Agency eyes cuts, layoffs to trim deficit
what everyone is taught this unofficially, you take the speed limit when you’re coming into a time-controlled area and you divide it in half,” said Hicks. “This way you stay out of trouble.”
NYC Transit President Andy Byford last year launched a program called “Save Safe Seconds” aimed at fixing some of the subway’s worst signal timers. Gov. Cuomo doubled down on that effort this summer by forming a “Train Speed and Safety Task Force,” which produced the STV report.
MTA spokeswoman Abbey Collins asserted that the STV study was merely a “draft report,” but conceded that it raises “a series of questions and issues to be further researched and developed” by Cuomo’s task force.
STV spokeswoman Linda Rosenberg added that the firm “100% believes speeds can be increased in certain segments [of the subway].”
Speeding up service would require trains to operate farther apart, according to to the report.
To run trains closer together at faster speeds, the subway will need “communicationsbased train control,” or CBTC. Currently the No. 7 and L lines are the only two in the system with the technology, and the MTA plans to add it to several busy lines over the next five years.
Subway speed limits would vary with a CBTC signaling system — its computers would direct trains at whatever speed is determined to be safe given track conditions and spacing between trains.
But a CBTC system still has to account for worst-possible scenarios, including tracks that are wet or covered in grease. Rails covered with leaves or grease sometimes force trains to stop 50% slower than they would on dry rails, the report says.
Even if the subways are fully automated, train operators insist they know better than any computer how fast trains can safely roll.
“They need humans running the trains,” said a train operator with 20 years of experience. “The governor, the [MTA] chairman should ride the trains with us so they can see it from our point of view.” A letter sent by the head of the MTA last week hints at a grim picture of the agency’s financial state.
“As the MTA enters our own next chapter, we do so with the understanding that our cost structure is not where it needs to be,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Patrick Foye wrote in the letter, obtained by the Daily News. “Our next step must be to establish how to migrate to the right level of resources needed to run the MTA.”
The MTA faces an operating deficit of nearly $200 million next year, which could balloon to nearly $1 billion by 2023, Foye (photo) said at an MTA board meeting in August.
The agency earlier this year brought in a consulting firm that recommended the agency save money by cutting up to 2,700 jobs.
At the August board meeting Foye said he is “reviewing the possibility” of subway and bus service cuts in order to reduce the MTA’s operating budget. “The magnitude of our deficits is so substantial that we can’t take anything off the table,” he said.
MTA spokeswoman Abbey Collins asserted that the chairman’s letter “does not suggest service cuts because there are no current plans for service cuts.”
“Chairman Foye sent an internal update on progress toward historic transformation that is essential to the MTA’s future as we work to operate more efficiently and increase the reliability of the systems,” Collins said.
The MTA has in recent weeks announced some service cuts to service, including slashing the number of buses it runs on the busy B46 select bus route, which serves some of Brooklyn’s lowest-income neighborhoods.