If You See Something...

Ever since 9-11 commuters on Metro-North have been told “If you see something, say something.”

One commuter recently did that, taking a smart-phone video of an engineer reading a newspaper while running his train at high speed, then posting that video on YouTube.

To their credit, management at the railroad reacted quickly, suspending and disciplining the 24 year veteran.  They also reminded every engineer on the railroad that this was inappropriate, dangerous and unacceptable.

How did those train operators and their union react?  With a cover-up, literally.

Since the video was posted, many if not most engineers have been covering their windows withnewspapers and cardboard to prevent anyone from seeing them at work.  They claim this is to reduce glare and reflection of interior lights, but we know better.

In my view, the only glare they want to avoid is the glare of public opinion for potentially being caught not doing their job.

How can commuters “say something” if they can’t see anything?

Metro-North says there is no rule forbidding such a “cover-up”, but they’re conducting a best practices review of other railroads to see how they handle this.  Whatever the results of that research, it will doubtless require union cooperation to take down the papers and reassure passengers about who is running their train and how.

Meantime, don’t worry, says Metro-North, we have inspectors on trains watching for misbehavior.  Oh, really?

Days after this YouTube video, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an audit showing that the railroad’s train inspectors were often web surfing rather than conducting on-train inspections.  While they should have been riding trains to see if conductors used seat-checks to prevent fare evasion or make surprise visits to engineers in their cab to see if they were reading, those inspectors were goofing off.

The audit says that the five inspectors and supervisor missed one third of their assignments while pulling down $832,676 a year. Four of the inspectors were paid $170,000 each for work not done.

As Bloomberg Business Week reports: “Investigators also found that an assistant vice president in charge of the unit referred a relative to a worker under her supervision. The relative was then hired, despite receiving a lower rating than two other applicants, and was given an $84,700 salary, about $27,000 more than was posted, auditors found. The employee and the assistant vice president had their paychecks deposited into the same bank account, investigators found.”

Since the allegations came to light, the inspection unit has been disbanded.  So who’s riding the trains, watchdogging the employees?

All this comes on top of other malfeasance uncovered by DiNapoli, including a 30 person Metro-North unit that abused overtime rules to pad their pay by $1 million and future pension payments by $5.5 million.

And last fall, eleven LIRR workers were indicted on charges of taking $1 billion in disability benefits for alleged on the job injuries.  Investigators tracked them only to see them playing golf and living the high life.

Who pays for these scams?  We do, through our fares and taxes.

So when Metro-North says they need more money because of rising costs, maybe we should ask its President, Howard Permut, just who’s running this railroad… managers appointing their relatives to jobs they don’t do… no-show employees abusing OT… or the unions covering up misbehavior at the controls?

Mega Projects of a Lifetime

If you’re lucky, you get to see one mammoth construction project in your lifetime.  Like the building of Grand Central, the George Washington Bridge or LaGuardia Airport.

But our generation is lucky enough to see two such mega-works:  The Long Island Railroad’s East Side Access tunnel to Grand Central and the New Britain to Hartford busway, now dubbed CTFastrak.

Recently the CT Rail Commuter Council was given a tour of the East Side Access construction site, bored out of solid granite 180 feet below street level. The size and scale of the project are hard to comprehend, extending from 37^th Street in Manhattan all the way north under Grand Central, the existing Park Avenue tunnel and turning east at 63^rd Street to go under the East River to Queens where it meets the present LIRR tracks. (For hundreds of photos of the project, click here)

The main station at 42^nd Street will feature two football-field length platforms, two tracks wide and two tracks high, feeding banks of escalators that will bring LIRR passengers to their own mini-GCT under Vanderbilt Avenue, just west of Grand Central.

None of this will affect our existing service to GCT (except for the added throngs of riders heading to the Lexington Avenue subway).  But the hidden benefit for Metro-North, especially New Haven line riders, may be direct service to Penn Station.  Only when the LIRR can divert some trains from Penn Station will there be room there for Metro-North.

Meantime, the project is behind schedule and 30% over budget, the biggest problem being the soil in Queens which is too soft for tunneling.  The $8 billion project should be finished in 2018.

Here in Connecticut, ground has finally been broken on the controversial New Britain to Hartford busway, now known as CTfastrak.

This 9.4 mile long bus-only highway will feature 11 stations, carry 16,000 daily passengers and kick-start TOD (transit oriented development) along its route while offering a much faster ride to downtown Hartford than can be found today.

I’ve written before about this project which has been widely criticized.  My rail-fan friends say it should be a light rail system.  But that would cost considerably more than the current $600 million price tag ($460 million of that coming from the Federal government).  The pro-auto lobby says it’s all a boondoggle and that nobody will ever take the buses.  We should all know the answer by 2014 or so when the road is finished and the service begins.  (I think it will prove to be a huge success).

Both projects are way over budget and behind their time line.  But so too were many other mega-projects which were similarly scorned.  Robert Moses was widely attacked for his highway projects in New York City in the middle of the last century.  But without him there would have been no Tri-Borough Bridge, United Nations, Jones Beach or parkways on Long Island.

Some of Moses’ greatest projects were built in economic hard times worse than today.  But generations later, we’re still relying on them to get around.  They may have seemed then like engineering folly, but they turned out to be a solid investment in the future we call “today”.

Big dreams like East Side Access and CTfastrak come with big price tags.  But if we didn’t think big, we’d still be in horse carts stuck in the muddy ruts of the Boston Post Road.  So tell your kids and your grandchildren that in your lifetime you saw not one, but two mega-projects turn from dreams into reality.

Hartford Lawmakers Put New Taxes on Commuters

Usually, I have a lot of respect for our elected officials in Hartford. But what happened in the final hours of the legislative session in recent weeks is just shocking.  You probably didn’t hear about it because there are no reporters left covering the state house for what passes for newspapers and TV news in our state, but that’s another story.

Lawmakers know they aren’t being watched and are, therefore, not accountable.  (I do commend veteran reporter Ken Dixon’s blog for the gory details of what they pulled off.)

Working late into the night, in their final hours in session, our elected officials wheeled and dealed on hundreds of bills, painstakingly crafted and considered in recent months.  By 3 am they were voting on bundles of bills they had not read, some introduced at the last minute, acting like bleary-eyed college students pulling an all-nighter.  This is the government we deserve?

Amidst this annual frenzy, the Malloy administration was also trying to plug a $200 million gap in the current budget.  Unwilling to raise taxes any further, they turned to rail commuters and motorists and picked our pockets instead.  But the session had started on a better note.

Thanks to State Rep Kim Fawcett (D-Fairfield), a previously announced 4% rail fare hike to take effect 1/1/13 had gone away during the writing of the new budget.  But at the 11^th hour, Malloy’s budget team put it back… not to raise money to fix our trains, but to raise funds to close the deficit.  This was less a fare increase than a tax on commuters.  And it was Governor Malloy’s idea, rubber stamped by the Democratic majority.

But worse yet, lawmakers stole $70 million from the Special Transportation Fund, also to plug that deficit hole.  That takes money raised by gasoline taxes, which was supposed to be used to fix highways and bridges, and uses it to pay for everything but those efforts.

As I have written before, the Special Transportation Fund (STF) is less a “lock box” than a slush-fund, dipped into regularly by Democrats and Republicans looking for money but reticent to raise taxes.

When he was running for office, candidate Dannel Malloy decried such moves.  He said he would call for a constitutional amendment to safeguard the STF from such pilfering.  Not only did he not introduce such an amendment, he did the same as past governors, raiding the STP and making commuters pay for his budgeting mistakes.  In my book, that makes him a hypocrite.

Months earlier, we discovered that this past January’s 4% fare increase wasn’t going to be spent on the trains, but was going into the STF.  When State Rep Gal Lavielle (R – Wilton) tried, along with 20+ lawmakers, to get introduce a bill requiring fare hikes to be spent on mass transit, she couldn’t even get it out of committee.

Commuters:  the fix is in.  Your fares (the highest of any commuter railroad in the US) are going higher.  But the money won’t be spent on improving rail service.  Those millions will just go into the STF slush-fund.  And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Of course, this is an election year.  So you might ask those running for State Representative and State Senator who want to represent you, why they allow rail fares to be used as yet another tax on commuters. 

Support the Busway !

You think rush hour traffic is bad in Fairfield County on I-95 and the Merritt?  Try driving on I-84 or I-91 into Hartford!  That’s why the planned Busway from New Britain to downtown makes such sense.

Yet, the project has been widely scorned and almost scuttled by rail advocates and lawmakers who would rather see rail service than buses.  Even though I’m all about trains, this Busway project makes sense.

But first, what is a “busway”, you ask?  Let me explain.

A busway is a dedicated highway just for buses.  In this case, it would run 9.4 miles from downtown Hartford to New Britain on an old railroad right-of-way.  There would be 11 stations, each with plenty of parking like at a Metro-North station.  So rather than be stuck in rush hour traffic on the interstates, you’d drive to a Busway station and hop aboard for a high-speed ride to downtown.

For more distant commuters, at the end of the dedicate bus-only Busway, the bus would enter the road system and head off into other towns and neighborhoods… something that rail cannot do… giving you a one-seat ride from home to work.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has had great success in other cities like Ottawa, Bogota and Jakarta.  In the Canadian capital, ridership grew so strong on one line that the buses were replaced with trolleys.  But in all the BRT cities, bus traffic drew riders because it was removed from the congestion of car and truck-jammed highways and given its own roadway.

So why the opposition to the New Britain to Hartford project?  Two reasons… money and prejudice.

First, the Busway has gone from $325 million to $600 million in cost.  That’s typical for CDOT accounting, so nothing new here.  But I think it’s worth $600 million, and better to build it now, in this economy, than to wait until it’s unaffordable. And $460 million of the project is Federal money.

Pull the plug now on the project and a) the Fed’s will never trust the state with a new funding application and b) we’ll be missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This project is visionary.  It’s planning for the future, not fixing the neglect of the past (as we’ve been trying to do for a decade on Metro-North).  It’s an investment in the Hartford area’s growth and, as I say, can easily be converted to or supplemented with light rail when traffic warrants.

Why not build a railroad and skip the bus step?  Too expensive and not as flexible.  And remember, this is coming from a huge rail fan.  If a Busway would cost $600 million, light rail would be easily twice that.

Which brings us to the second, and more serious, cause of opposition:  prejudice.  Nobody likes buses.  Trains are cool. Buses are for losers.  People take Metro-North by choice, preferring it to driving their cars.  But most people think of bus riders as indigents who don’t have cars, and who wants to sit next to one of “them”?

Designers have tried to make BRT systems look like trains, but the bus-hater prejudice is hard to overcome.  I just wish that the opponents of this plan would be realistic about the true goals:  moving people in large numbers, fast and safely.

The Busway achieves those goals.  And I predict it will be a big success and prove its detractors wrong over time.

Tired of Traffic? Don't Blame The Trucks.

Driving to Hartford the other day (no, you cannot really get there by train) I saw a beautiful sight:  hundreds of trucks!  What surer sign of an economic recovery?

Yet, motorists hate trucks and mistakenly blame them for traffic congestion and accidents that cause hours of delays.

Readers of this column know I’m a “rail guy” and would love to see freight trains replace trucks, but that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.  But as motorists we should not blame truckers for traffic woes of our own creation.

Check the facts and you’ll find most highway accidents are caused by motor cars, not the trucks drawn into the incidents.

Do trucks drive too fast?  Sure, but don’t we all?  Next time you’re on I-95 check who’s in the high-speed left lane and you’ll see cars, not trucks.

Should there be better safety inspections of trucks?  Absolutely!  But for every over-weight truck or over-worked truck driver there are doubtless hundreds of unsafe cars and equally road-weary warriors behind the wheel whose reckless disregard endangers us all.

Truckers drive for a living.  They are tested and licensed to far more rigorous standards than anyone else.  And because they drive hundreds of miles each day, overall I think they are far better drivers.  When’s the last time you saw a trucker juggling a cellphone and a latte like many soccer moms?

And remember… they’re not out there driving their big-rigs up and down the highway just to annoy us.  We put those trucks on the road by our voracious consumption patterns.  Every product we buy at stores large and small, including the very newspaper you hold in your hand, was delivered by trucks.  Want fewer trucks on the road?  Just stop buying stuff.

By definition, trucks are high-occupancy vehicles.  Compare the energy efficiency of a truck delivering its cargo to you in your “SOV” (single occupancy vehicle), even if it is a hybrid.  Only rail offers better fuel efficiency.

Why are trucks jamming our highways at rush hour?  Because selfish merchants require them to drive at those times to meet their delivery timetable.  If big-box stores and supermarkets only took truck deliveries in the overnight hours, our highways would flow must better at rush hour. 

Truckers must use the interstates while passenger cars can chose among many alternate routes.  Why is the average distance driven on I-95 in Connecticut just eleven miles?  Because most of us drive the ‘pike for local, not interstate trips.

If we were smart enough to “value price” our highways (ie return tolling) we’d see fewer vehicles of all kinds on I-95, and those that were willing to pay for the privilege of motoring there would get real value in a faster ride.

I’m hardly an apologist for the trucking lobby.  But neither is it fair for us to blame anyone but ourselves for highway safety and congestion.  It’s the SOV crowd, not the truckers, who are to blame.  Excessive speed and drinking cause most accidents, and the majority of accidents involve cars, not trucks.

Let’s be honest about this mess of our own making and stop trying to blame truckers as our scapegoat.  As the great philosopher Pogo once put it, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

What's a Fair Fare?

Governor Malloy is quick to tell us that creating a state budget is like making sausage, something he has done in years past (the sausage making).  “It’s not pretty. It’s work,” he says in describing the process.  The question is, how palatable will the end result be, especially for riders of mass transit.

Last year the Connecticut Department of Transportation said it desperately needed a fare increase of 16% for riders of Metro-North.  That got whittled back to a “modest” 12%, spread over three years and riders felt victorious.

That’s like a mugger threatening to take your life but only kicking you in the groin.  For this you’re supposed to be grateful?

Then earlier this year we found that the fare increase wasn’t being spent on the trains but getting tossed into the sieve-like “Special Transportation Fund” which also pays for bridge repairs and even CDOT pensions.

To her credit, State Representative Gail Lavielle (R-Wilton) and 26 other lawmakers tried to pass a bill requiring fare hikes to be spent on transit.  The bill never got out of the Transportation Committee.

But State Representative Kim Fawcett (D-Fairfield) had better luck in her role on the Appropriations Committee.  Not only did she get a $1.9 million set-aside to be spent on station repairs and improvements, but somehow she got next year’s 4% fare hike eliminated.

Are you as confused by the workings of Hartford as I am?  Oh, I’m grateful!  Just confused.

But so too are other taxpayers, especially those who don’t ride our trains or buses.  They wonder why tax money is being spent to subsidize transit at all.  (In Westport the Board of Finance is even slashing subsidies for local bus routes, following on this populist theme.)

I’ve often noted that fares on Metro-North in Connecticut are the highest fares of any railroad in the US.  That’s because the subsidy is the lowest.

For example, a one-way ticket from Bridgeport to NYC (a distance of 55 miles and running right alongside I-95) costs $16.25. 

But ride the MBTA commuter train from Boston to Providence (51 miles, also paralleling I-95) and you’ll pay only $7.75.  Or avoid the traffic mess on the 10 lane wide I-95 in Miami by riding there on Tri-Rail from Boynton Beach (58 miles) and you’ll only pay $6.25.  Similar distances against the same competing roadway… so why the fare differences?

Are the MBTA or Tri-Rail trains any cheaper to operate?  No.  But ironically, the lowest fares are where the lowest ridership is found.

Most commuter railroads keep fares low to attract passengers out of their cars.  But in Connecticut, where trains are standing room only (and driving options are few and undesirable), the commuter gets screwed with the highest fares, not to mention over-priced parking in limited supply.

Not everyone riding Metro-North is a “1%’er”.  Sure, we have a few millionaires.  But we have far more middle-income, blue collar and minority workers and students.  By constantly raising train and bus fares, we are going to literally drive those people out of our state.  They can get to their NYC duties faster and cheaper from Long Island, Westchester or New Jersey.

Forty percent of all the taxes paid in this state are paid by residents of Fairfield County.  Lose those commuters and the entire state loses… especially those we subsidize who live up-state and who never take mass transit.

So kudos to those in the legislature who “get it”, who see the value of keeping our mass transit as affordable as possible.  As these budget proposals come to a vote, we will be watching closely who votes in support of the commuter… and who sees them just as a convenient target of taxation.