Jim O'Grady

MTA chairman Joe Lhota said a proposed extension of the No. 7 train subway line from Manhattan to New Jersey is "not going to happen in our lifetime. It's not going to happen in anybody's lifetime."

The Port Authority of NY & NJ announced Thursday that it is overhauling its security operations, starting with the hiring of a Chief Security Officer.

The MTA is buying 300 subway cars to replace equipment on the C line that's nearing 50 years of age.

The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges connecting Manhattan (left) to Brooklyn.

(New York, NY - WNYC) Rejoicing. Also dread. That's the response from transportation advocates to the latest funding vote from the leadership of New York's transit system.

The board of the NY MTA has approved $13.1 billion to fund the next three years of its capital plan. It will be financed mostly by debt: $7 billion from bonds and $2 billion in low-cost federal loans.

This means the agency is sticking with ambitious projects like the Second Avenue Subway (rejoice!) but a debt crisis looms if the agency doesn't find new sources of revenue soon (dread!).

And that's why money-making transportation ideas will not die, even if they're sure to face serious opposition, like the plan to put tolls on the historically free bridges spanning the East River. Such tolls would produce a dedicated revenue stream for the NY MTA, and that would reduce the political brinkmanship and deficit spending that characterize the funding agreements behind the authority's five-year capital budgets.

The latest version of the tolling plan, promoted by former NYC traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz,  would bring in an estimated $1.2 billion a year, two-thirds of which would go to the NY MTA. (Go here for details on how that money would be raised, and here for a PowerPoint version of the plan itself.)

After today's NY MTA board meeting, chairman Joe Lhota was asked whether he'd discussed the plan with elected officials. "I have not talked to anyone other than Sam Schwartz directly on the plan," he said. "So I don't know where it's going."

Then Lhota gently nudged the idea into the debate over long-term transportation funding. "I do believe that people are focused on this," he said. "It'll probably be a very big item during the mayoral race next year."

It's hard to know whether his prediction will come true but it's easy to see why he would want it to be so. The Schwartz plan envisions $8 billion a year in transit capital and $400 million for maintenance projects to keep the system in a "state of good repair." Being able to count on that money would make the planning side of Lhota's job a lot easier. And after all, smoothly functioning subways, buses and commuter trains are essential to the New York City economy. Why shouldn't mayoral candidates be discussing a plan that could stabilize their financing?

But the fate of any tolling scheme ultimately rests with the state. "I have not had any conversations with the governor... regarding Sam Schwartz's plan on congestion pricing," Lhota said later in the day. A spokesman added that, officially, Lhota  “has taken no position on the plan."

Of course that doesn't mean he's not rooting for it, at least a little. Governor Andrew Cuomo's office did not immediately respond with a comment on the issue.

New Poetry in Motion poster on the 1 train in NYC. (Photo by Jim O'Grady)

The MTA, once roundly cursed,
For removing verse
From subway trains
Is today taking pains
To announce the return of Poetry in Motion.

There was a riderly commotion
When it ended in 2008
And the MTA realized too late
That nobody cared to contemplate
The in-house promotional placards that replaced them.

And now a literate lilt has returned underground
Where can be found
Dickinson, Frost and Ezra Pound
And more besides
As a straphanger rides from Dyckman to Canarsie.

As well, you may perchance
to read a couplet by The Bard
on the back of a Metrocard.
'Tis true,
You can scan a stanza and then swipe it through.

That's Poetry in Motion, back on a train near you.

The MTA, once roundly cursed,
For removing verse
From subway trains
Is today taking pains
To announce the return of Poetry in Motion.

(New York, NY - WNYC) New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders have agreed to fully fund the last three years of the transit agency's five-year capital plan. The news came as a relief to transit watchers around the region, especially given that the capital plan ran out of money on the first day of the year.

Under the agreement, the NY MTA bond cap will be increased by $7 billion and the state will provide $770 million in new funds over three years. It also calls for a $2.2 billion loan request to the federal Rail Road Infrastructure Fund.

NY MTA Chairman and CEO Joe Lhota praised the deal after a meeting of the NYC Transit committee this morning. "It's about the quality of our entire system, the renovation and repair of our system, the continuation of our megaprojects," he said.

Those megaprojects are the Second Avenue subway on the East Side of Manhattan, access to Grand Central Terminal for the Long Island Rail Road, the Fulton Street Transit Center near the World Trade Center and the westward extension of 7 train past its last stop in Times Square. They are among the largest infrastructure projects underway in the U.S.

The money will also buy new train cars, 340 of which were ordered today at a cost of $748 million, and energy-efficient buses. Other uses for the funding include improvements to subway stations, such as new elevators and escalators, and upgrades to communication and signal systems.

The capital program is expected to generate 20,000 jobs annually and have an overall economic impact of $37 billion. It does not change scheduled fare hikes.

Transportation advocates generally supported the deal while warning that it burdens the MTA with another $9 billion of debt. Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives called the arrangement "an express train to higher MetroCard fares and less subway and bus service."

Another hot topic at today's transit committee meeting was passenger fatalities. New York City subway trains hit 147 riders in 2011, up from 128 people hit the year before. Those accidents produced 51 deaths last year. There have been 21 deaths in the subway already this year.

MTA president Tom Prendergast said a possible response to the problem would be to wall in subway platforms. He said the authority is thanking about adding glass walls with sliding doors that open when a train is in the station, similar to AirTrain platforms.

"The primary reason is safety, " he said. "The second is environmental control and the third is to have a better means of getting the train into the station, doing the loading and unloading, and getting the train out of the station."

Prendergast said "environmental control" meant the ability to cool or warm glass-enclosed platforms. He claimed that in other countries, subway systems with enclosed platforms see increased efficiency in boarding, which saves time. "The entire functioning of the Lexington Avenue line depends on smooth boarding at Grand Central Terminal," he said. "Cutting down or eliminating platform accidents would help us greatly."

The NY MTA chief did not say how much the upgrade would cost or how it would be funded, only that he assumes it would be "costly."

MTA president Tom Prendergast said Monday that the authority is considering installing doors on platforms in the wake of a number of subway deaths — including a fatality on the L train tracks in Brooklyn this weekend.

The old adage is true: “If you build a system for mobile devices that allows Staten Islanders to find out when their bus will arrive, they will come.”

Staten Island bus rider Regina Esposito uses Bus Time. (Photo by Jim O'Grady)

(New York, NY - WNYC) The old saying is true: “Build a system for mobile devices that allows Staten Islanders to find out when their bus will arrive, and they will come.”

OK, that’s not an old saying. But it turns out to be true. The NY MTA’s BusTime system has been up and running in Staten Island for barely two months and already an estimated 10 percent of all bus riders use it every weekday. The service lets riders use a mobile device to text or scan a bus stop code and receive a message with their bus’s location.

“Having that information on the phone just revolutionizes the experience of riding the bus,” said Josh Robin, a project director with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which has had its own version of the program since 2009. “You can look on the screen and see the bus moving toward you instead of peering down the road, hoping to see the lights and LED sign of a bus.”

Staten Island is the first of the city’s five boroughs to receive BusTime, which, according to transportation analysts, is off to a flying start.

“I think it is a smashing success to have 10% of the riders using it within a year of opening the service,” said Dr. Kari Watkins, a civil engineering professor at Georgia Tech who studied real-time bus arrival information in Seattle. She said it has taken two and a half years for that city’s version of BusTime, called OneBusAway, to be used by 20 percent of its riders.

The success of BusTime has not come overnight. The NY MTA struggled for years to come up with a GPS system powerful enough to accurately track its buses while they plied their routes. Robin, who observed the MTA’s era of GPS trial and error, said he’s encourage by the outcome. “To think of all the fits and starts that MTA had in getting the GPS out there, this 10 percent rate is really impressive.”

NY MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said the authority plans to introduce BusTime to the Bronx and a borough-to-be-named-later by the end of this year. He said the entire city should be covered by the end of 2013.

Donovan said it’s too soon to tell if BusTime has led to an increase in ridership in Staten Island. He did say that usage of the system in in the borough has grown at a faster rate than it did for a pilot program on the B63 bus in Brooklyn. “We are pleased with the growth rate and we expect that it will grow further as more people become familiar with it and tell their friends,” he said.

(New York,  NY - Kathleen Horan, WNYC) The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission is holding hearings about proposed rule changes in the taxi industry that would allow the city to sell street hail permits beginning in June.

The commission is expected to vote on the new rules next month and that’s making many in the taxi world tense. TLC ‘s hearing room in Lower Manhattan was packed with industry players lining up for a chance to weigh in.

Yellow medallion fleet owners, who’ve had the exclusive right to street hails, took issue with the TLC’s proposed enforcement plan. Richard Emery with the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade said there is already a problem of illegal poaching within the industry. “Now the law and these rules seek to add up to 18,000 livery hail licenses that will compound, not alleviate, the poaching scourge.” Emery urged the TLC to seize vehicles that don’t honor the prescribed boundaries.

Several livery car company owners said they were concerned that the rules would penalize them with fines or point penalties when a new driver breaks the law. “The base would be held responsible for an action the base cannot control or be privy to or have no ability to stop in the future”, said Tarek Mallah, General Manager with Dial 7 Car Service.

Others within the industry said they were confused about how this new class of for hire vehicle will operate and potentially change how they do business. Denise Mariott Pierce, owner of Transportation Unlimited Car Service in Brooklyn, said she was still weighing her options about whether to opt in or not. She came to the meeting seeking answers about how she’d keep track of a  required surcharge and how she’d reimburse drivers for credit card transactions. She was also concerned about changed the system during an uncertain time. “This isn’t a really good economy—the timing on this isn’t the best,” Pierce said.

TLC Commissioner David Yassky said the commission was seriously considering all testimony and would amend the rules as necessary.He said the TLC would do more outreach by sending out 60,000 information packets to licensees-- since several information sessions about the rule changes have been poorly attended.

But David Pollock, Executive Director for the Committee for Taxi Safety, a group that handles leasing for yellow taxi medallions, said the TLC had a tough job ahead. “Every segment of the industry is fearful about these new rules," he said. "The TLC needs to work with all parts of the industry to make sure one segment is not destroyed in the process.”

Central Park bike lane schematic. (Source: Central Park Conservancy)

(New York, NY - WNYC)  Central Park is getting a new two-way bike lane this summer.

The NYC Department of Transportation will create it by removing a vehicle lane from a roadway that crosses the park from east to west at 72nd Street. The roadway, called The Terrace Drive, passes next to Bethesda Fountain and is open to cars on weekdays between 8 and 10 a.m.

Doug Blonsky of the Central Park Conservancy says the change is needed to keep the growing number of recreational users safe from each other.

"The park is getting so popular and so busy that there's so many more people and there's so many more bicyclists," he said. "We have to, as much as we can, try to separate the two."

Blonsky said 38 million people visit Central Park per year, a greater than threefold increase since 1984.

The park has three types of east-west crossings: below-grade transverses that are mainly used by cars, roadways like The Terrace Drive, and non-vehicular pathways. The new crosstown bikeway, which is a pilot program, will be the second of its kind in the park. The first is on a non-vehicular pathway at 96th Street.  Park rules require cyclists to walk their bikes on east-west crossings that don't have bike lanes.

Blonsky said the NYC DOT will be adding traffic lights where the new bike lane crosses the park's circular roadway in two places. He said a DOT study found reducing vehicular traffic from two lanes to one on the half-mile-long drive shouldn't delay drivers more than a few seconds per trip.

A new app released by the U.S. Department of Transportation this week is designed to let riders view bus companies’ safety records – but the wealth of information is largely undecipherable, an issue for riders in a city like New York that is a major hub of the booming bus industry.

Screen shot of US DOT's SaferBus app.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has released a new app called SaferBus that lets riders review a bus company's safety record. It is packed with useful information, little of it decipherable.

To begin with, a search for popular long distance carrier Bolt Bus calls up nothing. A spokeswoman for DOT says the app does have safety data on Bolt Bus and that you can find it if you happen to know that the company is owned by Greyhound or you have Bolt Bus's 7-digit DOT number.  Otherwise you're out of luck.

On the bright side, a listing for Megabus pops up right away when you type it into the app's search screen. Five safety categories appear, as they do for each carrier monitored by the agency. Click on the first one, Unsafe Driving, and you'll find that the DOT's "intervention threshold" is 50% and that the Megabus "on-road performance" number is 4.5%.

Is that good or bad?

Turns out that's good, which you can discover by reading the first of three footnotes--yes, footnotes--delineating the "percentiles range" of the agency's Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC).

Got it?

Tyson Evans, deputy editor for interactive news at The New York Times, gave SaferBus a test drive and then talked about how good apps work. "You have to come up with some kind of headline that says, 'Compared to everyone else, they're doing really well or really poorly,'" he said. "You have to have the context without cluttering it with endlessly footnoted explanations."

Like, say, the five stars found in every Yelp restaurant review--or the other user-friendly ratings on countless consumer websites.

The information on SaferBus is pulled from records kept by The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The spokeswoman said the agency is restrained by regulation from presenting its safety data in a way that clearly compares carriers. “Unfortunately at this point, we can’t rate," she said. "If the rider wants to know good or bad, that’s not where the agency is yet.”

The design of the SaferBus app come from staff at the DOT in collaboration with The Volpe Center, another federal transportation agency. In other words, SaferBus is an in-house government production.

By contrast, the NY Metropolitan Transportation Authority does not design its own apps using data such as train and bus schedules. Instead, the authority opens the code to third-party developers, who have created dozens of apps that tend to be user-friendly because, in the world of mobile data, user-friendly makes more money. There are 51 apps and counting in the authority's App Center.

U.S. DOT communications director Candice Tolliver said the agency plans to eventually follow the lead of the NY MTA. "Later this year, the agency will participate in a federal government Challenge program that gives app developers access to the raw data used to make SaferBus an effective safety tool," she said.

L to R at Hoboken Station: US Transpo Secty Ray LaHood, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, Hoboken Councilwoman Elizabeth Mason (Photo: Jim O'Grady / WNYC)

(Hoboken, NJ -- WNYC) U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood came to Hoboken Train Station to make a full-throated cry for Congress to pass the Senate's version of the federal surface transportation bill.

LaHood said the House version of the bill is inferior to the one just passed with 72 votes by the U.S. Senate, which he claimed would provide an annual $1 billion investment in roads and transit, fully restore the transit tax benefit and employ 54,000 workers in New Jersey.

LaHood called on Congressional Republican leaders to act quickly. "Speaker [John] Boehner, take the Senate bill," LaHood said himself a former Republican congressman, adding that the bill would pay for crucial road repairs.

"America is one big pothole," LaHood said. "We need this."

Flanking the secretary were Democratic elected officials from New Jersey. One of them, Senator Frank Lautenberg, challenged New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to convince his fellow Republicans to back the Senate bill.

"Governor Christie, don't be afraid," Lautenberg said. "Tell House Republicans to back away from the extreme Tea Party ideology and pass the Senate transportation bill."

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made a full-throated cry for Congress to pass the Senate's version of the federal surface transportation bill during a stop at the Hoboken train station Monday.

MTA workers repair and clean a stretch of closed track at Union Square Station. (Photo by Jim O'Grady)

(New York, NY - WNYC) Late night riders of a busy train line have their subway back after the NY MTA shut it down overnight from Monday to Thursday this week.

No trains ran from Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn from 10 pm to 5 am so work crews could make repairs without standing aside for train traffic.

Department of Subways Head Carmen Bianco said the shutdown, the first of its kind for the New York subway, allowed 900 workers to descend on 15 stations each night and fix and clean over three miles of station track.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Bianco stood on a station platform looking down on gangs of workers busily banging on railroad ties, scraping muck and collecting debris. He described some of the work getting done: "Repairing the track, putting down new rails, changing out a track switch, upgrading station lighting, painting, working on elevators and escalators."

But one level up in the station, behind yellow tape that prevented access to the line, not all riders were prepared to lose their service. Anais Pineda was out in Manhattan with her husband Jose celebrating their third wedding anniversary when they discovered, after midnight, there was no 5 train from Union Station to their apartment in the South Bronx.

"Now we have to take the R to 59th Street when we could've just taken the 5 straight home, which is a little inconvenient," she said. The couple estimated the shutdown would add a half hour to their trip.

Bianco said he sympathized with riders before pointing out that crews can do many times more work than normal during a shutdown without interference from passing trains, which gives riders more reliable service overall.

The NY MTA is planning to shut down the same stretch of line a total of four times this year. It will also expand the program--called Fast Track--to the 6th, 7th, and 8th Avenue lines, mainly in Manhattan, where it says straphangers have other ways of getting around.

Late-night riders of the No. 4, 5 and 6 train have their subway back starting Friday after the MTA shut it down overnight for four days this week.

The MTA said there are three ways to use real-time bus information known as Bus Time: Click it. Text it. Scan it. I went to three bus stops in Staten Island to try it on Wednesday, the day it launched in the borough.