byford said at a Regional Plan Association event last month, according to NY1.

Byford's plan includes an ambitious schedule to update the subway system's signals, which are a frequent cause of delays, and make 50 stations accessible to disabled riders within five years, according to news reports.

The improvements will come with a big price tag: $19 billion in the first five years and $18 billion in the following five years, according to the New York Daily News.

Transit advocates expected the plan to include such desperately needed big-ticket items. It's also likely to tackle less splashy but still critical operational issues such as contracting and management.

But the success of Byford's pricy plan will hinge on whether state lawmakers — including Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA — will pony up funding for improvements that likely won't be finished until long after they're out of office. The city and federal governments also contribute funding to the MTA's capital program, in which the plan's initiatives will reportedly be included.

"For the first time in my career I actually have faith that the authority is going to do the right thing (and) come up with a comprehensive plan," said Nick Sifuentes, the executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. "I have next to no faith that elected officials are going to step up to their end of the bargain, which is funding."

The scope of Byford's plan will be much bigger than the Subway Action Plan, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota's $836 million initiative to tackle the system's short-term problems.

It's time for long-term fixes now that Lhota's plan has "stabilized the patient," Sifuentes said: "This phase two plan needs to be the open heart surgery plan."

The idea of such a sweeping plan hearkens back to the 1980s, when the officials Richard Ravitch, Bob Kiley and David Gunn overhauled the MTA and New York City Transit by laying out clear solutions and reporting on progress, said Jon Orcutt, the director of communications and advocacy for TransitCenter.

"Some of that transformation was very visible, not day to day but year to year," Orcutt said.

Replacing the subway system's ancient signals will be a linchpin of Byford's plan, advocates say. The existing system is decades old and frequently causes train delays.

The MTA has previously estimated that resignaling the subways would take 40 years. That's too long for commuters to wait, advocates say, so Byford's plan could include a more aggressive timeline for that work. It will propose resignaling much of the system in 10 years, news reports say.

The subway's trains are also getting old and many need to be replaced. Rolling out new cars and adding substations to increase the amount of electric power going into the system could boost reliability and allow trains to run more frequently, advocates said.

State officials will need to help pay the multibillion-dollar bill for that infrastructure overhaul, said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance.

"He (Byford) can’t conjure up billions of dollars but the fact is under the state constitution, the governor is someone who can," Pearlstein said.

Byford's plan may also build on his pledge to make the city's public transit more accessible to disabled riders, advocates said. About a quarter of the subway stations are currently accessible and projects to increase that number are underway, Byford has said.

Sifuentes said he wants the subways to reach 100 percent accesibility within 30 years. "We should at least try to get to the halfway mark in the next decade," he said. Byford has promised to study how much it would cost to make every station accessible.

The behind-the-scenes aspects of the plan will be just as critical as the things commuters will be able to see and touch, advocates said.

The MTA's contracting practices and deals with labor unions are reportedly to blame for the enormous costs of big capital projects such as East Side Access, the construction of a Long Island Rail Road station at Grand Central Terminal. Work rules also reportedly played a role in forcing trains to slow down near tracks where construction is underway.

Byford has tried to make public transit friendlier by hiring a chief customer officer, openly apologizing for failures and trying to engage more directly with riders.

But he'll need to speed up procurement, overhaul management and change the agency's culture for real progress to happen, Sifuentes said.

"He’s going to have to grind against the bureaucracy," Orcutt said. "It’s been doing things its own way for a long time. But I don’t think that’s insurmountable. He’s the boss and if he says go, they have to go."

The plan's success, though, will depend on funding. If it's as ambitious as Byford's bus proposal, it could require multiple new revenue streams, Sifuentes said, including congestion pricing and Mayor Bill de Blasio's proposed tax hike for wealthy New Yorkers.

Advocates have urged state lawmakers to adopt congestion pricing — a proposal to toll cars entering part of Manhattan that could raise as much as $1.5 billion annually for the MTA —as a long-term transit funding strategy.

But the legislative session in Albany ends in about a month and has so far produced only small pieces of that plan, including a surcharge on trips in taxis and other for-hire vehicles in the recently approved state budget.

The picture seems bleak — despite the recent heat Cuomo has taken for the subway's failures, there's been a "startling lack of political accountability for transit over the past generation," Pearlstein said. But lawmakers could benefit from supporting Byford's potentially bold plan.

"If Albany can get behind it with the resources and let him work, it will end up being a great legacy for Cuomo," Orcutt said. "As much as people have tagged the subway crisis to him, this can sort of erase that if it’s working."

Byford will present his corporate plan during Wednesday's MTA Board meeting, which starts at 9 a.m. Watch live at this link.

(Lead image: New York City Transit President Andy Byford appears at an M train station on April 30, 2018. Photo by Marc A. Hermann/MTA New York City Transit)