Fixing the subways, without silver bullets
It doesn’t take a genius to know something is seriously wrong with New York’s subways and buses. It also doesn’t take a genius to begin fixing the problems. What it will take is clear communication, sustained management attention, and political and financial capital — basics that Gov. Cuomo can apply now without waiting, like a G-train rider, for something bright and shiny to appear.
Transit 101 is this: Cuomo runs the MTA. His appointees may represent only a plurality of board votes, but he sets the agency’s agenda, chooses its chairman, eagerly claims credit for phase one of the Second Ave. subway, and more.
But despite all the authority at his fingertips, on Thursday, Cuomo is convening an “MTA Genius Transit Challenge” contest, which he has said will award millions in public funds to “innovative solutions” to transit’s unreliability. He implies that deliverance for city straphangers is around the bend, in the form of astounding new technological wizardry, until now unknown to transit professionals.
The governor is looking for answers in the wrong places. Amazon is not going to appear with new widgets that speed up subways. The subway’s needs are already well documented.
We need an upgraded signal system that allows trains to run closer together. Electrical systems need to be enhanced. Track bottlenecks need to be overhauled. Bus lanes make buses faster. Better dispatching and train control can minimize cascade effects of delays. We need more subway cars, period.
We don’t need new ideas as much as we need the MTA to become an organization where established ideas can more quickly be embraced and implemented.
The MTA’s workforce includes many knowledgeable and experienced public transportation practitioners. But they toil in an institutional culture that moves at a snail’s pace, is unresponsive to the public and resists new approaches, including simple technologies used in other cities. No one is held to account when service fails or projects falter.
Changing organizational culture is hard, but others have done it. It requires management that questions norms and practices and elevating staff who are willing to innovate and take calculated risks with new approaches.
Cuomo’s recent appointment of Joe Lhota as chairman of the MTA board is a chance for that change. Lhota’s experience allows him to challenge the assumptions, biases and entrenched interests that perpetuate business as usual. He should be expected to instill new accountability in the agency.
But far more needs to happen to unstick the bureaucracy, create new ways of working and give existing ideas more traction. For example, he could tie executive compensation to organizational performance, or bring in neutral experts from other cities to explain why their construction costs and time lines are a fraction of those for the MTA’s exorbitantly expensive and delay-prone projects.
Can Cuomo and Lhota change the MTA’s culture when one is running for reelection or President and the other (Lhota is keeping a demanding fulltime day job) is on the job part-time? Time and riders’ daily experience will tell.
One thing the new MTA chairman can launch quickly is an honest public conversation about the problems affecting service, specific projects needed to fix them and the measures of progress that the public can expect to see. More open data about delays and trends would help peel back the MTA’s ancient layers of defensiveness.
With the problems clearly defined and out in the open, the public will know whether conditions are really improving. When public faith is restored, difficult steps such as additional funding or shutting down parts of the system temporarily for thorough rebuilding (as Chicago has done) will win acceptance more readily.
In 2014, Cuomo generated publicity with his promise to “reinvent” the MTA, even convening a panel of national experts amid high-visibility testimony. His failure to make good on those words hits transit riders hard now. But if he follows through with his current pledge, he will prove to be the real genius, not just of transit, but of public administration.