Can he save the subway?
MTA IMPORTS FIX-IT BIG FROM CANADA
THE NEW HEAD of the city’s woeful, broken-down mass transit system has spent the past five years toiling in Toronto on a massive network of trains and tracks that’s still only a fraction of the size of New York’s.
Certainly Andy Byford has worked some wonders and is no stranger to the horror of equipment that constantly breaks down and horrified riders nearing breakdowns. The 52-year-old United Kingdom native has worked on London’s Underground and Australia’s Sydney transit system in addition to his latest stint at Toronto’s commuter lifeline.
But that was off-Broadway. Now it’s showtime, and there’s a tough crowd in the subterranean glare of Broadway. The Toronto Transit Commission is the third-largest transportation system in North America, but with a daily ridership of 1.7 million, it doesn’t even come close to New York’s more than 7.7 million commuters.
Is Byford scared of what awaits him in January when he becomes the president of NYC Transit? He ought to be. “I think I convinced them,” Byford said of his ability to transform the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from 19th-century relic to 21st-century wonder. Pause.
“Obviously, I’ve got to now deliver,” he added.
Some of his biggest challenges will include:
Decreasing crippling delays in the subways, many due to track fires, signal problems and malfunctioning trains cars.
Improving reliability and flow of trains and buses as straphanger confidence is at a low point and ridership is in decline.
Reining in the high costs of running and maintaining the 24/7 system.
Enhancing communications to keep commuters better informed.
At NYC Transit, Byford will be tasked with managing the agency’s underfunded $836 million subway action plan, the ongoing effort to attack the source of its most frequent delays: a rickety, overused and under-repaired subway infrastructure.
He’ll also have to navigate the New York politics that led to underinvestment in critical maintenance, while shifting funds to Gov. Cuomo’s favored splashy projects, like 33 snazzy station redesigns and cashless tolls for drivers crossing MTA bridges and tunnels.
When Byford steps in, the current acting NYC Transit chief, Phil Eng, will return to his position as MTA chief operating officer. Past outsiders who’ve tried to navigate the thicket of the MTA have had mixed success.
Jay Walder, who worked for the MTA in the 1980s and early 1990s as a financial officer, then decamped to Transport for London to serve as director there. MTA until He didn’t 2009, return when he to was the named its CEO. But he frequently clashed with Transport Workers Union Local 100, and caught a ride out of the MTA after just two years. David Gunn, who came to New York City Transit in 1984 from Philadelphia’s transportation system, gained fame as the man who got graffiti out of the subways and brought service back from brink of collapse. MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said it’s common for transit agencies to pull professionals from outside their cities, rather than promote internally. “It’s not the first time it’s happened,” Lhota said. “You need a catalyst. You need a change agent.” Byford, who said MTA officials approached him to become NYC Transit president, brought welcome change to London, where he started his career in 1989 as a uniformed station foreman. His father also worked for Transport for London.
By 1994 he married a Canadian-born woman, Alison, who he met on the London Underground, and was manager of King’s Cross station, one of London’s busiest.
In 2003, he was appointed operations and safety director one of London’s biggest rail operators and achieved a 5% improvement in average punctuality, reduced average delays and improved scores for train cleanliness and passenger information.
He later went to work in Australia as the operations chief for the country’s biggest subway system in Sydney, and made the jump from there to Toronto.
“What the MTA liked about my background was that I have extensive operational, customer service and change-management expertise — and experience across three continents,” Byford said.
In Toronto, he said one of his biggest accomplishments was to change the Toronto Transit Commission’s culture to focus on riders. That’s a goal the MTA has recently vowed to achieve as well, with better announcements, more help from transit workers and clearer information about delays and disruptions.
Byford’s list of other wins in Toronto include many that match the wish lists of New York passengers, including new tap cards to pay for fares and reductions in delays and track fires.
He also pulled off a 5.3-mile extension of Toronto’s oldest and busiest line that’s set to open within a month.
“We’ve done that through changing management style and through getting the employees to
understand what’s important and wanting to do a good job rather than through coercion,” Byford said. “The TTC has hit record levels of customer satisfaction, and those record levels are being sustained.”
There were also unpopular measures — such as a test run of conductorless trains, contracting out cleaning work and random drug and alcohol tests for safety-critical positions, including executives such as himself.
Byford, who will be paid about $300,000, said those moves were needed to turn around transit in Toronto, though they would not necessarily be a fit for New York.
“I will, when I arrive at New York, spend some time looking and learning and listening to people. So I’m certainly not going to come there with a closed mind or with any preconceived ideas,” Byford said. “I’m aware of obviously the well-documented problems, and I’ll have to get my head around all of those. But I’m coming with an open mind, and I want to listen to people who’ve been there longer than me to see what really needs to be done.”
Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Tony Utano welcomed Byford to New York in a statement reminding him “New York isn’t Toronto.”
“We’ve seen a lot of bosses come and go. We don’t know the new president, and we’re not going to rush to judgment or speculate,” Utano said. “We have a contract, and we will fight to protect our members and their livelihoods as we always have done.”
Byford does have a smidge of New York and MTA history. His transit credentials earned him a spot on Cuomo’s 2014 MTA reinvention commission and on the panel for the governor’s MTA “Genius Transit Challenge” that evaluates outsiders’ ideas to improve service.
“This is a guy who’s done what we need,” Lhota said. “He understands the way old systems work, from his experience coming right out of college and being a railroad guy in London.”
“You come across somebody who checks off all the right boxes,” Lhota added, “you come to the conclusion, what do we need to do to get him?”
David Bragdon, director of the research nonprofit Transit Center, is well aware of Byford’s good work in Toronto.
But how successful Byford is in New York will depend on the powers that be, namely, Cuomo, according to Bragdon.
“It’s a really encouraging choice. The question is gonna be, does Andy C. let Andy B. do the job?” Bragdon said. “The question is, how much latitude is he gonna have to deal with workforce and labor issues and how much latitude is he going to have to really look for efficiencies and cost controls. Those are managerial questions, but those are also political questions.”