Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. The MTA runs New York City subways, buses and commuter trains that six million people rely on each weekday. And on Monday, board members approved close to a two billion dollar contract to expand the Second Avenue subway line into East Harlem. Jay Patel is the CFO of the MTA.
She's charged with quite the task, which I think is fair to say many would find unenviable. Charting a sustainable path through one of the agency's most financially trying periods. in its six decade history. She joins us here in the Bloomberg Businessweek studio. Jay, welcome. How are you?
I'm good. How are you, Tim? Thank you for having me.
Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. I want to start with the numbers and just ridership here. Weekday subway ridership is still 25% below pre-COVID levels. In your modeling, does that ever come back to where it was?
You know, we have a financial plan that's a five-year period. And originally, we were projecting that we would see our subway ridership up to 90%. But a couple of years ago, we revised that because we weren't seeing that. But we're hopeful we see an 80% by 2029 ridership recovery for subways. But on the railroads, we're seeing that recovery even higher today.
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Chapter 2: What are the current subway ridership levels compared to pre-COVID?
And I know there've been some mitigation efforts in place, but I took the bus to LaGuardia on Thursday. It was a great experience. But when I got on the SBS in Queens, I got on, it was like an articulated bus. So, you know, it was a long one. I got off and on in the back and out of like more than half a dozen people, I think I was the only one who paid.
And I was thinking to myself, I didn't know it was optional to pay to get on the bus. What are the numbers there?
So it's not optional, right, to pay the fare. We are encouraging every customer to pay their fare share.
But there's no enforcement on the bus.
So there's a couple of things that we're doing for fare evasion. And our chair has been tackling this first when he became chair. So on the subways, you've heard of us talking about we're doing fins, sleeves, gate guards, enforcing the exit gate, which is the the fare evasion highway. And so we've made great strides on the subways. We've reduced fare evasion in over a year by 30%.
We've dropped that rate from a high of 14% to 9.8%. So we know those efforts are working. On the buses, it's a little bit more difficult, but we're also working there. We've decreased fare evasion on our buses as well in the last year from 50% to 44%.
Because all the tactics the president of New York City Transit is employing, we have Eagle teams that are on different bus routes to make sure that they are enforcing the pay your fare, right? Our bus operators do their due diligence, but really our Eagle teams are enforcement out there riding different routes.
and making sure customers pay their fare or they're getting a summons or they're getting off the bus. And that's how we're working towards that.
How does that work? Because I heard of a friend who was on a bus and someone had come around and scanned their phone to see if they had paid the fare.
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Chapter 3: How does MTA plan to achieve an 80% ridership recovery by 2029?
Is that how it works? Explain to us.
um so right now um what we are doing is if you're boarding the bus you have to pay because there's two different ways you can pay right today is the metro card and the omni and when we go to full omni next year there's going to be proof of payment and so what you can do is european style proof of payment for customers is you can tap their phones or credit cards the method of payment to see if they paid their fare and if they didn't pay their fare
That's something that we'll work with on a summons or, you know, you need to pay your fare for our customer. And so that's something that's coming. We're really excited about that for Omni and proof of payment. But right now there's two different methods. And so we're working on different ways to combat fare evasion.
I want to talk a little bit about proposals from mayoral candidates. Zoran Mamdani, for example, his proposal to make all New York City buses free. What do you think of that? And does it create a sort of a two-tiered mass transit system where people who ride buses don't pay for it, but then people who ride the subway do?
And it kind of offset like people not necessarily taking the right mode of transit for their destination.
Yeah.
So we've heard the mayoral candidates proposal for a fare free buses. What I'd like to emphasize again is fare box revenue is important to the operations of the MTA. It's 26 percent of our revenue and buses is about a billion dollars in the out years of revenue for for the MTA bus. For the MTA, excuse me. And that's important to us. And so we want to make sure revenues equal service.
And that is something that's a hypothetical right now. But we we rely on Fairbox revenue.
So you said a billion dollars in revenue is what it brings in. Mamdani estimates that's about 750 million dollars annually to make buses free. Is that an accurate assessment on his part?
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Chapter 4: What fare increases are being implemented and why?
So you've got to be looking at it closely.
We are looking at it. But one thing that I would like to emphasize right right now in New York City is. fares are affordable. We make transit and buses the most affordable at $2.90, and it's affordable with fare fares reduce fare for our customers. But, you know, it is something that we will look into as the mayoral candidate has proposed.
What about mitigating climate issues that affect particularly the subway stations? You go online, you see videos of flooding in stations.
Or maybe you're trying to get home on a rainy day in the summer and it happens.
Water in the subway station. Do you guys have, at least as part of the upcoming capital plan, a plan in place to update the infrastructure? Sure.
A couple of points on that, right? A couple of the issues that arise in the subway systems are not the MTA's fault. New York City, right, contributes to the flooding issues that we face in the subways, whether it's through DEP, manholes, the sewage. So that is one aspect of the flooding that you see on the New York City transit.
But our historic capital plan, that $68.4 billion, does have climate resiliency issues. of hardening the system in certain stations in proposed and therefore.
Let's talk a little bit about congestion pricing. Not as hot of a topic as it was a few months ago. It seems like it's died down a little bit. In your view, is it working?
Congestion pricing is working. It is reducing traffic by 11%. What does that mean? 70,000 cars are off the road every single day. What else is it doing? It's moving our buses faster. It's moving people faster. We've seen a change in ridership, but also we've seen safety increases. There's a 14% decline in pedestrian crashes.
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