Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared on NY1’s Inside City Hall with Errol Louis to discuss fare discounts, subway safety, and ongoing COVID-19 recovery efforts.
A transcript of the interview appears below.
NY1 Anchor Errol Louis: Welcome back to Inside City Hall. This week, the MTA announced that it'll be launching a new four-month pilot program around its OMNY mobile system. Starting at the end of this month, the agency will allow users free unlimited rides after they take 12 OMNY taps in one week. It's an effort to bring more riders back into the system as our city continues to encourage the private workforce to return to offices. Joining me now to talk more about this is the Chair and CEO of the MTA, Janno Lieber. Welcome back to the program. Always good to see you.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber: Great to be with you, Errol.
Louis: Absolutely. Tell us now about this, is in place of what I guess was the old unlimited MetroCards that people used to use?
Lieber: Yeah, I mean, traditionally people walk up at the beginning of the week and they have to decide how many rides am I going to take? What kind of fare do I want? Now the OMNY the system allows you just tap away and when you hit 12 rides, lucky 13, from 13 onward, it's all free for that week.
Louis: Right.
Lieber: So, this is sort of taking away the complexity. It also has an equity component for people who may be, you know, be short of cash and don't want to face that decision to lay out bucks at the beginning of the week. So, we're excited. Part of our goal here, though, is to make it more attractive to come back to mass transit. The city needs, you know, people to come back to mass transit for the economy. And the MTA we need our riders back because we want to get back to financial stability.
Louis: Where is ridership these days? I mean, anecdotally, you know, I can always get a seat. Which I know is, you know, fine for me, but very bad for the system.
Lieber: Listen, we were on a pretty positive trajectory before Omicron. We were at about 60 percent of pre COVID ridership on an apples to apples, day by day. We said, you know, Omicron set us back a little bit. But we've come roaring back. And, you know, I talked today to Kathy Wylde, the head of New York City Partnership, you know, her folks, her members, major businesses think that they're going to have a lot more people in the office in the next couple months. So, we do think that ridership is coming back. But obviously, in order to get back to where we were, we're going to need a lot more people to get comfortable using mass transit. And that's why we're doing all kinds of fare promotions, not just for OMNY, but also to get people inside the city to use the commuter rail system. So, if you live in Southeast Queens, and you want to go to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn or go to Penn Station or if you live in Bayside and you want to go to Penn and you can save real time by doing it. We've made that a $5 fare, flat fare off peak. So, we're hoping people get a lot of time savings out of that.
Louis: Okay, now, what are your projections? I mean, I know the partnership is trying to figure things out. The Real Estate Board of New York trying to figure things out. What are the MTA’s projections about what the commutes going to look like in the next year or two?
Lieber: Well, obviously, we're still working our way back to where we were before. So, we're not going to get all the way back to the ridership we had before. And principally, that's because commutation has gone down. Interestingly, Errol, ridership is much stronger in the discretionary periods, on weekends and night times. It's in excess of 70 percent pre COVID. So the message is when New Yorkers have somewhere to go they're comfortable using transit. But, you know, obviously it all depends on the pace of when offices reopen and that's still a work in progress.
Louis: Right. Let's talk about you've been asking for more help in dealing with crime and disorder in the system. What specific assistance are you looking for?
Lieber: Well, since before the new mayor came in, I've been saying, look, our riders need the cops to be present. We love our NYPD and they're key to maintaining a sense of order and safety in the system. I know you come from a family of NYPD. But we are asking for is we need the cops to be on the platforms and on the trains, like the old days, rather than elsewhere in the station. The new administration at the NYPD led by Police Commissioner Sewell has actually started doing that and it is bearing results. Today we know there were cops on the platform at 59th Street-Columbus Circle. They caught a guy who had a hammer. At Times Square last week same thing. A rider got off the train and told the cop right there on the platform there was somebody he thought had a gun and they apprehended him. So it's working. But there's more that needs to be done. We especially need to deal with the problem of people who are, you know, struggling with mental health issues in the system. That's having a disproportionate impact on the feeling of safety and security in the system. And I know the new mayor and the Governor want to deal with that.
Louis: There's been a lot of talk about that about getting better attention and treatment and help for people who need you know, addiction treatment, mental health services and so forth. How was that done? Do you have or do you know of a group that's especially effective that you'd like to sort of bring in or push to scale and have them do more work in the system?
Lieber: Look, we're the transportation agency. We're not the lead and we're not the experts on that. The State and the City, but especially the City, have mental health professionals and homelessness professionals to deal with those issues and they are the ones who will come into the system and start not only to have more interactions with the homeless, but the goal as I understand it from both the State and Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams is now to give those people more services and options that will take them permanently out of the subway system. We don't want to be, you know, part of a process where people are struggling. We're really relying on the State and the City mental health professionals to come in and to come in with some options to get those people into permanent housing and permanent service.
Louis: And at a minimum, though, you've got to give them benchmarks and tell them like what looks like success, right?
Lieber: Absolutely. You know, a lot of this comes down to a couple of key stations. We actually know where these folks, these unfortunate folks, are congregated. It's not every station in the system. It's probably 25 stations. Plus having both the law enforcement professionals and the social service professionals present at the end of the line, because a lot of people are riding back and forth. And that's where you have an opportunity to interact with them and have a meaningful interaction, hopefully, to move them out of the system and take them somewhere that'll give them some hope.
Louis: Well you I mean, there was that brief period at the height of the pandemic when they shut down the system and it was at the ends of the lines when they would have to clear the trains and people had access to services and so forth. It seemed like a pretty good idea. Was it a workable model that you could build on?
Lieber: It was. It was more successful than all of the other strategies that we know of that have been employed to deal with this population in the system. So we're hoping that they go back to something. But in the meantime, Errol, honestly I have to speak up for riders. And it's not just about the long term services, which is a complicated effort. We also have to just deal with fundamental sense of disorder. So when riders experience people putting shopping carts onto trains, which is not permitted, when you see open drug use, when they're smoking and masking, even if it's not an attack on them, it feels like the system is less safe.
Louis: Right.
Lieber: And we're asking the PD to deal with that as well.
Louis: Okay the killing of Michelle Go, the tragic killing triggered a conversation about installing these kinds of safety barriers. You've been pretty vocal that you don't think that's necessarily a good idea, or if it is, even if it's an okay idea it's a very expensive one.
Lieber: You know, I'm not actually looking at it strictly from the standpoint of cost. The issue that we're facing is that we did a 4,000 page study, because we were actually long before Michelle Go were looking at this idea which is used strategically in some places around the world and the real engineering issues. A lot of the platforms won’t accept the additional weight. There are real ADA barrier issues. So what we're saying is let's try it where we can. We're still studying where it would be best to pilot it, but let's also deal with the growing problem of track trespass, which is God Forbid not people being pushed, but people voluntarily getting on the tracks. This is a much larger piece of the problem we're encountering. It's not just dangerous, but it's also impacting on service. So we've had a fair number of those recently. So I am going to offer up a plan that deals with both platform doors, but also some of these other strategies to interdict what we call track trespass.
Louis: Got it. There were some big projects that are always talked. The Penn Access project. That's four new Metro North stations up throughout the East and South Bronx. I saw an estimated completion time of five years. Is that how quick it'll be done?
Lieber: Yeah and you know, what we're doing is something that, you know, we love at the MTA to do, and Governor Hochul loves it too, which is we're not building a whole new line. We're going to actually use the existing Amtrak Hell Gate Line, which flies back and forth through the Bronx but has no stops in the Bronx. We're going to turn it into, instead of a two track railroad a four track railroad, and we're going to put four stations in the Bronx in an area which is now what they call a transit desert. There's not a lot of good mass transit options. So people in Co-Op City will be able to get to jobs in Manhattan if they want to or to go north to Westchester and Connecticut where there are a lot of jobs that go wanting. It's a great project.
Louis: That is going to be transformative. That I'm very excited about. The Interborough Express this new idea that Governor Hochul announced is something you'd been, you know, sort of wanting to do for a long time.
Lieber: Well, you know, listen, there's an existing rail line that runs from the Brooklyn waterfront all the way to Jackson Heights and northern Queens and it's being used for one freight train a day. Governor Hochul announced in her State of the State that she wants, and it's an idea that I've been cooking for a little while, but she wants to turn it into a new rail line, passenger rail line, to connect all those communities between southern Brooklyn and northern Queens. It's going to connect people who are in transit deserts again to the whole rail system. And all of a sudden you've got Brooklyn Queens connection, which is not part of our current rail system. It's really transformative.
Louis: Yeah. Very exciting. Thanks so much for coming by. Best of luck with everything. We'll continue talking.