Good morning. Today is Wednesday. We’ll take a look at what the Metropolitan Transport Authority’s looming budget deficit could mean for riders – and motorists. And, ahead of next week’s primary, we’ll recap an important congressional race in Manhattan.
The Metropolitan Transport Authority is facing a $2.5 billion budget deficit for 2025, 12% of its operating budget. That has New Yorkers, who remember past financial emergencies, worried about service cuts. I asked Ana Ley, a Metro reporter who covers transit in New York, to explain.
The president of the MTA tells you that transit in New York City is “like air and water – we cannot exist without it”. But MTA cannot exist without revenue. Is that one reason the administration is talking about charging motorists up to $23 to drive into Midtown Manhattan under a congestion pricing scheme?
How bad is the financial picture of the MTA?
It was bad for a long time. The pandemic just made it worse very, very quickly.
The state allows MTA bond issuance in the early 1980s to save it from the economic downturn at the time, and the high volume of government debt. Expenditures have since exceeded income, and the government has had to borrow money to keep up.
More troubling, the MTA is more reliant on fares than most other transit systems in the country, and it has lost large numbers of riders through the pandemic. The federal government has offered a one-time bailout of more than $14 billion to keep it alive, but that money runs out in two years. That’s why transportation leaders are scrambling to find solutions.
How far is the current MTA from the pre-pandemic numbers? What about previous forecasts that say next year’s MTA will carry 86% of the number of passengers it had before Covid hit?
Ridership has struggled to recover and hovers around 60% of pre-pandemic levels. Forecasters predict they will reach only 80% of pre-pandemic levels by 2026, down from earlier expect 86% next year. Because of that drop, the latest projections from the agency’s advisor, McKinsey & Company, estimate that the MTA will bring in $7.9 billion in revenue by 2026, a significant drop from previous estimates. that’s $8.4 billion. Before the pandemic, it had expected to make $9.6 billion that year.
Early estimates of the pandemic now seem overly optimistic because at the time McKinsey released them, it was not expected that the coronavirus would have evolved so much and stunted the city’s recovery. We also don’t know if remote work will become as commonplace or if motorists will avoid transit after several notorious incidents of violence amplified. perceive that the system has become more dangerous.
So what can the MTA do?
Without help from the state, there is not much that can make drivers or transport workers happy.
It could cut service, raise fares, or lay off staff. But its potential budget gap is huge, and those just probably won’t fix it.
The cuts will be especially devastating, because they can push the system into a so-called vortex of death in transit, where service drops and delayed upgrades make public transit a less convenient option, which will reduce ridership and continue to reduce revenue until the network goes down. The MTA got a glimpse of that in 2010, when transportation leaders cut their way out of the financial crisis caused by the Great Recession, inconvenience 15 percent of transit riders and drive some out altogether.
Today, any new service cuts risk deepening workforce inequalities already wracked by the pandemic. White-collar workers have the option to stay home, but many lower-wage workers, who tend to be people of color with longer commutes, still need to go to work.
Weather
Showers are expected in the morning. The rest of the day is mostly sunny, with temperatures close to 80. At night, the temperature will drop to about 60s.
PARKING OUTSIDE
Valid until September 5 (Labor Day).
In Manhattan, the congressional musical chair
With six days to go before the Democratic primaries, it’s time to recap an important race.
It’s unusual for two incumbents to go head-to-head in a primaries for the same seat. But that’s what’s happening in Manhattan, where a plan is to redistrict the East and West precincts above 14th Street in a single borough for the first time since before World War II.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, from the West, and Representative Carolyn Maloney, from the East, are the players in this congressional musical chair game. The music will stop when the votes are counted next week.
Both have served in the National Assembly since the 1990s. Both have accumulated enough seniority to serve as committee chairmen, Mr. Justice, Ms. Supervisor. Also in the race was Suraj Patel, a 38-year-old lawyer who said it was time for a generational change.
Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, is backing Nadler. Many politicians and politicians had expected him to sit out the primaries, as most other House Democrats from New York did. So does Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. As expected, there’s some history between them all: Maloney endorsed Gillibrand’s presidential campaign in 2020. The first time Schumer ran for the Senate, in 1998, Nadler endorsed him.
For Maloney and her allies, the race is increasingly focused on women. With the Supreme Court and Republican-led states withdrawing reproductive rights, her supporters see it as the time to rally behind a woman in Congress. Maloney spent a sizable portion of the $900,000 she loaned to the campaign to reinforce the message “you can’t send a man to do a woman’s job.”
My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that few women have ever had more influence in Washington or used it with such intense concentration – pressing for the Equal Rights Amendment, paid leave, safeguards against gender-based violence and a national history museum on women. Maloney gets support from feminist Gloria Steinem, who has called her “the most needed, the most trustworthy and the most experienced”.
The main battle is becoming more and more vicious. Nadler has identified himself as progressive and has highlighted his status as the city’s last Jewish congressman. Maloney bluntly told Nicholas Fandos that Nadler doesn’t work as hard as she does, especially on local issues.
She also said that residents of one of the nation’s wealthiest and freest counties needed her, not Nadler or Patel. But Nadler’s team assembled a group of Nadler women led by two former Manhattan district presidents, Gale Brewer and Ruth Messinger. Senator Elizabeth Warren appeared in a TV commercial for Nadler, and he also had the backing of actress Cynthia Nixon, who ran for governor of New York four years ago.
METROPOLITAN . Diary
(Central Park, 9 a.m.)
Dear Diary:
I didn’t breathe
in years
but one
dark
pick
A wind
Ropes
mine has veins
throat
an old man-
dolin
and a tune
switch over
I
– Rolli Anderson
