Photo Courtesy of the Riders Alliance
Demonstrators rallied outside of Gov. Cuomo’s City office last week.
By Michael V. Cusenza
City public transportation commuters, elected officials, and transit advocates last Thursday gathered outside the Manhattan office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo to demand that he take action to fix the growing crisis of subway delays and overcrowding.
The “Rush Hour Rally” was organized by the Riders Alliance, “a grassroots membership organization of subway and bus riders dedicated to winning better transit” in the five boroughs. The demonstration, according to the group, followed the fourth major subway meltdown of the last month, with Tuesday’s power outage affecting hundreds of thousands of riders who were subject to extensive delays and train rerouting. The extensive delays of the last week were not an isolated incident, according to the organization: a Riders Alliance analysis of MTA data released in January found that subway delays had more than tripled over the previous four years.
Other major system-wide delays this year have been caused not only by power outages but also by equipment failure, signal malfunctions, broken trains “and myriad other problems that reflect an outdated transit system that has not been sufficiently maintained.” Angry subway riders demanded immediate action from Cuomo, who ultimately controls the state agency.
“Subway riders get on the train these days without knowing when or whether they’ll ever get to work. For a wealthy professional, subway delays can be a serious nuisance. But for an hourly wage worker, getting caught in transit can mean losing pay or even losing a job. New York is a dynamic, prosperous city, but our transit system feels increasingly like third world infrastructure. Through all of the misery riders are experiencing, Gov. Cuomo has been conspicuously silent. No announcement, no action, no plans. Angry subway riders want to know: where is the governor?”
The group laid out a series of demands for Cuomo last week, including:
• Accelerating his timetable for delivering promised funds to the MTA for the agency’s capital program, which purchases new subway cars and pays to upgrade signals and equipment.
• Putting forward a comprehensive vision for how to address the day-to-day concerns of transit riders, including what the Riders Alliance called a “Marshall Plan” to modernize technology that is in some cases almost a century old.
• Convening independent experts to look into immediate changes that could reduce delays and improve reliability, including adding staff to deal with problems in real time and changing methods of dispatching and controlling trains through the system.
On Monday, it seems that the group’s prayers – and demands – were answered. The MTA announced a six-point plan to restructure management of the agency, and improve system reliability and service.
“With this plan, the MTA is taking the right first step: acknowledging that riders are suffering and need immediate action to improve subway service,” Raskin said on Monday. “These short-term plans must also be matched with a long-term vision that acknowledges the scale of the problem and invests the billions of dollars we’ll need to get to reliable, quality service. Fixing the problem will require real funding for our subways and buses, as well as sustained attention from Governor Cuomo, who ultimately runs our transit system. But for today, we recognize the MTA for responding to riders’ concerns, and we hope that ideas in this package will work well and can be expanded throughout the system.”
