Advocates: Thanks, NY MTA, For Restoring Some Bus / Train / Subway Cuts. Now Where's The Rest?

G, thanks, MTA for restoring some service. But where's the rest? (photo by bitchcakesny / Flickr)

(New York, NY - WNYC) Want to know what transit advocates think of the news that the New York MTA is expanding and restoring bus and subway service? We at TN collected the responses and fed them into the Scrambletron 5000, a machine that transforms numerous opinions into a single collective sentiment. (Stick with us on this one.) Here's what came back:

"Thanks, NY MTA, for restoring a third of the service you cut two years ago. But we still we want the other stuff back."*

Most responses from NY metropolitan area transit-watchers began with praise, like this line from the The Working Families Party, which had agitated by online petition for making a temporary extension of the G train permanent:

"We're very excited that the MTA made the right decision."

That means, yes, the G train will retain the five extra stops that take it deeper into brownstone Brooklyn. And the NY MTA's announcement brought more bounty: five new bus routes serving neighborhoods with sharp population growth, including the Far West Side of Manhattan and the Brooklyn side of the East River between Greenpoint and Williamsburg; 25 bus lines' service will be restored or extended; enhanced off-peak service on some Metro-North and Long Island Railroad lines.

About those upgrades, City Council Speaker and likely mayoral candidate Christine Quinn said, "I applaud [NY MTA Chairman Joe] Lhota for his plan to restore critical service and urge the [NY MTA] Board to approve the proposal without delay."  (The board is scheduled to vote on the plan next Wednesday.)

She further lavished praised on a new bus line serving the "Tech Triangle" between NYU's planned tech campus in Downtown Brooklyn, the burgeoning hive of internet start-ups in nearby DUMBO and, next to that, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, home to Steiner Movie Studios. She also applauded increased bus service to "underserved" Red Hook, a Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood with no subway.

She then raised the specter of the "devastating" 2010 service cuts that the NY MTA enacted to plug a hole blown in its budget by the recession. Those cuts saved the NY MTA about $90 million a year. The proposed service restoration, which rolls back the cuts by a third, will cost $29.5 million--that's out of the $6.4 billion the authority takes in annually from subway, bus and train fares, and tolls on its bridges and tunnels. So relatively little is being spent to generate a fair amount of goodwill.

But Quinn, echoing several advocates, pointedly called for the changes to be a "first step toward restoring full service."

Another reason the NY MTA can afford to increase service now is the seven percent fare hike scheduled for 2013, which is expected to generate $450 million a year for the agency. Chairman Lhota knows upcoming public hearings about the hike will bring heat down on the authority, so he's creating some goodwill now--in part by postponing a planned fare hike from January 2013 to March. He acknowledged that political reality at a press conference yesterday: "It's really hard to go into a period of time where you're talking about a fare increase when you're reducing service or you're not increasing service."

Tri-State Transportation Campaign, in its statement, described the MTA's p.r. problem: "Unfortunately, next year’s looming fare increases cast a shadow over the good news."

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign pointed out another rider-unfriendly aspect of the 2010 cuts: allowing more crowded subway lines. Russianoff reminded the public and the press that the new package of service changes "leaves in place less generous 'loading guidelines... that allow more standees and less service on subway lines."

And City Councilman Brad Lander--who lobbied for, and got, more buses to Red Hook--immediately started calling on the MTA to restore the B71 bus, a line that the MTA has decided to leave in mothballs, at least for now.

That's a sampling of reaction. Stay tuned for more.

*Quote generated not by an actual person but the Scrambletron 5000, a made-up thing.