While Walder may be a better technocrat, Lhota may have the political savvy to better deal with the mouth-breathers in the Senate.
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21 January 2012
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19 January 2012
Ravitch: Big Business, Cuomo Have Failed to Lead on Transportation | Streetsblog New York City
The business leaders of today, Ravitch argued, lack the public spirit of that earlier generation, and he expressed little optimism that they would eventually become advocates for the infrastructure of their city. “Their preoccupation on the whole is, honestly, keeping the Bush tax cuts, keeping the government from regulating them and making sure they’re too big to fail,” said Ravitch. Indeed, who has heard current Chase CEO Jamie Dimon ever mention the MTA?
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17 January 2012
‘Mr. Lhota Goes to Albany’ — secondavenuesagas.com — Readability
Of course, no day in Albany would be complete without unnecessary references to a tired cliche, and here Lhota acquitted himself nicely. During the Finance Committee hearing, Lhota said it was time to cease repeating eight-year-old claims proven false about two sets of books. “It needs to end,” he said. “It was nothing more than a marketing gimmick by a former state controller who didn’t know what he was talking about.”
This is the most heartening thing Lhota has said so far.
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14 December 2011
Cost Concerns, Reasonable and Otherwise
For example, Madrid’s MetroSur, built for about $1.7 billion in today’s money, or $45 million per km, gets only 140,000-170,000 riders per day, for a total of around $10,000 per rider. This is fine, but not very low, since the very low construction costs are matched with low ridership per kilometer, more comparable to a tramway than to a subway; most Parisian projects are considerably cheaper per rider, even though Paris builds on-street light rail for the same cost Madrid builds tunnels. In contrast, Second Avenue Subway is about $25,000 per projected rider, high by non-US standards but not obscenely so; I know of no cheaper project in the US under construction right now, including some with quite reasonable per-km costs.
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9:10
In 2000, then-Mayor Giuliani cut a deal to slash New York City’s contributions to the pension plans for two years (giving him extra money to throw around while running for Mayor), in exchange for the employees getting to slash there own contributions (by 75% over their careers) permanently. Now MTA head Joe Lhota was Giuliani’s budget director at the time. Was he involved with that deal? How did he justify it then, and what does he think of it now?
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25 October 2011
Countdown clocks driving up rider satisfaction
As the authority notes, the bump in satisfaction may not be due to better service or cleaner platforms. Rather, the countdown clocks are driving the perception of better service. As the authority noted in the survey presentation, “All 54 subway service and station attributes were rated higher by those with countdown clocks in their station than those without a countdown clock in station.”
In other words, Walder will still be saving the MTA’s butt long after he left out of disgust with the state’s indifference to its transit authority. I mean… countdown clocks. Duh.
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11 October 2011
They don’t want a subway entrance on their corner because they think only criminals are subway riders, and they don’t want to introduce unsavory elements to the Upper East Side. That is an insult to everyone else. It’s a slap in the face to subway riders and the handicapped. It is, truth be told, an elitist argument, and it’s why urban planning policy is stuck in a rut in New York City.
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7 October 2011
UES Residents Blast Subway Entrance Plans for Landmarked Blocks
Particularly on the west side of the street, the entrance wasn’t needed, she said, because “people to the west don’t take the subway. Not to be elitist, but they don’t.”
The 1% speaketh.
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6 October 2011
The New York local of TWU brought the matter to the New York State Supreme Court Monday, asking for an injunction to keep the NYPD from forcing city bus drivers to deliver protestors to jail. TWU spokesperson Jim Gannon said Monday that at least once over the weekend, normal passengers were ejected from an MTA bus to make room for detainees.
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4 October 2011
Skewed North Shore BRT/LRT Proposal
Let me think, you have an abandoned rail line (and a heavy rail line at that), and you want to put a ferry line there. What sense does that make? […]
And when I made that statement, everybody was surprised at how young I was (16). One woman said “You should be the one studying this project”, and they actually tried to avoid responding to me (they were like “Thank you. Next question”, and then everybody said “But you didn’t answer his question”, and that’s when they made up the response about expenses)
Meddling kid wants to know why fancy MTA consultants eliminated the possibility of restoring an abandoned train line to it former heavy-rail (higher capacity) status, to only seriously consider paving it over for buses, downgrading it to light-rail, or replacing it with a stupid-ass ferry.
