What Kalikow's Successor Should Do: MTA Hairshirt Apparent: Me

What Kalikow's Successor Should Do
MTA Hairshirt Apparent: Me

By MEL LEVY

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was established by New York State in 1967. Its purpose was to coordinate its constituent agencies' funding for capital projects. For example, no longer would the New York City Transit Authority and the Long Island Rail Road compete for monies. The idea worked too well.

Over the past decades, agency competition was ended but the MTA became a dictator. It acquired ultimate power over both the agencies' needs and operations. A small group of people with little or no knowledge of mass transit operations run everything.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

In January 2007, a new New York State Governor (with the advice and consent of the State Senate) will choose a new Chairman of the MTA. The right person will be able to reform the MTA for the public good. Therefore I herewith nominate myself for Chairman of the MTA.

As Chairman, my first obligation, my first and only obligation, would be to the riding public. The MTA would be contracted to only the original constituent agencies (NYCTA, LIRR, Metro North, Long Island Bus, and Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority). The bloated auxiliary MTA bureaucracy would disband. We don't need separate sub-agencies such as MetroCard, Capital Construction Company, etc. They only lead to the give-away (and transfer) of public monies, thereby increasing unneeded debt with the ultimate result of ever-increasing fares.

Forget 2nd Ave.

For example, the 2nd Ave. subway is not needed. It will not increase ridership but would increase operating expenses (and construction debt) to run a new line. The claim is that the Lexington Ave. Line is overcrowded. This is true, but it would be cheaper to extend the Lexington Ave. Line platforms ($1.2 billion over six years versus $20 billion over 25 years), thereby increasing the capacity of the "Lex" by 20 percent and essentially maintaining the same operating expenses.

The TBTA has a yearly surplus exceeding $600 million. This money should be divided by mass transit based on rider use rather than the MTA's political divide.

Abolition of the Capital Construction Company would allow the agencies to decide the best possible priority and remove the exorbitant cost of farming out the engineering and save at least half the cost.

The MTA now bargains with the major agency unions. This is a prescription for disaster. People who know nothing about the jobs and have no interface with the unions now step in at contract time. So we only feed MTA egos and aggravate the public the MTA is supposed to serve.

Help, Don't Dictate

Therefore, if appointed, I will do the job the MTA is supposed to do by helping the professionals who run the agencies, not dictate to them as the amateurs do now. The result will be a mass transit system responsive to the public need, not the special interests. In short, a system of professionals serving the public, not the other way around.

Mr. Levy, a retired veteran of 35 years in the transit system who monitored the structural integrity of the subway system's below-river tunnels, is the former chairman of the Civil Service Technical Guild's New York City Transit chapter.