MTA Hires Management Consultants,
Hopes They Can Help Save $Millions,
But Most Waste is in Capital Projects.

By Henry J. Stern
March 30, 2005

The Metro section of today's Times has a number of interesting items on local issues, which you can get by buying the newspaper, or visiting their website, www.nytimes.com.  To us, the most intriguing story was "For MTA, the Search for Savings Has a Price," by Sewell Chan, ppB1,6.  We have said for years that the MTA was extravagant, inefficient, overstaffed and bureaucratic.  On the other hand, the trains and buses run pretty well, which is their principal business.  Despite last week's breakdowns, most riders are relatively satisfied with transit service, and for that you must credit Peter Kalikow, Katie Lapp, Larry Reuter and the agency's operating employees. 
 
On the capital side, however, the MTA is wasteful beyond reckoning, with three unnecessary projects in Lower Manhattan alone.  The $450,000,000 South Ferry subway station, replacing a station that has worked well since 1912, is one.  The problem here is that you must leave or board the 1 or 9 train on only five cars, because the old station was built in 1912 as a local stop.  For access, ten is better than five, but the difference is not worth half a billion dollars, which is probably less than the sum the reconstruction will end up costing.
 
 This is not to to mention the destruction of thirty or more trees in Battery Park, with inadequate restitution when compared with the project cost, or judged alongside the city's commitment for improving Bronx parks as a result of the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park, and what has been done by the state in building Riverbank Park over the Manhatttan Water Pollution Plant on the Hudson River.
 
The second boondoggle is the Fulton Street station reconstruction.  This will take at least a billion dollars, and it is minor rerouting of existing lines, with an arcade to the former World Trade Center.  Yes, some work should be done here, but the whole nine yards is unnecessary.  It is a scheme that idle engineers design when there is no imminent construction work facing them.  If the MTA hires a management consulting firm, as they seek to do, this project is the first thing they should examine — if they are allowed to look at capital projects, which is where you will find most of the waste.
 
But these exercises in extravagance pale when compared to the two billion dollars that the Port Authority plans to spend on a subway station to replace the one destroyed on 9/11.  The station has already been replaced, at a cost of $320 million, and the new station is operating.  Now it is to be torn down, and the mother of all subway stations will be built.  The architect is Santiago Calatrava, of Spain, who is world-renowned for his work.  But if the project is unnecessary, it would not matter if Frank Lloyd Wright himself were exhumed in order to design it.
 
The excuse for this waste of money is that the federal government is paying for it because it is near the disaster area, and they would not give us money for any other locations.  That is what Robert Moses used to say to advance his monuments, in effect that he had secured funds for this project, and that the money was not available for anything else, so if you turned down his plans, you could kiss the money goodbye.  For a long time, the newspapers believed him, and concrete collars, now congested beyond capacity, were constructed.
 
In view of this, if the MTA wants to spend $832,000 on Booz Allen Hamilton to find economies in the administration, of the transit system, let them do it.  The sum is chump change compared with what the agency has already wasted.  Of course, there are intelligent and public-spirited New Yorkers who have studied the MTA and have ideas as to where money can be saved.  They can give their information to Booz Allen, the people who are being paid to find it out, or they can send it directly to the MTA, or to the governor and the mayor who appoint its members.  We support cooperation with public agencies, even though this sometimes leads to disappointment.  We suggest that Booz Allen ask openly and publicly for assistance on this project, and that people who know the score respond positively to their request.
 
We are not advocating spending less money on public transit — it requires more than it now receives.  But the money should go to meet real needs: keeping the system in good repair, building the Second Avenue subway and extending lines where needed, not constructing palatial terminals where you already have  stations which are modest but serve their purposes.
 
Rule 15-W: "Waste not, want not."

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