It takes a fresh approach to solve a stale problem. For more than a year, as the subway and bus system fell apart, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio blamed each other. Last week, they hurriedly made an agreement that makes responsibility even more obscure. Tuesday, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson strolled into this dysfunctional arrangement and said: I’ll take care of this.
Johnson proposed something so obvious, that no one else has seriously suggested it: The city should run its own transit system, with voters seeing clearly who’s in charge.
Most council speakers (and mayors) use their “state of the city” speeches to try to please every last constituency, and drone on and on. Johnson got right to the point. “You want a tax base that supports cops and firefighters, schools and public libraries?” he said. “None of that is possible unless you have an economy that’s thriving. And our economy lives and dies on how we move people around. So if we want to survive, we’ve got to get this right . . . Our transit system literally built New York City.”
Contrast these stark words to de Blasio’s comment last week. In his sixth year in office, he apparently figured out that the subway is kind of important: “What I gleaned” from a subway ride “is people really depend on their subways,” he said — and then promptly heaved his own citizenry’s problems on to the governor: “I would rather have one person in charge. It clearly should be the governor.”
Johnson asks the question people don’t ask often enough: Why?
If the MTA is to move from a board structure, in which the state shares responsibility for oversight with the city as well as other downstate counties, doesn’t it make far more sense to put the city in charge? The MTA, as Johnson points out, runs the buses. Yet the city runs the streets the buses travel on. A lack of coordination here — the city could time traffic signals to speed bus services, but doesn’t do enough of it — keeps bus service slow.
Then, too, the MTA recently put the city through years of work (and spending) to come up with a plan for the L-train shutdown, only to cancel the shutdown. With the city in charge of how to get people around when it must shut a subway line down, say, to modernize the signals, that wouldn’t happen.
Johnson also voiced a hard truth that you won’t hear from the governor: The MTA has to cut labor costs. “To truly lower costs,” he said, “we need everyone to come to the table and have real talks . . . developers, contractors, and the women and men of labor.”
This is hardly Pinkerton strike-breaking talk — and with no appetite for a real get-tough attitude among the New York voting class, why not see if a conciliatory approach will work? Union workers, after all, know a lot more about how to make the system more efficient than their managers do.
Cuomo is going in the opposite direction, quietly asking, in his state budget, for MTA labor disputes to go to binding third-party resolution — which, historically, gives unions more power.
Longer term: What if, someday, the state elects a governor who’s not from the city, and has no firsthand experience of how important it is to downstate? De Blasio wants to give control to Cuomo without thinking through the implications, but the City Council, at least, should think twice.
But, how? Johnson released a 104-page briefing book, cheerfully titled “Let’s Go,” that explains.
Financially, it’s not all that hard: transfer the bridges and tunnels that generate a huge surplus for the MTA to the city, as well, plus give the city-run MTA (Johnson would call it the BAT, for Big Apple Transit) some of the tax revenues that already come from the city, but now flow through the state first.
Politically, Johnson faces a tougher task. Though Cuomo pretends to have stepped in to save the MTA very reluctantly, he doesn’t want to give it up: The Transport Workers Union is a reliable vote center.
Giving the city authority over the MTA isn’t quite like giving the city authority over the schools, as Mayor Mike Bloomberg won. It involves giving the city much more say over its own tax base. To work right, it’s a transfer of broader taxing power, essentially, from the state to the city — something no governor or Legislature likes. It’s counterintuitive, but suburbanites and even upstaters do care about the city. They don’t want a city so powerful that it can just ignore their needs.
Still, desperate times call for grand ideas. As Johnson said Tuesday, “Today, New Yorkers are abandoning the system and getting into Ubers and Lyfts. Tomorrow, it’s U-Hauls. And the businesses will follow. Why would they stay? . . . No one is doing anything real.”
This piece originally appeared at New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post