Tunnel Vision
Extending the subway takes real leadership
BILLIONAIRES don’t have “scheduling conflicts” — they can be where they want, when they want. But former Mayor Bloomberg did the right thing by skipping the opening of the new No. 7 train station Sunday. When you built something, you don’t have to blather about it.
Mayor de Blasio, one of the blatherers Sunday, should ask himself: Two years after he’s left office, will people gather to celebrate one of his accomplishments? Will his legacy speak for itself ? On Sunday, the new subway stop at 34th Street and 11th Avenue was an occasion for a party (with cookies and a band). By Monday, it was becoming people’s routine.
Edward Kapson, a fiveyear resident of the neighborhood, got on the train for a mundane reason: “to get to Grand Central,” near where he works.
Andrew Ingall had just gotten off after going in the other direction, taking his young daughter to Rosh Hashanah services at a Far West Side synagogue.
The MTA expects 32,000 people to use the station each day. But eventually, as the train encourages developers to build more offices and apartments, it’ll get crowded. The station can handle 25,000 people an hour.
We wouldn’t have the station were it not for Bloomberg. As a plaque at the new station reminds riders, “the project was funded by the city of New York.”
Bloomberg got the project started more than a decade ago, during his first five months in office. He didn’t whine that the state, which runs the MTA, and the federal government didn’t want to pay for it.
The city put up the $2.4 billion cost by borrowing money, with a plan to pay for it when new development generates new tax revenue.
As de Blasio graciously put it Sunday: Bloomberg “believed, he cared and he got it done.”
Yes, the project cost 60 percent more than it was supposed to, even though it’s missing a second station. Yes, it’s late — it was supposed to be done for the 2012 Olympics. And we should have done more. New York has never been richer than it’s been over the past two decades. But by the end of 2016, when the Second Avenue Subway opens, we’ll have only four new stations to show for it.
That, when we can barely cram more people onto the rails. As MTA chief Tom Prendergast pointed out Sunday, ridership on the No. 7 train alone has doubled since 1977, to 76 million now.
But at least Bloomberg did something. What is de Blasio doing?
So far, complaining. “I think it’s very important we remember the facts,” he said after the MTA’s Prendergast begged the city for more money. “We are doing our share.”
And looking for someone else to take responsibility. “We have been missing the kind of partnership in Washington that this city deserves,” de Blasio said. “When we go to Washington and ask for our fair share, we still find the voices of the people of New York City are not heard.”
De Blasio’s not entirely wrong. Gov. Cuomo has no idea how the state will pay for the $8.3 billion he said he’d devote to the MTA’s $29.8 billion budget to fix up subway stations and the like over five years.
And the MTA has treated de Blasio shabbily, responding to the mayor’s earlier agreement to pay a little bit more to the agency — $657 million over five years, instead of $500 million — by asking for even more money: $3.2 billion.
Big picture, though: New York is in another boom.
Thanks to Wall Street and tech, City Hall is getting an extra billion dollars more than expected this year in tax revenue. It’s not asking too much for the city to put up the $3.2 billion.
It’s just $640 million a year — when we’ll spend $3 billion more than we were supposed to this year alone on city workers’ wages, thanks to the raises de Blasio gave out.
Meanwhile, subway walls are collapsing. Concrete fell across a Brooklyn subway track last week in a spot that already had brackets to hold the deteriorated concrete in place.
And all of the MTA’s subway money comes from de Blasio’s taxpayers, anyway — it doesn’t matter to New Yorkers whether they’re paying through their city, state or federal taxes, or just paying the fare.
If the mayor wanted to be really progressive with our tax money, he’d just make sure the MTA spends the money well — and that means speaking out against the featherbedding and other union practices that make this stuff cost so much, anyway.
Four or eight or 12 years from now, will we be glad the mayor had the vision to get something done — or will we be blaming him for not leading as everyone bickered and more walls fell down?
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.