Who's getting out of the way of the buses?

The Transit Workers' Union Local 100 has been campaigning against New York's recently enacted Right of Way law, which gives the police and courts more power to punish drivers who injure or kill people in the crosswalk. Essentially, it established the rule of law where previously the right of a person to pass, to take up public space, and to threaten and even kill others was granted based on the size and power of that person's vehicle, or the extent to which a police officer sympathized with that person. Or the extent to which that person was dead.

The TWU bus drivers see this as a problem because the previous state of anarchy favored them. They're union members piloting some of the largest vehicles on the road. There are many times when I've been crossing the street and had to wait because a driver swung his bus out in front of me. I had to get out of the way. Most people did. Some of them didn't, and some died. Too many.

But there have also been times when I've benefited from that anarchy. I've seen sedans, SUVs and sports cars come to a halt at a green light, as my bus driver takes a left right in front of them. If the driver had followed the rules, we might have sat for a while waiting to make that left turn.

Yesterday, a Local 100 spokesperson tweeted a picture of a bus waiting to turn off of 181st Street while an "oblivious pedestrian" crossed Wadsworth Avenue with the light. Several times in recent months the TWU has threatened to take extreme care to avoid violating the right-of-way of pedestrians, to which pedestrian advocates have replied, "No, please don't fling me in that briar patch!"

When pedestrian advocate Robert Wright observed that the pedestrian crossing Wadsworth had the right of way, a Local 100 spokesperson tweeted, "The point is that there should be a turn signal so that peds can be safe when buses have to turn." And yes, this is one way that the problem could be solved, but having lots of turn phases can cause more problems.

Even before that tweet, the picture had gotten me thinking: what if we wanted to give bus drivers the priority they used to have, but enshrine it into law? We give police cars, fire trucks and ambulances the right to take street space; if we think buses should have more priority, why not give a similar right to them? What if all in-service buses were allowed to turn whenever they wanted, and all other traffic had to yield?

Then it got me thinking that if they had this priority, we would need some kind of signal to tell pedestrians and other drivers to get out of the way. Police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, they all have sirens and flashing lights. Sirens on every bus would be overkill. Flashing lights?

Photo: New York City Climate

Hey wait a minute! Didn't there used to be lights on some of the buses? Yes, when the first Select Bus line debuted on Fordham Road it had flashing blue lights on the front. The idea was partly to distinguish Select Buses from the local buses operating on the same route, but also to notify drivers that the bus had priority.

You may also remember what happened to the flashing lights. After four successful years of Select Bus Service, when it was rolled out on the S79, Staten Island politicians complained that the lights were "distracting to drivers," and pressured the MTA to shut them off.

Where was the Transit Workers' Union in this? I haven't found any mention of them. If they tweeted or sent out a press release, it wasn't picked up. But they did endorse State Senator Bill Perkins for re-election, after he repeatedly opposed plans to extend the M60 select bus lanes to West 125th Street.

Local 100's choice of 181st Street for this action is telling. 181st is a critical bus corridor connecting the A and #1 subway lines with transit-poor neighborhoods in the western Bronx. The buses are constantly getting stuck behind double-parked cars. The Department of Transportation tried hard to speed them up, but local politicians watered the plan down to nothing. Where was the TWU?

These issues - stiffer penalties for hurting pedestrians with the right of way, dedicated lanes for buses, and lights to reinforce the priority of buses in those lanes - are all issues about who's getting out of the way. In that sense, they're like the bus bays in Tenafly, or pedestrian overpasses: an indication of the priorities of the government. The right-of-way law says that pedestrians are as important as bus drivers and riders, and the TWU has fought that tooth and nail. The dedicated lanes and flashing blue lights said that private motorists were less important than bus riders, and the TWU didn't lift a finger for it.

A safe, comfortable bus network

Recently I drew your attention to Kimberly Matus's story about being groped on a downtown 2 train, and the fact that the only way she could be reasonably sure of avoiding a repeat of that situation was to take a taxi to work, or buy a car. The Death Valley of Commute Options means that Matus - and people like me who just want to sit down - have no reasonable transit alternative. We can take a cheap, fast train or a cheap, slow bus, and both of them force us to deal with crowding and noise. Even the taxis are hard to find, and the legal options for sharing are rare. The system is set up to force us into cars.

Photo: Ben Woosley / Flickr.

The frustrating thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. Whenever there's crowding or queuing, chances are someone is willing to pay to escape it. If the government sets up an alternative it will get customers, and if barriers to entry are low, private businesses will set up alternatives.

Sadly, barriers to entry are not low. The City DOT refuses to allow any private bus lines to operate within city limits, the City Council won't authorize commuter vans to pick up passengers legally, the NYPD won't let them use the bus lanes, and the State Legislature is driving intercity bus operators out of business, based on bad data from the Federal DOT.

I'm proposing that instead the City allow well-regulated private buses to bid on selected routes, charging whatever fare the market will bear. And no, not on the routes with the lowest demand, which basically ensures failure without an anchor, but on high-demand routes, paralleling subway lines. It would help if the city also provided dedicated bus lanes and bus bulbs along these routes, but I don't think they're absolutely necessary. From what I can see, the demand is there even if the buses are much slower than the subway.

I can envision a million objections, but there are two serious ones I can think of. The first is that it will undermine the strength of the transit unions and the quality of life of transit workers. Because of this, I propose (1) that all bidders be required to operate a closed shop on these routes, employing only members of the transit unions that are currently active in the city.

The second, raised by Zoltán, is that it's not fair to make women pay more to avoid sexual assault. I completely agree, and I think we should be working towards a system where such offenses are rare and swiftly punished. But I don't think we should have to wait for that, and it's not the only reason to provide comfortable alternatives to the subway.

The third is that it will poach customers from the existing subway and bus routes. In the comments to my previous post, Alon Levy tried to argue that this would mean a "mass exodus from the subway," and that it was somehow okay for New York subways to be operating at 100% of recommended capacity because Tokyo subways have much higher loads.

Chart: New York Times (2007), based on MTA data.

I'm not convinced. I think we should be aiming for passenger loads below 100%, something like the Shoupian ideal of 85%. Why shouldn't people be comfortable during rush hour? But I agree that the government should not be subsidizing competition to its own transit system, the way it currently does by building and widening highways. But to address these objections, I suggest the following additional conditions:

(2) That there be no direct subsidy to the private operators. If there are enough people who think they can make a profit, they should pay the city an amount to be determined by competitive bidding.

(3) That the routes be rebid every year, based on a survey of passenger loads. The routes should connect subway stations that currently require travel on a line that sees loads greater than 85% capacity at rush hour (or even outside of rush hour, with reasonable deviations. If a route drops below 85% on a survey, it is no longer eligible for parallel bus service.

In addition, I think these two conditions would help ensure consistency and satisfaction:

(4) That the routes be served at least every fifteen minutes from 6AM to midnight, seven days a week. If an operator fails to provide that level of service, the DOT should rescind the authorization to operate on that route. If the operator cannot make a profit, there should be a formal process for abandoning a route.

(5) That the MTA allow the private operators to accept Metrocards and any other standard MTA fare payment system, if the operator desires it.

What would such a network of bus routes look like? Ultimately, that would be up to the operators bidding for the routes. But I have some ideas about what I would bid on if I had a bus company. First, if we assume that the chart above is still correct, it would mean paralleling the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, E and L trains. Those lines roughly parallel Eric Fischer's travel map of geocoded tweets:

Map: Eric Fischer / Flickr.

Knowing that most people are commuting to jobs in East Midtown, I set up a bunch of routes that focus on that area.

I would definitely pay five dollars for a guaranteed seat on one of these buses during rush hour, even if I had to sit on it for an hour, as long as it meant avoiding a crowded subway. I'd pay even more if it had BusTime, legroom, outlets, broadband internet and an espresso machine. I bet some people who currently drive or take taxis or black cars into the city would take one of these buses instead. Surely it's worth a try?

What you get when you make hasty generalizations

On Monday I pointed you to a Times op-ed by Elliott Sclar and Robert Paaswell, and observed that they chose to focus on the private transit systems of third world cities like Calcutta (which in that particular spelling is practically shorthand for crowds and squalor to most Times readers) and ignore the reasonably clean and safe vans in New Jersey and Chinatown. Last night I showed how this guilt-by-association game leads to a number of erroneous conclusions.

First, I want to discuss one bizarre point in the op-ed, the parenthetical aside in this paragraph:

Indeed, even though the van companies are already operating on the former bus routes, the Taxi and Limousine Commission has not added enough personnel to cover its new regulatory responsibilities. (It’s worth asking why, if such funds were available, the city shouldn’t reinstate some of the bus routes instead).

Sure, it's worth asking. There are no dumb questions. But an answer comes to my mind pretty quickly: one TLC enforcement agent can monitor several routes. One agent is a lot cheaper than the number of bus drivers needed to run all those routes. So it's worth asking why, if I answered this question right away, the guys who run two prestigious academic institutes couldn't come up with the answer before their op-ed went to press. My guess is they didn't want to know, and they thought it would make them sound clever. Not exactly.

Here are a few more of their erroneous conclusions, which happen to result from applying their selective methods to perfectly accurate observations. Sclar and Paaswell are correct that appropriate regulation is necessary for transit to be an effective tool for achieving our goals. But they make a mistake in conflating public ownership and regulation. In reality these are not the same thing. You can have poorly regulated government enterprises; the MTA is often said to be one. You can also have well-regulated industries that are privately owned, like restaurants. If the authors are Communists who believe that everything should be run by the State, they don't say that upfront, and if they're not Communists they don't make a good case for transit being treated differently from food preparation.

Once established, Sclar and Paaswell argue, transit providers can become organized and entrenched, protecting their interests at the expense of the public. They are correct here: I can think of one city in particular where a "cartel" of transit operators has jealously guarded their monopoly even though the public winds up paying more money for less service. Unfortunately for their argument, it happens to be our city, and the cartel is the Transit Workers' Union. They may not engage in the kind of violence that the authors breathlessly related, but they are certainly succeeding in stifling innovation and impeding efficiency measures.

In this op-ed, the argument I'm probably the most sympathetic to is the one about employee wages and hours. I strongly believe that everyone deserves a job with decent pay for a reasonable workday. But it doesn't make sense to fight this battle in every workplace. Transit cannot shoulder the burden of social justice by itself. There are other social goals that I consider more important than maintaining the wage levels of unionized public-sector transit workers. What does it matter how much you're earning if you spend most of it on Metrocards, or if you're obese, your wife gets run over, your kid has asthma, or your house gets flooded.



I am also troubled by the hours worked by van drivers, but I'm equally troubled by the amount of overtime racked up by MTA workers. I don't want to see anybody overworked, no matter how much they get paid for it.

In contrast, Sclaar and Paaswell don't seem concerned at all about the amount of overtime that MTA operators are working. That makes me think that they don't really care about the hours anyone works. They just know that other people might care, so it's a handy thing to throw at the vans.

And I think that's the bottom line. This op-ed isn't science, and it's not journalism. It's a couple of cranky old guys who've been doing things a particular way their whole lives: publicly owned, unionized transit. That way is running into some difficulties, so someone tries a different approach: private jitneys. This also happens to hurt their friends in the union.

Do Sclar and Paaswell actually go try the vans? Do they ask around to find out how vans can be successful? No, they start from some prejudices they formed on a cramped bus ride in Rio, and brainstorm all the bad things they can think of about jitney service. They edit it (sort of) into an op-ed, and presto! Top of the Times opinion page. Yay.

Consensus, trust and bad faith

Here's the most interesting quote from Alex Blumberg's piece on consensus and the economy in Jamaica and Barbados:

Alex: For Tony Wolcott, it all comes down to one simple thing. Which, when he said it, I couldn't believe what I was hearing:

Tony: Trust and that to me is a key factor in the whole cohesion of the social partnership that we've got here.

Alex: The reason that I'm laughing is that you represent the employers of Barbados, and again, I'm putting this into the American context. It's just sort of hard to imagine an American leader of a business association talking about how much they trust the labor union. It just doesn't seem possible, right?

Part of the problem is simply that so many of the actors are obviously acting in bad faith. Marty Golden sits by and watches as the MTA fails to get proper funding, votes for the budget that strips $143 million from the agency, and then attacks Janele Hyer-Spencer for voting for that same budget. The TWU leaders make a mockery of the overtime rules that earlier labor leaders worked so hard to establish. Real estate mogul Bruce Ratner milks the MTA for all it's worth, even as it's preparing to cut subway and bus service.

How do you build the kind of trust that Tony Wolcott talked about? Well, one difference between Barbados in 1991 and New York in 2010 is that the leaders in Barbados actually seemed to care what happened to the country. I honestly think that on some level Bloomberg cares what happens to the city and state, and Paterson cares, and so does Jay Walder. At the very least, I think they want to be seen to have done a good job.

I have no reason to think that John Sampson cares about the State or even his legacy, and the same with Lloyd Blankfein and John Samuelson. All three of them just seem to be trying to milk the system for as much as it's worth and then retire to Florida. How do you establish trust with someone like that?

Ultimately, the thing to do is to reform the system so that dishonest politicians like Sampson and Richard Brodsky can't get the kind of power that they currently have, and so that greedy unelected business owners like Ratner have limited influence. I'm guessing that if we had trustworthy politicians and trustworthy business leaders, then the TWU - which as far as I know is a fairly democratic institution - would drop its defensive postures and begin to work with the others.

To accomplish this long-term goal, we have to reform campaign finance, ethics and patronage. There are several promising proposals in these directions being floated by Andrew Cuomo, Ed Koch and others; let's hope that at least one of them has some success this year.

At this point, though, reestablishing trust is a long way off, and consensus is even further. In the meantime, we need to use methods that don't rely on consensus, but we can't lose sight of the fact that they're necessary evils, and we need to plan for the day when they're gone.

A five borough van plan

Last night Andrea Bernstein reported that the the city was planning to announce a radical expansion of private vans, to compensate for the MTA bus cuts. New York 1 has the details from the Mayor's press conference this morning. Of the routes in Brooklyn and Queens that have been cut by the MTA, the city will choose "three to six" as pilot projects.

An hour before this, the Taxi and Limousine Commission approved a plan to replace the X90 bus with a taxi share stand at 71st and York. The taxis would cost $6 per person and go down the FDR to Water Street and end at the World Financial Center. Apparently the share taxi stand at 79th and York is pretty popular.

It occurred to me that this could be the culmination of a longstanding plot to privatize bus service, or some kind of brinksmanship to get real transit funding out of the legislature, but I think the best explanation is that the Mayor has come to the realization that Silver and Sampson will never properly fund the MTA. He sees it as a managerial challenge to provide good transit for the city, and if he gets to boost private companies and weaken a union or two, so much the better.

I have a few concerns with this plan, though. The first is the suitability of the routes. If they've been cut for low ridership, how does the Mayor expect them to work? Jitneys and taxis have lower overhead, but they can't conjure up profits out of thin air. If the routes were eliminated because they duplicated other routes, then the jitneys will probably succeed. If they are the only transit route to a given place, they stand a good chance of failing.

The second concern is that this would widen the existing divide between the "haves" (Manhattanites with $6 share taxis) and the "have-nots" (outer borough residents with $2 vans). It would establish two tiers of transit service to correspond to the existing two tiers of taxi service, and re-establish the two-fare zone.

This would be okay only if these two pilots are eventually integrated with the services offered by the MTA into a single system that would include a range of well-regulated options overlapping throughout the city, from private taxis to share taxis to jitneys to scheduled buses, eventually accepting Metrocards or their smart card replacements and allowing free transfers. Most importantly, it would include quality van service for upscale passengers who are willing to pay a premium to avoid lowest-common-denominator transit.

This has the potential to evolve into a system that could get people out of their cars and lead to an expansion of the constituency for transit. But it won't be easy. The Amalgamated Transit Union already held a low-key protest at the Mayor's press conference, and the tabloids are ready to jump on any problems that might arise. Transit advocates need to press for these conditions, in rough order of priority:

1. The city must pay enough for strict enforcement of all vehicle and traffic licensing, insurance and safety standards. A lot of money will be freed up by not chasing "neutral good" operators who are licensed but operating on unauthorized routes. That should be put to good use keeping riders safe and avoiding bad press.

2. The city must streamline the process of permitting new vans and share taxis.

3. Vans must have a decent chance of obtaining authorization to operate on routes anywhere in the city, regardless of whether there is an established MTA route. However, scheduled bus service should get priority in bus stops, giving them an incentive to anchor the routes.

4. The city and the MTA should institute a process where van operators can accept Metrocards - or whatever new technology replaces them - allowing a free transfer to other van services, or MTA buses and subways.

5. The city and the MTA should allow private companies to bid on bus routes, either existing MTA ones or private ones. These should be fair bids, not sweetheart deals aimed at divesting the MTA of valuable rights.

6. The city and the MTA should work to provide more quickways to help private and MTA buses compete with private cars on subsidized roads.

7. The city should work to find good layover locations for vans. They could work with the Port Authority to allow through-running so that the vans can be stored in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey.

If you've got a blog or a newspaper or a PR department, I hope you'll put out stories in support of these goals. Maybe you can find the time to try out the share taxis or the existing vans. If you're "just" an ordinary citizen, I hope you'll talk to your friends, write your legislators, and send letters to the editor in support of these goals.

Our priorities, and labor's priorities

In the comments on my last post, Yonah asked,

Do you know how much of the cost savings afforded by jitneys are due to the lower pay their drivers receive? How much do they get paid relative to publicly employed drivers?

Excellent question. I don't know the exact answers. I have the impression that some drivers work as independent contractors: some own their own vans and work as part of a syndicate, others drive the vans and pay either a flat fee or a percentage to the van owner. In either of those cases, they don't have a fixed wage. They may not even earn minimum wage, which I believe is legal for legitimate independent contractors.

In any case, I imagine that the drivers wind up taking home significantly less than drivers paid by the MTA. I also doubt that they get any of the benefits negotiated by the TWU, which just about everyone would agree are quite generous.

I don't feel great about this. As I've said before, I'm a big leftie. My dad was in a union, my wife is in a union, and in general I think unions play a critical role in standing up for workers. I also think that everyone deserves a living wage, decent medical and pension benefits, and reasonable work hours and conditions.

That said, I do have other priorities, as shown at the top of the blog. If it comes down to it, I would have to say that reducing pollution and carnage, increasing efficiency, improving society and providing access for all are more important than labor issues. As long as the drivers aren't being enslaved or abused, I wouldn't insist that they have absolute parity with TWU drivers.

In response to previous posts on this issue, some commenters have argued that the TWU contracts go beyond reasonable. I have to admit that there are several things that bother me about the current contract. The idea that pension benefits are based on the last year's pay including overtime is just preposterous. I didn't appreciate the TWU taking a cost-of-living raise when the cost of living was not actually rising. The relatively young retirement age is also not appropriate.

I wouldn't have a problem with these things if the MTA were flush with cash, but it's clearly not. Why should the transit workers get raises while the MTA is cutting service? The TWU has fought for congestion pricing and bridge tolls, but they haven't put their full power behind that issue. Of course it's not just the TWU, but also the other public employee unions that have demanded more at a time when the government is earning less. Is the TWU really okay with getting hefty raises and benefits in the short term, while putting the government in a position where it won't be able to hire transit workers in the long term?

Essentially, the TWU's first priority is providing for all their members, and transit seems to be only an afterthought. My first priority is providing for myself and my family, but transit comes next. In my priorities the wages and conditions of transit workers are important, but they are a lower priority than the very existence of transit.

How not to do fare collection

Recently, the Daily News has been looking at fare-beating, starting with two pieces by Pete Donohue on March 17 and March 18. Earlier this month, Donohue's colleague Mike Jaccarino filed a report of fare-beating on the Bx12 Select Bus.

This offered Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz a ready-made excuse for his tepid support of the proposed B44 Select Bus service on Nostrand Avenue:

I’m not fighting it, I’m open to it, but I am just concerned that the system is set up in a way that it is easy for those that want to use the bus not to pay a thing and we lose even more money for the MTA.

If you've spent any time in Paris, you know what it means to take fare control seriously. In Paris, transit passengers are required to have a ticket or pass on them at all times. There are dedicated teams of "contrôleurs" who travel around the city on foot and by transit, setting up checkpoints at bends in subway corridors. On buses and commuter trains, they board simultaneously at the front and rear to cut off the possibility of escape. They work as the bus moves and get off when they've checked everyone.

By contrast, the Select Bus enforcement teams do not actually ride the bus. In some bizarre scenario out of CHiPs, the control teams drive up to the bus in an SUV, board it and check everyone's receipts, then get back in their vehicle and drive away. While this is happening, the bus just sits there, so everyone's trip is delayed by at least five minutes.

Of course this undercuts any attempt to market the Select buses as an alternative to a private car. But worse, if there are too many of these sweeps, it would wipe out the time advantage over traditional bus service. Jaccarino quotes a number of people who are legitimately angry that other people are riding for free while they pay, and have to futz with the validation receipts. But they assign vague blame to "the MTA" - a classic "bad MTA" story - instead of looking at what exactly the MTA is doing wrong: accommodating enforcement personnel who think they're too good to ride the bus.

The News could actually do a great service by printing a series on the myriad ways that New York City residents and taxpayers lose time and money by accommodating law enforcement personnel who think they're too good to ride transit. It would be on a par with their Boulevard of Death series, and a tremendous improvement over the simplistic "Queens Parking Crunch" series. But I'm not holding my breath; who reads the News, after all?

If the News is able to drum up enough outrage to bring about effective fare collection, great! More revenue is a good thing. But it is not worth adding more delays to everyone's trip and undermining the goals of Select Bus Service.

Transit performance and frequent lines

Last week, the Times' Clyde Haberman described how New York City Transit had revised its performance metrics, so that they measure "absolute on-time performance" as well as "controllable on-time performance." The last measure excluded "situations deemed beyond their control — sick customers, police investigations, repairs, vandalism and so on," in Haberman's words.

Ben at Second Avenue Sagas says that the change is an improvement, but not really sufficient, and I agree with him. He observes that for frequent lines (roughly, less than twelve minutes between trains or buses), adhering to the schedule isn't the most important thing:

New Yorkers don’t really expect subway trains to run "on time" because the schedules, while available, are rarely used and aren’t considered gospel. The better indication of on-time performance involves train wait times. If I just miss a B train during the day, I expect to wait 8-10 minutes for the next one. If I’m waiting longer than that — no matter what time the schedule comes — I consider the next train to be late.

Let's go back to our goals for transit. First, it should work towards access for all; this is pretty much achieved by offering frequent, safe service. Then, it should get people out of their cars. If the train or bus is slower or less reliable than driving, people are going to drive instead. speed and reliability (and sometimes comfort) are where good management can make a difference, and that's how performance should be measured.

On-time performance has something to do with speed and reliability, but not enough. Let's imagine a bus route, the Q200, that runs every five minutes. The most popular trip, from the Statelee Apartments to the Hitek Office Center, is scheduled to take thirty minutes. The intended customer experience is to wait no more than five minutes for a bus and spend no more than forty minutes door to door.

In practice, the passenger crush at Statelee Apartments means that by the time everyone gets on, the next bus is right behind. This leads to the all-too-familiar bus bunching phenomenon, where Bus A is late - and packed - and Bus B is early and empty. So some passengers wait up to ten minutes for a bus, and then it can take 50 minutes door to door.

In terms of our goals, bus bunching is awful, because it reduces not only speed, reliability and comfort, but frequency - which means we're no longer providing access for all. But in terms of on-time performance it's not so bad: the leading bus may be late but the following bus is on time.

Now let's imagine that the bus operator institutes some kind of pre-boarding payment collection at the Statelee Apartments, reducing dwell time and eliminating the bunching. That's a major coup, improving frequency, reliability, speed and comfort. But they won't get that much credit for it, because in on-time estimates it's just a small improvement.

In the years before computers were everywhere, it may have made some sense to use on-time performance as a metric, but now that anyone can plug some numbers into a spreadsheet it's really lazy. So what could we use for a better metric?

1. Average wait: The MTA calculates its subway wait assessment as "percent of instances that the time between trains does not exceed schedule by more than 2 minutes (peak) or 4 minutes (off-peak)." I would instead say, "If someone arrives at the bus stop (or train station) a minute after the last bus leaves, how long do they wait for the next available bus?" I would also make sure not to count buses that were too full to pick up people as available. Note that this has nothing to do with any schedule.
2. Average trip time: Pick a popular trip. How long does it take, on average, door to door?
3. Practical frequency: How often do available buses come? Bunches of buses (less than one minute apart) count as a single bus.
4. Crowding: How many buses have one of the single seats available? This may not be cost-efficient, but it's still good to know.

By the way: if, as Haberman reports, Jay Walder is being hailed as "the Dumbledore of transportation wizardry," then who is its Cornelius Fudge? Dale Hemmerdinger? And if, as Gene Russianoff puts it, this new era of transparency at the MTA is not quite "the coming of the Paris Commune," should we be glad that we don't have to deal with Shelly Silver as Thiers and Pedro Espada as Mac Mahon?

What to do about labor costs

Back in February, I wrote about some ways of helping transit operations to become independent of government budget battles. In the comments, Christopher Parker wrote:

A lot really does come down to labor costs, which are a very significant amount of the expense of transit.

Christopher is quite right here, and this is a major issue. Transit systems in countries with low labor costs are able to operate more lines with less subsidy. Some have argued that transit will never be competitive with such high labor costs, blamed the transit workers' unions, and recommended finding a way to break the unions.

This is, of course, only one manifestation of the wider labor cost issue. Yes, with enough force we could break the unions, dismantle restrictive labor laws and bring labor costs down to the levels of Brazil or Thailand. But what would we really accomplish? A big part of what makes America (or France, or Japan) a nice place to live is that many people can make a decent living, with health care and a pension, without working seventy hours a week. We do not want to race to the bottom on this.

Our goal should be to accomplish what we want without compromising on labor standards. Like all workers, transit staff deserve enough money to pay the rent and support a family, plus decent health care and retirement benefits. They deserve to work reasonable hours under healthy, comfortable conditions. We should stand in solidarity with the bus drivers and train operators. We are all transit workers.

Actually, we are all transit workers, and that's part of the problem, as Christopher continues:

When you think about it, that's a serious competitive disadvantage because the perceived labor cost of driving is free.

What has happened over the past hundred years is that the government has effectively outsourced the bulk of passenger transportation to individuals and families. They pay much of the capital costs (roads and bridges, roads and bridges), and subsidize some of the rest (Detroit bailout, oil wars), and even pay some of the capital maintenance, which is essentially an operating cost.

The remaining costs (vehicles and their operation) is mostly provided directly by the consumer. This has always been true to some extent, but during the golden age of rail transport it was provided by corporations, usually private, but unionized with strict labor rules. Many of these have been taken over by the government, but unable to compete with the cheap labor of individual drivers, they have shrunken considerably.

Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we have paid dearly for the de-professionalization of driving. Car crashes are the ninth leading cause of death worldwide and climbing, and the leading cause of death among young people. Buses and trains do kill people, but at nowhere near that rate.

It's time to recognize that we can't get away from paying for well-trained, well-treated professional transit operators. Of course we should work to reduce scams like the golfing "disabled" Long Island Rail Road workers, and other wastefraudandabuse. But there's a limit to how much cost savings can be wrung from labor. If we try to save money by farming transportation out to unprofessional, poorly-trained individuals, or by ruining working conditions - or even by importing desperate immigrants - it will backfire, and we'll wind up dead or wishing we were dead.

As Christopher points out, this outsourcing of passenger transportation provides unfair competition to organizations that do treat their drivers right. If the "externalities" were not hidden - for example, if the cost of medical care for road casualties came out of the DOT's budgets, or if the states had to pay every driver a living wage for every hour behind the wheel - we'd see these costs brought under control quickly, and transit wouldn't look so expensive.

Labor issues

In the past I've talked about the BRT bait-and-switch, and we just got a refresher on that, courtesy of Streetsblog, from ITDP Director Walter Hook. You can have "BRT" for a fraction of the cost of the Second Avenue Subway, and you can have "BRT" that can move passengers on roughly the same order of magnitude as a subway, but unless the subways are running with gold-plated wheels you can't move subway-like numbers of passengers for a fraction of the cost.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and anyone who tries to give you one is suspicious. I'm very disappointed to hear this dishonest rhetoric coming from the ITDP, because I know they're telling the same thing to people in Ghana and Honduras, who may not have the same access to information that we do. Are my T.A. membership fees paying for this guy's salary?

There's a similar bait-and-switch that gets talked about with privatization. Private companies can operate transit routes for a fraction of the cost of public agencies, and private companies can provide a level of pay, benefits and support to their workers that's similar to public agencies, but unless there's a really blatant, systemic level of waste, fraud and abuse in the public sector, you can't get the same pay, benefits and support for a fraction of the cost.

There's just no such thing as a free lunch.

More on labor issues coming up.