Quick Note on Respecting the Civil Service
The news about the congestion pricing cancellation in New York is slowing down. Governor Hochul is still trying to kill it, but her legal right to do so at this stage is murky and much depends on actors that are nominally independent even if they are politically appointed, especially New York State Department of Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez. I blogged and vlogged about the news, and would like to dedicate this post to one issue that I haven’t developed and barely seen others do: the negative effect last-minute cancellations have on the cohesion of the civil service.
The problem with last-minute cancellations is that they send messages to various interest groups, all of which are negative. My previous blog post went over the message such caprice sends to contractors: “don’t do business with us, we’re an unreliable client.” But the same problem also occurs when politicians do this to the civil service, which spent years perfecting these plans. I previously wrote about the problem with Mayor Eric Adams last-minute canceling a bike lane in Brooklyn under pressure, but what Hochul is doing is worse, because there was no public pressure and the assumption until about 3.5 days ago was that congestion pricing was a done deal.
With the civil service, the issue is that people are remunerated in both money and the sense of accomplishment. Industries and companies with a social mission have been able to hire workers at lower pay, often to the point of exploitation, in which managers at NGOs tell workers that they should be happy to be earning retail worker wages while doing professional office work because it’s for the greater good. But even setting aside NGOs, a lot of workers do feel a sense of professional accomplishment even when what they do is in a field general society finds boring, like transportation. One civil servant in the industry, trying to encourage an activist to go into the public sector, said something to the effect that it takes a really long time to get a reform idea up the hierarchy but once it happens, the satisfaction is great; the activist in question now works for a public transit agency.
Below the threshold of pride in one’s accomplishments, there is the more basic issue of workplace dignity. Workers who don’t feel like what they do is a great accomplishment still expect not to be berated by their superiors, or have their work openly denigrated. This is visible in culture in a number of ways. For example, in Mad Men, the scene in which Don Draper won’t even show a junior copywriter’s idea to a client has led to the famous “I don’t think about you at all” meme. And in how customers deal with service workers, ostentatiously throwing the product away in front of the worker is a well-known and nasty form of Karenish disrespect.
What Hochul did – and to an extent what Adams did with the bike lane – was publicly throwing the product that the state’s workers had diligently made over 17 years on the floor. A no after years of open debate would be frustrating, but civil servants do understand that they work for elected leaders who have to satisfy different interest groups. A no that came out of nowhere showcases far worse disrespect. In the former case, civil servants can advocate for their own positions with their superiors; “If we’d played better we would have won” is a frustrating thing to come to believe in any conflict, from sports to politics, but it’s understandable. But in the latter case, the opacity and suddenness both communicate that there’s no point in coming up with long-term plans for New York, because the governor may snipe them at any moment. It’s turning working for a public agency into a rigged game; nobody enjoys playing that.
And if there’s no enjoyment or even basic respect, then the civil service will keep hemorrhaging talent. It’s already a serious problem in the United States: private-sector wages for office workers are extremely high (people earning $150,000 a year feel not-rich) and public-sector wages don’t match them, and there’s a longstanding practice by politicians and political appointees to scorn the professionals. It leaves the civil service with the dregs and the true nerds, and the latter group doesn’t always rise up in the hierarchy.
Such open contempt by the governor is going to make this problem a lot worse. If you want to work at a place where people don’t do the equivalent of customers taking the coffee you made for them and deliberately spilling it on the floor while saying “I want to speak to the manager,” you shouldn’t work for the New York public sector, not right now. I’ll revise my career recommendation if Dominguez and others show that the governor was merely bloviating but the state legislature had passed the law mandating congestion pricing and the governor had signed it. I expect this recommendation will be echoed by others as well, judging by the sheer scorn the entire transportation activist community is heaping on Hochul and her decision – even the congestion pricing opponents don’t trust her.
Pedestrian Observations 
“What Hochul did – and to an extent what Adams did with the bike lane – was publicly throwing the product that the state’s workers had diligently made over 17 years on the floor”
Isn’t that what we want to do with BART’s Silicon Valley extension, CAHSR to Palmdale, and many other bad projects?
This is the first thing I thought of. Alon has praised the changes to Boston’s Green line extension to make it cheaper, but wasn’t that also changing the product the state’s workers’ has diligently made for years away at the last moment as well?
No, in the relevant sense.
If you want to look at this through political glasses, this elevates the status of the planners, because it throws away work explicitly due to it being contaminated by other interest groups’ influence, and says that in the future the planners will have more, and the other groups less influence. Even if one parses the situation as the organization as a whole losing status, the internal political position of those people who made the same criticisms as the final feedback is improved at the expense of those who introduced or argued for the aspects that sunk the project.
The concept of “blame-free incident debriefing” (e.g. aviation investigation) is relevant. A message of “this topic is important to get right, what you did won’t cut it (for specific reasons x,y,z that you are already aware of), I trust you can do better” is entirely appropriate when a mentor says it honestly. Of course, politicians are not in the habit of ascribing a higher status to ideals than to themselves.
Whereas the whole point of Alon is that these actions demonstrate at least two things:
1) In the political order of importance, local NIMBYs and unknowable whims of the governor outrank the planners, or perhaps I should say, the concept of good planning. The message is “this is unimportant”.
2) This state runs on a “political order of importance” schema in the first place, rather than being a system in which commitments exist. Any explicit or implied assent or promise can be rescinded at any time for any reason. …Dreams and drug trips are not known for good transit planning, since previously-established constraints changing are bad for the coherence of anything that relies on them.
It’s pretty clear that the person who killed it is Jeffries. And he did so because there are 12 Republican held toss up districts in the House and 4 of those are in the greater New York area.
Yes, so now he took what was a priority-10 issue voters and made it a very salient issue for the election. Hochul’s political instincts in going along with this are the same instincts that led her to win New York by six points in a neutral national environment.
One could call this move a “Keir Starmer” move as it prioritises swing voters over core votes
Except that unlike Trump Sunak is just a bit incompetent and the Greens and the Lib Dems are much more formidable opponents than any third party in the US and even so Labour is likely to only lose a handful of urban seats.
Starmer’s flip-flopping on trans rights is different from this. The equivalent would be if doctors and psychiatrists worked on a plan to increase access to HRT, Parliament passed a lot mandating easier access to HRT, and then three weeks before implementation the prime minister scrapped it with no public input from either the civil service or the party, because some political advisor told him to scrap it.
Are the current rules for transgender people in Britain really that unreasonable?
And is the status quo not better than risking the (small) percentage of the population who are actively anti-trans growing?
And in terms of delivery I was just reading Rachel Reeves new book – isn’t having a chancellor who has explicitly looked at how foreign countries do things in the bank of England a good thing?
Yes, they are, trans people in the UK are on gray market meds because it takes years to get approved for HRT, let alone any surgery.
That is a healthcare waiting list issue that Starmer has promised to fix and Blair did fix in his day.
Sure, but in Germany for example there’s no gatekeeping on HRT, so it’s not that there’s a waitlist but it’s much shorter, there just isn’t one.
(Cf. Nordic countries, which have extensive gatekeeping on HRT, but no gatekeeping on changing your gender on your ID, except Sweden, which is abolishing the gatekeeping as we speak.)
Lots of parents are super worried about the lack of gatekeeping for HRT drugs for trans people.
The German self-ID law is for adults; teens require parental permission or proof that their parents are too abusive to bother. The UK still says it will not accept German IDs because “they don’t have gender protections” (i.e. gatekeeping on name and gender change).
And it is pretty clear he killed it due to polling or canvassing or less likely donors or communication with the Labour Party in the UK.
BART to San Jose California HSR via Los Banos and California HSR via Palmdale and are all 100% the products of systematic rent-seeking, bid-rigging and payoffs by Parsons Brinckerhoff. (The first two explicitly dovetailed together to maximize worst and costliest public outcome. Literally criminal.)
There was and remains zero involvement by any public agency professional who was not actively on the take. In fact, you’ll have your work cut out to find one competent ethical professional today at CHSRA, the Santa Clara VTA, or the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission today or at any time in the last 30 years. It really is that bad. Total, irremediable agency capture by parasitic self-dealing private capital.
Bad projects do indeed need to be thrown under the bus. Bad actors need to be terminated with maximum prejudice. We know what they are and who they are.
The main change I’d like to see to BART to San Jose is switching from single-bore to twin-bore, which option cleared the EIS – the same civil service that meticulously planned the large-diameter TBM option that’s now proving to be too expensive simultaneously planned a more conventional option with twin bores and cut-and-cover stations.
I don’t know where to begin with this!
I can’t stress enough that THERE IS NO METICULOUS CIVIL SERVICE.
There’s no civil service. There’s nothing meticulous. It’s just self-dealing self-serving outside consultants all the way down.
The “public” agency is merely a hollowed-out host body that feeds the contractor parasites. Money = life. There is no public agency. There are no professional staff. All there is are zombie bodies that provide sweet sweet nutrients to the parasite.
There really is no there there.
The consultants “planned” the cut and cover dig for a stupid fucking urban subway line in the middle of literally nowhere. I mean, what’s the harm in trying? Just a couple million in-house dollars on staff you have on the payroll anyway, and pitiful few hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy off public officials. Pretty good odds!
Then when they got away with that, they said, hey, maybe we can get away with “planning” a dual bore TBM dig in the middle of literally nowhere. I mean, the suckers bought something so outrageously cost-ineffective that clearly the sky’s the limit, so why not shoot for the sky? You hardly need to pay them anything, they just give up their precious bodily fluids for free.
Then when they got away with that, they said, hey, maybe we can get away with “planning” a world’s-worse TBM bore in the middle of absolutely fucking literally nowhere. The absolute suckers bought something so laughably fraudulent already that clearly there is no limit, no limit at all, so let’s fucking ream them. mercilessly.
To speak in defence of the devil: some of this is not their fault. Even if there were an in-house civil service (as opposed to state capacity being privatized/outsourced to consultants), they wouldn’t do much better when the political directive is: “All stakeholders are equal, obviously. Let me read part of the list: Bob the Shopkeeper, Joe the Shopkeeper, all future passengers put together, all taxpayers put together, etc. Therefore, the concerns of the first two is of equal importance to the concerns of the latter two. Sacrificing tens of thousands of passengers per day in possible ridership, and several billion dollars, to save the shopkeepers from the slightest inconvenience, is the correct collaborative-consensual-democratic decision. Obviously so.” (Also on the list is the spirit of St. Gridiron, which (whom?) we must propitiate with a station majestic enough to befit His memory. Cathedrals and weddings don’t run on descoping.)
Likewise, if you are not allowed to say “in our experienced judgment, this should be good enough” but instead must hide behind an appearance of objectivity, quite a lot of “study everything!” is going to happen, as well as overscoping where (without resorting to common sense) it cannot be sufficiently proven that it’s probably unnecessary. Obviously, designbuild does add a number of further pathologies. And of course you will not find competent and ethical professionals today, because they quit decades ago — which to a large extent they did exactly because they couldn’t do good work in the environment despite being competent and ethical.
The leader of the Democratic caucus in the House doesn’t interfere because a couple of shopkeepers in the city are upset.
I mean Jesus that doesn’t happen in Britain and we are much more centralised.
Only plausible explanation is that the swing voters in the House swing districts are upset about it.
Setting aside the specifics of congestion pricing (where the fact that the legislature passed a law should take this out of the governor’s hands), I have some questions/criticism of your stance here:
the equivalent of customers taking the coffee you made for them and deliberately spilling it on the floor while saying “I want to speak to the manager,”
Except that the governor is not a customer, the governor IS the manager. Isn’t it a prerogative of managers to mange, and make decisions as to what will be done? If they must do exactly what the civil service has proposed, who is really in charge? Which leads to:
publicly throwing the product that the state’s workers had diligently made over 17 years on the floor.
Isn’t this anti-democratic? You imply that if a civil servant has worked long enough then their policy must be enacted, even if voters have voted for something else? You make some good points about not treating people with disrespect a la the Mad Men reference, but how can an elected official cancel a project without publicly tossing it? Which leads to:
Don’t you want elected officials to be able to cancel projects? If a state DOT and AASHTO had worked long and produced a detailed plant to drive a major freeway through the heart of a city, wouldn’t you be happy if a newly elected pro-transit governor cancelled the freeway and redirected funding to transit? Your post suggests that this would be a bad thing that makes the civil service feel unwanted, so the freeway should be built as planned.
To preempt the “freeways have negative impacts” argument (that in this case is terrible because all of your arguments in the post are procedural not policy/effects based), what if a transit department spent a decade plus preparing to implement an expensive, proprietary tap on smart card system with fare gates, and a mayor with knowledge of the German speaking world cancelled deployment in favor of a proof-of-payment model and all door boarding for busses? Would you argue in favor of spending more money on a payment system that is known to reduce ridership just because the civil service had worked so hard on it?
There’s still a distinction between a no “after years of open debate” and a no completely unexpectedly. Cancellation based on obvious changes, such as a new leader taking office, a project delay or cost increase, new evidence coming to light, public protests, etc. seems understandable to me even if they aren’t the decision I want. But a no coming seemingly at random conveys a different thing. Why Hochul didn’t cancel it years ago and save everyone the trouble? I guess the canonical understanding is that Hochul did not cancel this herself, but did this as a favor to Hakeem Jeffries, but that still makes it frustrating, because a good leader is supposed to defend her own operations from her superiors (and even that’s being generous because Jeffries doesn’t strictly outrank her).
Cancellation based on obvious changes, such as a new leader taking office, a project delay or cost increase, new evidence coming to light, public protests, etc. seems understandable to me even if they aren’t the decision I want. But a no coming seemingly at random conveys a different thing. Why Hochul didn’t cancel it years ago and save everyone the trouble?
This, with one exception, generally seems like a fair and reasonable standard, especially compared to Alon’s “why won’t we think of the bureaucrats while deciding public policy!” argument. You are certainly correct Hochul had plenty of opportunity to do this earlier.
The one exception is ‘public protests’. No matter what the policy, there is always someone somewhere opposed and protesting it, which means any politician could cancel anything with no warning and say it was because ‘the people’ didn’t want it. If you are suggesting disruptive/violent protests that is an even worse reason to change course, because it encourages mobocracy.
I’m just saying about protests that if they are really unexpected and reveal new things about the electorate that’s a cause for changing direction. Not a handful of people you knew would be protesting anyway, and yes, certainly not rewarding destructive protest tactics. But my understanding here is that Hochul canceled not in response to changing public opinion revealed by protest, but in response to Hakeem Jeffries’ request. I don’t think she changed her mind randomly, or she would have seized an earlier opportunity, and avoided this last minute business that anyone can agree makes it look worse.
To elaborate on why public protest is not a good excuse, there have been ‘public protests’ against congestion pricing in the sense that there are groups opposing it on various grounds (because of ideology, the fact that it is regressive, etc.). If public protest was an obvious reason for cancellation then Hochul can point at those groups and say “See, it wasn’t supported.” Also, from what people are saying, public protest IS why this is happening, to the extent that Hakim Jeffries is worried that those groups which oppose congestion pricing will be enough to push swing districts to the republicans in a close election.
For what it is worth I believe ULEZ caused about a 25 percentage point swing in the Uxbridge by-election.
I want to encourage good planning and rational behavior. The “pause” is neither.
Everybody assumes their despotic technocrat will do they want. I’m sure the Everyone Drives Everywhere crowd is celebrating. And claiming the governor is a valiant defender of the right of Real Americans(tm) to Drive Everywhere. Though without congestion pricing it’s sit in traffic everywhere within miles of Manhattan.
The transit geeks want their despotic technocrat to send trains everywhere frequently all the time. The BANANAs are aghast that anyone is talking about anything. Pick your despotic technocrat carefully.
To beat a dead horse one more time ARC should have been open by now. A project canceled unilaterally by a governor.
I mean I think it has to be considered in the context of the political structure, rather than a straightforward “politician is elected, therefore all of their decisions are very democratic”. Statewide politicians having veto power over exclusively urban policies is already an antidemocratic structure, and is doubly so when it is a single politician able to overturn citywide decisions made over a long (also democratic) process for what is nakedly their own political careerism. And despite all that, I could see this being more legit if Hochul was elected on a ‘we won’t do congestion pricing’ platform, but instead she gave the plan support until this u-turn which had no local electoral mandate.
It’s the prerogative of managers to manage; if they want to spill the coffee that the barista made in full view of the other workers and customers then it’s their prerogative too, but they shouldn’t act surprised when customers and workers find this a terrible environment and go elsewhere.
Yes, but that is a terrible analogy. Hochul is not managing a business that has customers like a coffee shop. The decision to implement or not implement policy is the management decision, there is no way to “not order the coffee” without throwing the almost brewed pot out. And as a public official everything decision Hochul makes is ultimately in full view of everyone, if it were otherwise and congestion pricing just didn’t happen but no one talked about it or answered Freedom of Information requests because Hochul was trying to not hurt the feelings of the civil service you would (rightfully) be much more upset.
There is a way to not order the coffee; it involves doing anything other than passing the law, signing it, pledging to a specific start date, and then reneging three weeks out, after a multi-year process. For example, “this is a Cuomo-era plan and we’re not doing it” upon taking office would have killed it and annoyed people but would not be this humiliating.
As I mentioned to colinvparker, I can agree with opposing last minute changes that could have been made years ago on grounds of consistency by elected officials. But that is a standard far removed from the title of your post “Respecting the Civil Service.”
Nobody likes a micromanager. Let your people work and trust them on it (or fire them if incompetent) .
Nobody likes to see a project canceled just before launch. If a project is canceled with a lot of time left people can understand, but when a project is ready to go it is a waste and everyone who worked hard on those last details feels cheated. If this was to be canceled, it should have been done at least a year ago.
A good point, well-stated. Also, as you and the Transit Costs Project report have pointed out, in New York, agencies rely too much on consultants, rather than building internal professional teams. The “pause” type of behavior deters skilled persons from joining an agency staff. In contrast to the US, graduating university students consider government employment more attractive than the private sector.
Civil servants have the right to quit and go elsewhere. I doubt that the MTA is going to lose employees due to this. The combination of pay/benefits/pension in the public sector is better than the private sector (where pensions have gone the way of the dodo). I know teachers who raise their own children to become teachers with the mantra that there is no other job the with combination of pay/benefits/pension and time off.
The Census Bureau says the median household income in New York City is $76,607
Those people have to get out more. That you empathize with them means you have to get out more.
Yeah, these people need to complain less and pay their fucking taxes. Nonetheless, office workers are expensive in the United States and the market rate for a project manager is at this point north of $150,000; if you don’t pay that, you’re getting two train geeks and a thousand people who couldn’t get private-sector work.
That delicate symbol manipulator snowflakes feel underpaid at twice the median income doesn’t make them poor. It’s twice the median income.
It’s not about feelings it’s about getting things done.
If you don’t pay a market competitive wage for good people, you won’t get many good people.
You’re the only one bringing feelings into this.
I wasn’t the one who wrote “feel poor”. Twice the median income is twice the median income. That’s not poor.
Could the high quality of transit-related civil service in Spain be related to the relatively high unemployment rate there? This would make the comparative job security attractive. Spanish doctors and healthcare are also perceived as highly competent compared to Spain’s economic/education level. The U.S. has an unemployment rate of less than 4% in comparison. The U.S. government has issues attracting people to join the military as well with the tight labor market. The countries with low transit costs also seem to have various job market problems. South Korea has most of it’s employment in small businesses with poor pay+benefits, with some chaebol employment that people have to grind in school to obtain. Turkey has hyperinflation.
On the other hand, Singapore is known for paying its government workers really well. While transit is great, cost per km of transit is high. And India has a ridiculously competitive civil service, but it’s often not very effective as well. Maybe 1st world periphery=good, Anglosphere influence bad is more important?
Spanish public-sector engineering is an institution that predates modern Spanish unemployment rates.
And the UK, as a reminder, had the same construction costs as Italy and Germany in the 1970s. The divergence has been more recent, even without some kind of economic pulling ahead – if anything, there’s been an entire round of construction cost explosion from the Northern line extension to the planned Bakerloo line extension in a low-growth environment.
The planned Bakerloo line extension and Crossrail 2 are much more overpriced than the Northern Line Extension and Crossrail 1.
The Northern Line extension had to attach to the existing Northern Line at an unplanned location and the trains had to be kept running and its short so the cost of that is relatively high.
In comparison the Bakerloo extension is much longer and frankly you could short run it to Waterloo during construction of the connecting tracks to the new tunnels (or just accept it will be a little longer than planned and use the existing tracks south of Elephant and Castle)
For Crossrail 2 even if you accept as justified that the Clapham Junction to Angel bit should be £1 billion a kilometre at current costs like Crossrail 1 that is still “only” £12bn for the 12km of that, so god alone knows how you get to the £30bn the project costs for the whole thing – and that isn’t at 2024 prices.
(Alon said not rich. That is different from poor. They may be well aware they are making a lot more than average, but they still see their monthly budget and the need to make hard decisions.
A few years back I compared my income (close to 150k) to a poor family I know – after you subtract the house payment (we live in a much nicer house) and retirement savings (they have none) – the poor family had more take home pay to live on than I do. Of course in the end a nice house is a nice house, and retirement savings is a big deal, but people making 150k can easially feel not rich and be right for now. Of course in 30 years when that house is paid off and the retirement funds have grown things will be very different, but 150k for a young officer worker is not-rich. And these numbers are why they get made when people say they should just pay their taxes – money to maintain their standard of living is tighter than it looks from the outside.
Poor people don’t own houses. Twice the median income is……….twice the median income.
This is not true. In many of the world’s poorest countries, the vast majority of people own their own houses. That house may not high quality or large enough, but it’s owned by poor people.
In the context of the U.S. home ownership is high enough that poor households are home owners. It might just be some old mobile home or in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but it’s owned by a poor household.
Median income is still median income no matter how you want to contort whatever it is you are contorting. 225k a year would be three times median and 300k a year would be four times.
You claim that I’m contorting something, but can’t say what it is… It’s just a fact that it is common for poor people to own homes in most of the world. Discussions around median income are irrelevant to what I was saying.
To more directly address your overall point, people only perceive those close to the top 1% as “rich” in the U.S. Most people see themselves as “middle-class” and few as rich or poor. Someone who earns $150,000 describing themselves as rich would probably be laughed at. In NYC (America’s only majority transit city and the area being discussed) $150,000 is considered middle class for a family. Someone who earns that amount can’t afford family-size (3 bedroom+) market rate housing in an affluent area such as the congestion pricing zone.
If you don’t pay market rate for workers, you will get less competent people. Calling people “delicate symbol manipulator snowflakes” doesn’t change that.
The median income is the epitome of middle class. Since it’s exactly in the middle. It’s not my problem you don’t understand the concepts.
You can look up the dictionary/wikipedia definitions of middle class. It’s not defined as median income, and many $150,000 earning NYC office workers would fall under the definition. Maybe it’s different where you live, but the phrase doesn’t mean median income here and people earning the median income aren’t the epitome of middle class.
The majority of households in New York City make a lot less than $150,000 a year. Because the median is $76,000.
The point is someone making $150k/year likely has about as much free cash to buy things like food as someone making $40k/year. Sure the $40k person makes several times less money, but the difference is going into a somewhat nicer house (not a mansion) in a somewhat nicer neighborhood, retirement plans, or new cars (not and – you cannot have all of the above on $150k). In 30 years the $150k person can have a lot more savings and so could have a better retirement (but this is only could – many are spending the money on cars and not saving. Since the two have about the same amount of cash to work with for their daily life they both feel the pinch at the end of the month.
Sure 150k could result in a nice retirement, but it won’t make you feel like you no longer have to worry about pennies.
What?
People rarely have much free cash or savings they can touch (retirement savings is locked away where it cannot be touched until you retire). If you give someone a raise they will go out and finance a new(er) car and so their monthly spending case remains the same.
Don’t get me wrong, someone making 150k has a much nicer house, car, and a retirement fund. They are better off. However their day to day cash is about the same as a poor person. They are regularly not able to find the money for what looks like a small purchase because they don’t have the money.
Alon
If they wanted the project to go ahead why not spend at least some of the money on commuter rail?
You have made many suggestions before on this blog about how commuter rail into New York could be improved – so why not simply prioritise that over the urban projects?
In fact even as it stands with the city payroll tax paying for the second avenue subway etc and the congestion charge paying for commuter rail you might actually get more infrastructure.
Also this whole debacle puts pressure on all the people involved to start caring about building infrastructure cheaper.
I covered this in the vlog; the state has been overfunding commuter rail relative to its ridership, with East Side Access, the LIRR Third Track, Penn Station Access, and now state plans for Penn Reconstruction.
But East Side access as you have shown did nothing at all for ridership and all these other projects sound like ones that only/primarily benefit peak users.
Running twice as many trains off peak would benefit many more people and would be something much more reasonable to fund with the congestion charge.
And to be fair I looked at the off peak data and it is about 200k per weekend day over the two systems. I mean that’s not actually bad, and I would be very surprised if doubling weekend service wasn’t profitable.
Also bigger car parks and/or new parkway stations would help as well.
Theres also fault with both the MTA and the transit activists for failing to understand the risk of upsetting the swing district voters which is why the governor has reversed course.
Why didn’t either of those groups understand that? It doesn’t feel to me like advanced politics – similar projects have been electorally controversial in the UK.
Swing district voters don’t seem especially happy about the cancellation; their mistrust of the government is such that they’re not going to believe it’s dead.
Is this based on canvassing or polling or speaking to Democratic Party operatives from the swing districts?
If so fair enough – but difficult to believe Jefferies would have pushed for this if those people were happy enough to continue.
Or is it based on vibes within the transit community which isn’t politically representative.
Yeah. It’s the job of a politician and their staff to attempt to understand what motivates their constituents. They spend a lot of time and money on this and hire experts to help with this task. If they get it badly wrong they are likely to be voted out of office. Basically, I’d trust the subject matter experts over non-expects on this topic, like any other topic.
Twice in a little over a decade Seattle voters rejected transit measures only to approve similar measures the very next year. In both cases the measures were approved in presidential election years, when turnout is higher, and there was less of an ability for committed opponents to defeat the initiative will a relatively smaller number of people (in one case the proposal was also scaled back due to perceived sticker shock). For the third measure the regional agency only planned to go to the voters in a presidential election year.
As a practical matter NYC should have planned to introduce congestion pricing in 2025. Many people who will vote to oppose or because of something new won’t care in a few years after it is established and everyone adapts.
In 1976 I experienced this phenomenon at Oregon DOT. A project that had been funded in one governor’s last year in office was killed by the new governor. His transportation aide had been encouraging our team with support — right up to when the new governor publicly attacked it.
We had lots on our plate. If he had tipped us in advance we could have gone onto other work. Two satisfying things did happen: I took a job with another agency and the new governor was defeated for reelection, largely because of being a poor manager.
One possible reason Hochul nixed congestion pricing (and its money to the MTA) was to increase the intensity on Albany to pick a winner for building a casino in NYC and have it’s additional revenue go to the MTA. More jobs (both construction and operation) and entertainment is a much more winning strategy than higher taxes.