mta.info


Remarks as Prepared
Elliot G. Sander, Executive Director and CEO
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Crain’s Breakfast Forum, June 5, 2007

I am delighted to be here this morning to talk about the MTA, which I have had the honor of running since January 1, when I was recommended by Governor Spitzer and then appointed by the MTA board.

I am going to talk about what we’ve done in the last five months, as well as what we will be doing in the near future to confront the major challenges facing the MTA and to take the organization to the next level, as a highly successful public transportation agency with 21st  century capabilities, strategies, programs, and policies.

First, the MTA faces a myriad of challenges that it must successfully confront before it can move to the next level. I group these challenges into three separate, but clearly related categories:

The first category is money. We face an operating deficit of approximately $800 million in 2008, $1.5 billion in 2009, and $1.8 billion in 2010. We also face a potential hole of $500 million to $2.0 billion in our 2005-2009 capital plan, and have few recurring revenues other than federal funds to support the next capital program, which will cover the period from 2010 to 2014.

The second category is institutional issues. There is no shortage here, but let me note a few: We have had a less than fully motivated workforce due to issues of morale, both in management and amongst our front-line personnel. We have had areas of significant labor management conflict. I’ve seen an absence of focus on customer needs and performance accountability. There has been an inability to optimize the various business lines the MTA operates.

We have 7 agencies: New York City Transit, Metro North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road, MTA Bus, Long Island Bus, Bridges and Tunnels, and Capital Construction. It often seems that the MTA is less than the sum of these parts, rather than more. In an era of flat and virtual organizations, it is particularly important that we break down these barriers.

And, we have an organizational culture that is highly risk averse and inwardly focused. (Of course, you can all speculate how it got that way!)

The third, and certainly not last category, is what I will call technical issues. There are two key issues that fit here: One, insuring we have the best security program possible, both in terms of operational tactics and capabilities, as well as hardening our physical infrastructure. Two, successfully advancing the myriad of plans, projects, technologies and programs to insure that the MTA not just maintains its existing infrastructure - not a small task in and of itself - but expands and improves it to meet the new challenges of the 21st Century: global competition, regional growth, climate change, and congestion.

These challenges are, of course, on top moving between 8 to 9 million people daily on our subways, buses, commuter rails, bridges, and tunnels, or what we at 347 Madison like to affectionately call the ‘Daily Miracle’.

So here’s what we’ve done to date. Starting with staff, because organizations are really all about people, we’ve created a management team second to none of any large transportation agency in the country. We’ve done that by retaining and in some cases promoting the best talent we have.  We’ve also recruited both new talent as well as brought back some great talent that got away

Next, we’ve embarked on a variety of strategies to improve our performance. These include the creation of two blue-ribbon panels. The first, co- chaired by Dick Ravitch and Hezekiah Brown, is focusing on workforce development, and is covering such issues as NYCT’s disciplinary system, training, succession, and employee availability. The second, co-chaired by John Cavanaugh and James Jones, is aimed at controlling capital costs, a critical assignment given our robust private and public construction market, a tight labor market and the cost escalation of other inputs like real estate and steel.

Next, we’ve hired Deloitte Consulting to do an in-depth organizational assessment of our 7 agencies. This exercise covers strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and will provide our agency heads, who are heavily engaged in the process, a roadmap for their efforts for the next several years.

We’ve implemented a quarterly agency performance review process. It is basically a combination of the processes I participated in during my prior corporate life at AECOM, and one that is more familiar to many of you, which is Compstat.

We’ve launched a number of programs, including an MTA wide customer service effort and a major security program called Operation Directed Patrol, and I’ll be sharing some results from those initiatives in a few minutes.

In terms of structure, we are taking a serious look at how the operations of our various agencies can be consolidated to improve service. We are revisiting the possibility of creating either one regional bus company, or integrating the operations of the three we now operate in a semi-autonomous manner. On the commuter rail side, we are driving much greater coordination and benchmarking between the LIRR and Metro-North, while having them retain their individual service identity.

I also do want to point out the significant progress we’ve made with MTA Bus, the consolidated entity of the private bus lines we acquired from the city in 2005. While much remains to be done, we have made substantial improvements in bringing what we inherited at MTA Bus up to the standards of our other bus operations. This entity carries more people than either Metro North or the LIRR, but because of all of the other high profile work we are doing, this effort tends, like many other MTA initiatives, to occur a little bit in the shadows.

In the spirit of partnership and transparency, and to reinforce the organizational values I’ve talked about, we’ve also created several transit advisory groups with the academic, civic, and business sectors that we are meeting with quarterly to provide us with input and commentary on all of our activities. We’ve also worked hard to strengthen our working relationships with a variety of key federal, state, and city agencies.

While these efforts are only in their beginning stages, we are pleased with some of the initial results. We’ve leveraged several immediate operational challenges - including some where our response initially was questioned, and appropriately so - to strengthen our performance and reinforce key organizational values. These include the response to the LIRR Gap, NYC Transit’s weekend service diversion program on the 7 line, and track safety procedures following the tragic death of Danny Boggs and Marvin Franklin. We also responded aggressively and successfully to the April 15th  Nor’easter, where we were uniquely praised by the chairman of the city council transportation committee, John Liu.

We achieved resolution of a mini civil war between the two major sets of unions at Metro North, leading to a joint settlement with both groups including a new pension tier, and done within the overall financial pattern of the NYC Transit – TWU arbitration agreement two years ago.
We significantly improved NYC Transit’s service diversion plan, highlighted by the A and C plan, building on the 7 line experience.

Through Operation Directed Patrol, we’ve gone from roughly 60 door to door weekly train checks on our commuter rail lines, where we were basically invisible, to a weekly average of 1,250 trains patrolled and 2,500 step on/step off patrols by our MTA Police. As part of Operation Directed Patrol, I’ve reached out to TSA Administrator Kip Hawley and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to secure their participation, and as a result, we have extensive TSA involvement, over 180 NYPD joint train inspection initiatives, as well as routine station patrols by state, county, and local police agencies on a daily basis.

And we’ve continued to make strong progress on advancing our myriad of programs and projects to improve and expand the system. These include the mega projects and other high profile efforts like the Hudson Yards, Atlantic Yards, and the LIRR 3rd track.

I am proud of the progress that we have made in just five short months on all of these important initiatives. We are tackling longstanding issues while simultaneously moving to transform the MTA into a model 21st century public transportation agency.

Looking to the future, we are exploring a number of exciting initiatives, and I want to mention two of them today:

First, we are moving quickly to improve the customer experience. We created an MTA interagency Customer Service Initiative (CSI), which has already generated several new ideas:
First, each of our agency presidents have already scheduled “Meet the President” sessions where they go out into the system to talk directly to our customers.

Second, we are improving the readability and consistency of our customer service signage across the entire MTA family.  Better signs for recent A and C service diversions tested well with our customers and their look and feel are being expanded to our railroads and bus operations.
And finally, we are studying the possibility of creating a customer service call center similar to the city’s 311. MTA customers would dial one designated number and reach a call center that could provide seamless transportation information for all MTA services.

The other exciting initiative I’d like to share today concerns a fundamentally new way of thinking about the MTA and regional transportation. Changing travel patterns mean that our riders are now more likely to be using multiple carriers and often traveling through more than one state.

As a regional transportation provider, it makes sense for us to provide a seamless and regional transportation experience. We are working on linking areas of the region together with other transportation agencies, thereby creating a streamlined transportation experience.  This effort aligns with what Candidate Spitzer stressed in his transportation speech at the RPA in May 2006, when he called for undertaking regional initiatives in partnership with New Jersey and Connecticut in order to implement regional transit interoperability.

Towards that goal, the MTA, along with the LIRR and Metro-North, is working with Amtrak, NJ Transit and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority on launching a pilot regional rail interoperability project.

Under this bold interagency experiment, Metro-North’s New Haven Line customers will enjoy a one-seat ride to and from the New Jersey Meadowlands Sports Complex for up to 10 Giants and Jets football games, beginning in the summer of 2009.

In addition, all Metro-North, LIRR and NYC Transit riders would be able transfer to these and other football trains at Penn Station, using a single ticket for the entire journey. This is the first time that a single ticket has allowed travel across MTA commuter rails, subways and buses, and NJ Transit trains.

Our hope is that this pilot will lead to projects that are induced by other kinds of travel patterns throughout the region, such as new commuting to work patterns which we will see more of as the population grows. The vision is to integrate our transportation system with others so that customers can have a seamless journey on our regional rail network.

There are of course significant challenges to this level of regional interoperability such as rolling stock, scheduling, and labor issues, but we are confident we can work through them and make this a reality.

In conclusion, I’d like to make three final points:

First, by mid-July, I will announce how the MTA will be responding to the first and most immediate challenge I mentioned, which are the deficits in 08 and beyond.

Second, we cannot risk what the MTA has accomplished to date in dealing with the fiscal challenge. The MTA has seen a 41 percent increase in subway and bus ridership since 1996, a 33 percent increase in commuter railroad ridership and a 16 percent increase in bridge and tunnel traffic. On the transit side, that’s more than Amtrak handles in 3 days or more than the ten next transit systems combined. It has achieved these results with far better mechanical reliability, on-time performance, with far better safety, and in the case of NYC Transit, with an average fare less than it charged in 1996, due to extensive Metrocard discounts.

This has been accomplished while keeping its costs well under control when factoring in uncontrollable expenses or new needs like security, handling new ridership, and additional maintenance requirements due to more advanced equipment technologically.
And it is doing this with a basic infrastructure designed for the beginning of 20th Century.

The third, and last point I would like to make, and it is as important as any I have made this morning, is that I believe “we”, and the “we” in this case means not just our executive staff, but the MTA board, our agencies’ management, the vast majority of our employees, and I believe the leadership of our labor unions, are fully cognizant of the critical role our organization plays, both present and future, in the region’s economic competitiveness, livability, and environmental viability.

We will work hard to continue to win the support of the public, our elected officials, and all the other key stakeholders, including this morning’s audience, to continue to earn and maintain your trust as we execute our mission.

# # #