It's Coming!

The headline in Friday’s Boston Globe would not have been out of place in the Post or Daily News: MBTA plans for drastic cuts in bus, rail service. Hmmm. And it gets even more familiar once you start reading the front-page article.

The MBTA would halt all evening and weekend commuter rail service, eliminate six Green Line stops, discontinue lightly used bus routes, and lay off 805 employees if the agency does not get legislative help with its $160 million deficit, according to a state document.

The agency has delayed making the contingency plan public as it awaits action from the Legislature on a potential gas tax increase designed to rescue the state’s transportation system. The increase could prevent or minimize service cuts and fare increases.

Wait. Is Massachusetts now governed from Albany? No. In fact Boston and Gotham aren’t alone. As Eliot Brown points out over at Politicker, Chicago went through all this almost two years ago (when times — and tax receipts — were good) and managed to avert their doomsday plan well past what everyone thought was the “last minute.”

The problem is that transit funding in the US is wildly inadequate and often poorly set up. Look at the systems with the most problems of late: New York, Boston, and Chicago. These three systems alone account for roughly two out of every five mass transit trips taken in the entire United States. And riders already pay far more of the cost of operating those systems than newer systems like Miami, Houston, and L.A. They are, in effect, penalized for being successful.

The Federal government stopped supporting mass transit operating budgets in the early 80s, instead focusing on capital funding to build or rebuild systems. The result has been a long, slow descent into increasing fares and local bonding initiatives funded with incremental tax increases. That impact of that long-ago policy shift is finally catching up with America.

Almost every transit system is facing operating deficits and service cuts and fare hikes are being contemplated across the country. It’s easy to blame Albany for inaction (and it’s certainly true that the Senate in particular seems desperately in need of adult supervision) but the bigger picture is two-fold and damning: The Feds forced transit funding down to the local level while freely doling out cash to highways in all 50 states. And in New York the decisions of Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have compounded a bad situation.

The three of them over the last 15 years forced the MTA to borrow money repeatedly for projects — there was NO pay as you go in the Empire State — and now the mortgage payments are eating away at the operating budget. All those new cars on Metro North and the LIRR, all those subway station improvements, all those new subway cars — that was all done on borrowed money and the bill is coming due more each year. That’s why the MTA is in such a hole despite riders paying the highest share of operating expenses of any transit system in America.

At the same time multiple studies have shown cars and highways getting massive hidden subsidies that wildly distort the way Americans get around. Hong Kong’s transit system actually makes a profit. How? Everybody uses it because gas prices are very high making transit a cost-effective and attractive option. Hong Kong’s transit doesn’t need a subsidy because the government doesn’t tilt the playing field toward auto use with hidden pro-car subsidies.

Our leaders in Washington and Albany (and Boston and Springfield) have repeatedly failed transit users as if money spent on transit is somehow less worthy than money spent on highways. America loves it’s cars but isn’t it time to at least stop subsidizing them?

Sen. Majority Leader Malcom Smith

For what it’s worth here are a few of my random thoughts and favorite stories on this chilly Monday:

It’s almost doomsday! With the MTA being forced to vote on it’s doomsday budget loaded with big fare hikes and bigger service cuts the responsibility for this rests squarely on the shoulders of Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith who has perfected the art (long-practiced in Albany) of fiddling while Rome burns. He has had an astonishingly inept three months leading the Senate.

While Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Governor David Paterson long ago agreed to sign off on some bridge tolls and tax hikes to rescue the transit system, Smith and his fellow Senate Democrats dickered and (internally) bickered. The result? A completely farcical “plan” to save the MTA with modest tax and fare hikes — a plan that was mathematically flawed — a plan that would not work.

To his credit Paterson rejected it almost immediately. And Smith? There has been no real response. There’s some leadership.

So here’s my question: Which newspaper editorial page will be the first to call for Smith to resign? Maybe the first will wait until after the budget is finished. But sooner or later it will come….

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Gov. David Paterson

Which brings us to Governor Paterson and his woes. A new poll shows his approval rating continues to decline and now resides in the sub-30 range. Ouch. A new report dug up by Liz Benjamin over at the Daily News shows that when he was Senate Minority Leader his leadership was essentially nonexistent. Finally it appears that Paterson has signed off on a Silver-Smith (there are opportunities here for wordsmiths more clever than I) budget plan to spend every dime of the Federal stimulus money on keeping state spending high while also raising $8 billion in taxes over the next two years.

So here’s another question: Which newspaper ed board will be the first to call on Paterson to declare he will NOT seek reelection thereby freeing him to act in the best interest of the state — not his political rehabilitation?

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President Obama’s toxic asset plan has gotten some terrible reviews from some of his biggest fans but Wall Street seems to love it. Of course remember that lots of conservative critics have been quick to point out that the market has dipped a lot since Obama took office and dipped precipitously on certain days when Obama announced certain proposals or Congress passed certain bills (see: Stimulus, for one).

So will the frothers at Fox give Obama credit for coming up with a “good” plan, at least according to the market? I’m going with…”Yeah, right!”

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Speaking of Obama, Nate Silver over at 538 has a great re-analysis of the election results from last fall. Remember that shortly after the election one of the principle bits of analysis was how Obama did better than the previous Democratic nominee John Kerry everywhere except Appalachia. That led to a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle talk about how racist all those poor white folks (rednecks) were.

But Silver went back and looked at how Obama did only among non-black voters figuring that the previous analysis was skewed by the large and almost totally one-sided nature of the vote among African-Americans. What he discovered is that whites in the Deep South were much redder than their Appalachian cousins.

In retrospect that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone considering our history. Still it’s important to set the record straight. Kudos Nate!

Percentage of White Vote (Red=McCain, Blue=Obama)

New York Gov. William Sulzer in 1913

The latest Get Real video is a history lesson that Albany’s Democrats seem never to have learned. Turns out their self-destructive behavior now is eerily similar to what happened in 1913 — the last year (other than one year during the Depression) that the party controlled all three levers of power in state government. Could they be sowing the seeds of their own destruction again?

Get Real: Dem History Forgotten from Jay DeDapper on Vimeo.

Brooklyn Bridge Free No More?

It’s no mystery what Mike Bloomberg is going to run on in his bid for a third term — safe streets and good management. But what exactly would his Democratic opponent try and do to sour New Yorkers on their popular mayor?

If Anthony Weiner was to really run (which seems very doubtful at this point) he has already spent months sketching out an outer-borough populist case that paints Bloomberg as an elitist who was lucky enough to be mayor during one of the biggest economic booms in the city’s history. Weiner would be prepared to illustrate such an argument with the mayor’s own actionsand pet projects (see: Term Limits, Congestion Pricing, and Yankee Stadium).

Bill Thompson, on the other hand, has been far more coy. While he has mildly critical of Bloomberg on some issues (term limits, school control) he has shown little fire in the belly and even less campaign fire and brimstone. Thompson has shown no hints of a storyline he might use to bring the mayor down — until now.

Sunday Thompson joined Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat and a handful of other pols to blast the proposal emerging in Albany to toll the East and Harlem River bridges. The idea has been around for decades and was one of the key recommendations of the Ravitch Commission which was charged with finding a permanent fix for the MTA’s fast-growing budget problems.

In the past couple of days the idea of tolling the currently free bridges into Manhattan (from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Broadway bridge over Spuyten Duyvil — my personal favorite place-name in NYC) has gone from a non-starter to a no-brainer as the leaders of the Assembly and State Senate have both thrown support behind it.

The original Ravitch plan called for tolling the East River bridges at the same rate as the Midtown and Battery Tunnels and the Triboro Bridge while putting $2 tolls on the Harlem River crossings. Now Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith back the idea of tolling all the bridges at that $2 mark (or the same as the current subway fare at the time).

Leading the charge against this idea now appears to be Thompson’s first significant attempt at finding an issue that will help define him and Bloomberg. Tolling these bridges has always been easily spun as a Manhattan-centric idea (at least since Mayor Lindsay ordered up a study on it in 1970) designed to stick it to the working stiff. And so Thompson adopted a bit of that stand in Sunday’s news conference arguing “Harlem and East River tolls would burden many hard-working people who live in boroughs other than Manhattan and would drastically hurt small businesses, many of which already are struggling in this economy.”

Good as far as it goes but truth be told Assemblymember Jose Peralta seemed to strike the better campaign pose when he said “The MTA’s Harlem and East River toll plan would win approval by Robert Moses the Master Builder himself, with their idea to seal off Manhattan Island and make it only affordable to the wealthy.” Peralta is presumably not running for mayor, however.

Thompson is instead repeating his proposal from late last year to radically increase registration fees for large gas-guzzlers. It’s an idea that could very well work but his failure to get any traction for it with the only three guys in Albany makes him look no more effective than Bloomberg whose congestion pricing plan suffered an even worse fate.

Thompson has spent the last seven years as the city’s Comptroller dutifully presenting solutions but rarely engaging in the kind of hard-ball politics many of his ambitious predecessors became infamous for (paging Liz Holtzman!). If he’s going to take on Bloomberg and his big bucks he’s going to have to be more than the cerebral dispassionate solutions guy. New York already has one of those that voters say they basically like. His name is Mike Bloomberg.

New York City Subway

Even with the Feds potentially spending about $15 billion on mass transit in the next 18 months, the MTA’s proposed big fare hikes and service cuts would still have to happen according to MTA insiders.

That’s because while the amount of money in the stimulus bill for mass transit seems to grow every day, the money is for capital programs — building stuff — not operating systems already up and running.

Last week transit money in the stimulus jumped from $9 billion to $12 billion just before the House passed it’s version. Now Sen. Chuck Schumer wants the Senate version to spend even more — roughly $15 billion if he has his way. Schumer is proposing spending $10.4 billion on capital  programs, $2 billion on rail modifications (improvements to existing systems), and $2.5 billion on so-called “New Starts”.

Note that none of that money would go to pay for the actual costs of running current transit systems (the Feds don’t generally pay operating costs) so all that money would do almost nothing to help the MTA right now. If approved, several billion could be transferred to the MTA but only to be used on current projects like the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access (LIRR into Grand Central), and the Fulton Transit hub. These are the kind of “shovel-ready” projects the stimulus is designed to tap in order to put the money to use immediately.

To be sure these are important and expensive projects and any increase in Federal dollars will help the MTA in crafting it’s next capital program later this year. But $100 monthly Metrocards and disappearing bus lines are still on track to be implemented because the MTA’s operating budget (passed in December) needs a different kind of help. Operating aid.

Saving the fare and the service depends on actions not in Washington but in Albany where the state legislature (under the guidance of then-Governor George Pataki) forced the MTA to borrow every red cent it spent on buying new trains, rehabbing stations, and rebuilding tracks over the last ten years. The cost of repaying those loans is now staggering and impossible to do with the MTA’s current funding stream.

So forget about DC saving us, it’s up to the often hapless crew in Albany to figure out a new “revenue source” (taxes or tolls) for the MTA that will keep the agancy’s doomsday budget from becoming reality.