In my first post on a way out for the MTA, I proposed breaking up the MTA transit monopoly and settling the payroll tax controversy by turning the bus systems, and the payroll tax/taxi surcharge revenues, over to New York City and the counties. New York City and the counties would also shift their existing MTA contributions, excluding those for rail station maintenance, to their bus systems. The MTA would no longer operate buses. If the suburban counties didn’t want to keep the surcharge, fine. If they didn’t want to have buses, fine. These new transit systems would not inherit the rules of the old ones. Just the vehicles and depots. One might think, given this proposal, that I have joined the many MTA bashers. Having worked at NYC Transit twice in two different eras, I in fact know more about MTA dysfunction than most of those complaining, but I also know the agency works better than most in the public sector. My actual reasoning is as follows.
A decade of propaganda has been successful in convincing the ignorant to “blame the MTA” and demand something for nothing. While I don’t agree with this, the reality is that this cynical strategy has been successful. Moreover, the suburbs don’t like the payroll tax, and neither do I. It is a tax that is passed on to workers who don’t have union contracts, but exempts the rich with their capital gains and the retired with their retirement income. It sticks it to the losers over 30 years of governmental self-dealing and exempts the winners. That’s why Lew Fidler proposed it and the state legislature passed it. Unfortunately, the MTA has become dependent on it.
By taking away the bus system, people would feel that the MTA had been “punished.” New York City and the counties could be offered the opportunity to keep the payroll tax and use it to cover the bus operating subsidy, or get rid of it – and perhaps the buses too. Bus fares would be set independently, and the city and counties could decide on their own level of subsidy and cost. If they wanted to keep the free transfers, fine, they could pay the MTA to use its fare media, but the revenues for bus-subway trips would count as subway revenues, because the subway would need to cover most of its costs.
Giving transit responsibilities to local politicians would also impose some accountability on them for the conditions non-drivers experience. As a strange state-local hybrid, the MTA has become a convenient scapegoat for elected officials at both levels of government. As it is, both state and local officials cut funding to the agency, object to increases in fares, and then object to reductions in service. That kind of cynical irresponsibility might be a little harder to pull off if local officials could, in theory, add service and cut fares if they came up with the money from elsewhere. And those local officials demanding that the MTA provide transit services without the payroll tax would be free to figure out how to do so themselves, and take the blame if they failed.
The purchase of the buses themselves could be funded the way similar purchases are funded all over the country, with federal transit aid. Federal aid used to purchase buses is less likely to be cut off than federal aid to rail systems, because bus systems were more common.
What about the benefits of regional transit coordination?
There is little coordination between subway and bus services in the MTA region, and most of this could be handled informally between a state-run rail-based MTA and local bus operators. The MTA could choose to pay the local bus systems to provide alternative service when rail lines are shut down for maintenance and construction, just as money is shifted from the capital plan to the bus division within the MTA when bus diversions are called for today. Or the MTA could hire charter bus or school bus operators instead. A century ago when trolley lines were privately run, free transfers were provided by agreements between the companies, with payments netted out. There is no reason the same system could not be replicated for the separate bus agencies run by New York City and the separate counties, given a shared fare media.
There is no reason to believe that the city and downstate counties would be unable to supervise bus systems. The railroad industry is small and requires special expertise that very few people and organizations have. But bus operation and maintenance requires many of the same skills as the much larger trucking and inter-city bus industries, and bus transit is common across the country.
Moreover, if New York City and the counties operated the bus routes, one important form of coordination would increase. The MTA is responsible for both the trains and the tracks they run on, but it must run buses on streets supervised by New York City and other local governments. This makes innovations such as Bus Rapid Transit more difficult. If New York City and the counties would be responsible for both the operation of the buses and the streets they ran on, with both functions under a single Commissioner of Transportation, accountability would be concentrated and coordination would improve.
The New York City rail transit system is virtually unique in the United States, a transit system with a sufficiently economically diverse customer base and critical economic role that it could and should cover a large share of its costs. New York area buses, on the other hand, are what they are elsewhere in the United States – a social service for those too poor, young, old or sick to drive and unwilling or unable to use rail transit (or, increasingly, ride a bicycle). Substantial subsidies will always be required for the bus system. In Downstate New York, the counties and New York City could decide how much bus service could be afforded, and how deeply it should be subsidized. Of these areas only New York City is relatively poor, and even it is increasingly less poor over time.
Finally, all monopolies always rip you off, whether corporate, business association, union, or political. Breaking up monopolies is a good thing in and of itself. The bus system is no substitute for the rail system, which carries far more people and makes the Manhattan Central Business District – the economic engine of all of New York State – possible. But for at least some trips within counties and New York City boroughs, the buses and trains could be in competition with each other. And that would be a good thing.