Lee Sander at Cooper Union,
New MTA CEO Shows Plan
For 40 Years of Building
To Get Out of Wilderness

NOTE:  This is a long article (2149 words) which contains many digressions from the theme of Lee Sander's speech Monday about the MTA. We discuss a number of city-related subjects, most of which are intended to provide background material to the presentation. Some are purely information, without relevance to the speech.  Feel free to skip anything which does not capture your interest. We suggest you print out the article, since it may be too long to read at work, or in one sitting at home.

 

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Yesterday morning I attended the first State of the MTA address, given by its executive director and chief executive officer Elliot G.(Lee) Sander. Along with Dale Hemmerdinger, chair of the MTA, who greeted the large audience by videotape, Sander manages the agency which oversees subways, buses and rail lines in the metropolitan New York area.  The MTA, Sander reported proudly, now has 68,000 employees, which makes it a very substantial authority.

I like Lee Sander, and it was pleasant to see him up on the platform from which Abraham Lincoln spoke on February 27, 1860, seven score and eight years ago. This week, we learned what the MTA is planning for the next two score years.  The agency is celebrating its own 40th anniversary this year, claiming it was created by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and the state legislature in 1968. In fact, it is 43 years old, starting out in 1965 as the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority, running the suburban railroads. In 1968, it absorbed the New York City Transit Authority, which the city yielded in the hope of receiving greater state subsidies for the subways. Another benefit the MTA provided was getting rid of Robert Moses, whose bastion, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was also merged into the MTA. Moses was made a consultant, but was rarely, if ever, consulted.

Moses had drawn Governor Rockefeller's ire five years earlier, when Nelson named his brother Laurance chairman of the State Parks Commission, a position Moses had held for thirty-nine years (1924-1963), by appointment of Alfred E. Smith and subsequent governors, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman. Laurance (1910-2004) was a remarkable man.  He gave Jackson Hole Park to the nation, and was the leading figure in conservation of natural areas throughout his long, productive life and generous life. Laurance's appointment prompted Moses to angrily denounce the governor and resign all his positions in the state park system. 

Five years later, Nelson got his revenge, but of course, he acted in the public interest for the benefit of mass transportation, which essentially replaced highways as the beneficiary of bridge and tunnel income. The troll at the tollgates was involuntarily retired. Just because he built all the facilities didn't mean he could determine where the coins (what tolls were in 1968) were put to use.

Rockefeller's principal physical legacies to New York were the Empire State Plaza in Albany, now named in his honor, and theWorld Trade Center. His brother David did better, building the 60-story tower in lower Manhattan now called One Chase Plaza. The Bank of the Manhattan Company, formerly part of the building's name, has fallen into the memory hole, along with such other Chase acquisitions as Chemical, Manufacturers Hanover and the Corn Exchange Bank, which is only recalled by sheaves of corn in bas-relief on some of its older buildings, specifically on East 86th and West 207th Streets.

Chase itself merged with J.P. Morgan in 2004, but the Chase name is still on the building, a better fate than befell Pan Am. Its home is now the Met Life building. RCA (the former Radio Corporation of America), was swallowed by General Electric and its building in Rockefeller Center, a name which was kept when the property was sold to others, was renamed for (which kept its name even when the Japanese briefly owned it) is now the GE building., known informally, however, as 30 Rock.

Sander read his speech thoughtfully and carefully.  He thanked many people for their assistance, including union leaders and MTA employees.  He compared New York City to other great cities in the world, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Paris.  He said "We cannot settle for a second-rate transportation network."  We link here to press accounts of his speech.  Sewell Chan's report made the New York Times 'City Room' blog but not the paper itself.  That blog is a good place to look for deeper coverage on items there may not be enough room for in print.

With the aid of PowerPoint, a device unavailable to most of his predecessors, Sander sketched his view for the MTA of the future. He included both projects now under constructions and those which are, at this time, concepts for the future. He included the Second Avenue Subway and the East Side Connector, which would bring the Long Island Rail Road (two words) into Grand Central Terminal. BTW, Pennsylvania Station is called a station because trains run through it, while Grand Central is the end of the line for southbound trains and the start of the run for northbound traffic. 

One problem is that Sander's visionary plans, important as they may be, would cost vast amounts of money, a score billion dollars or more (I'm not sure how to parse that.).  The projects now under construction will also cost enormous sums that have not yet been appropriated.  That is not, however as threatening as it sounds.  There is never enough in the initial budget allocation to cover the entire cost of construction, not to mention the inevitable over-runs that will occur.  Still, it will require considerably more money to build the Subway and the Connector than has been set aside at this time.  The MTA slogan could be "If you build it, they will pay." That was also a Moses strategem, build enough of a project so that it would be folly not to complete it.

Sander is right to look to the future, and whether or not he can have much impact on it. He went public with what he believes a first-rate transit system should offer the public. He also presented a boatload of initiatives which the MTA is working on at present.  The foyer outside the Great Hall was crowded with MTA employees at small stands, like a street fair, devoted to various divisions of the system.  At one stand, off to the side, you could apply directly to the MTA for a job, via internet.

The unstated, but primary, reason for congestion pricing is to impose a toll on the East River bridges to provide a new revenue source for mass transit. There is no assurance, of course, even if there is a lockbox for the new money, that the existing subsidies will be increased or even maintained. In this day and age, sadly, anyone who believes a public official is either quite naive or is engaged in what Hillary Clinton, speaking with regard to General Petraeus, called "a willing suspension of disbelief."

We have chewed on that elegant phrase before. It was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, but who knows where he found it, possibly in a dream fueled by opium. The line cannot fairly be said to have been plagiarized, any more than if a candidate said "To be or not to be, that is the question." In any event, if she knew about Coleridge, that's pretty good.

Congestion pricing, which sounds like what you pay at the drugstore for cough syrup, has been packaged as a remedy for asthma in the South Bronx, among other effects which are joyously anticipated.  It may be a reasonable proposition to toll those bridges. The mass transit world has advocated that for it for years and it will certainly help keep people who are lower on the socio-economic scale out of Manhattan, where they might commit crimes, litter the streets and certainly not shop at costly Madison Avenue stores and boutiques.

Nonetheless, the imposition of tolls, particulary for what was formerly free, has always been politically impossible, this being a democracy. Legislators, if they were not under orders, tend to vote in agreement with the strongly expressed wishes of their constituents, who see themselves as being asked to assume an unfair burden from which Jerseyites have been exempted.   That is why it has been packaged as an environmental panacea, with advertising money spread among the greens and newly formed front organizations. The scheme would require a new costly bureaucracy to administer, but that is of no conern to those whose expertise is not in transportation or municipal budgeting. One likely possibility is that the cost of entering Manhattan would rise over the years, as it has in London..

In his speech, which you can link to if you want the full monty, Sander vigorously supported congestion pricing. If he failed to do that, he would not be doing his job. He is sincere in his belief. The scheme means more money in his agency's pockets, and the prospect of continual increases as the MTA requires additional support..

To sum up: Lee Sander delivered a thorough speech, covering a lot of ground in about two score and three minutes.  Visions of sugar plums danced in the heads of MTA planners who heard his words. .Contractors did a jig in anticipation of future jobs.  Expressions of good will abounded, Rule 19: "Be kind to man and beast."  For an hour in the Great Hall, the world belonged to the MTA.

Will all this happen?  Some of it will, some day, in the absence of disaster. Much of it will not, at least in the foreseeable future. Most of us will be riding the great subway in the sky before this plan is completed, and it is probable that we will be back on the moon before Lee Sander's successor announces the next forty-year plan in 2048. Hopefully, Cooper Union will still be standing on that day, and a new crop of urban planners will salivate over the proposals. We assume that, by then, private motor vehicles will have been outlawed or sharply restricted, unless they are electrically powered.

Don't ask what the subway fare will be, or what the fee for entering Manhattan will amount to. The price for oil will have skyrocketed, after all, don't they call it "black gold." The number of Transit Workers Union pensioners will exceed the number of employees, and the retirement age will be reduced to 45. These are not wild predictions, they are simply projections of current trends.

As for the present, we welcome whatever incremental improvements the MTA will be able to make. When the authority was formed, it was intended (as was the Health & Hospitals Corporation) to achieve efficiencies by not being subject to bureaucratic restrictions. It would take a thorough investigation by outsiders (not consultants groveling in search of further contracts) to measure the progress of these authorities.

The faster we devise systems of accountability, the quicker the scoundrels and parasites are to find ways to get around them. That is the nature of human beings; a constant struggle is required to enforce the law against wrongdoers, and sometimes the enforcers are not as honest and efficient as they should be.

Good luck, Lee. You'll need it.

Am I skeptical?  Yes, and here is why.  In 1951, the public approved a $500,000,000 bond issue (about $5 billion in today's dollars) for the express purpose of building the Second Avenue Subway.  The money was used instead for lengthening local stations and repairs to existing lines.  Today, more than two score and sixteen years later, the line is being built in dribs and drabs.  In his speech, Sander said the Second Avenue Subway will open in 2015.  If you believe that, there is a wonderful bridge opened in 1883 that you might want to purchase.  You may toll it appropriately. 

The MTA is facing difficult challenges.  It must reduce costs and shed superfluous staff.   They know where they are, but who wants to put people who have done nothing wrong out of work in a recession?  The lawsuits alone would tie up the MTA's remaining lawyers.  It is difficult to steer a very large ship in a new direction.  Even a slight turn of the tiller requires enormous effort.  The most important responsibility of an agency head is to appoint the best people to top positions, without fear or favor.  Hopefully, merit will trickle down in the agency. A great deal depends on the intelligence, strength and courage of the Commissioner.  He has a rare opportunity to effect positive change.

Mayor Bloomberg said that the best way to use your money is to spend it all and let the check to the undertaker bounce.  The corollary to the mayor’s theory is that, in politics, the best way to use your power and influence is to spend it all, and leave just before they come to take you away.  If you leave at the peak of your popularity, there may well be a lot of important things you have not done.

In Great Britain, the monarch's coronation often occurs about a year after his/her accession to the throne.  Consider the address in the Great Hall of Cooper Union as Lee Sander’s coronation.  To quote the last line of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel by Philip Roth,

"Now vee may perhaps to begin."