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Obama administration sells transit out to protectionists (again)

I’m not sure how I missed this (actually, I have an idea – more on that in a minute), but back in February the Federal Transit Administration issued the following warning about strengthened “Buy America” transit procurement protectionism: Congress and the Obama Administration asked Americans to provide $787 billion to help avoid an economic catastrophe and restore and modernize America’s infrastructure.  In return, the Federal Government asks recipients of Recovery Act funds to be held accountable to the American public by using these resources to maximize opportunities to put Americans back to work and to support our domestic manufacturing industry. In order to support this goal, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) will not consider any requests for a public interest waiver of FTA’s Buy America regulation for Recovery Act projects.  If issued, such waivers would allow recipients of Recovery Act funds to procure steel, iron, or manufactured products, including rolling stock, that are not produced or manufactured in the United States.  I will not waive Buy America for Recovery Act projects because such action would undermine the very purpose and intent of the Recovery Act—to preserve and create jobs in America.  In addition, FTA will continue to carefully scrutinize requests for waivers based on non-availability to determine whether suitable American-made alternatives exist, and if none do, whether the funds can be used in an alternative manner that fulfills the goals of the Recovery Act.  Similarly, FTA will examine requests for cost-differential waivers to determine whether the cost savings justifies the loss of American jobs, especially in critical manufacturing sectors.  By necessity, FTA will extend existing, standing waivers—for products exempted by the Federal Acquisition Regulation, microprocessors and microcomputers, and small purchases—to Recovery Act-funded procurements, although I encourage recipients to use their best efforts to carry out the intent of Congress and the Obama Administration […]

Five union work rules that harm transit productivity

Since Alon’s comment a few weeks ago that union work rules, not wages and benefits, are the real problem with labor unions at America’s transit authorities, I’ve been looking into the matter, which seems to be something that a lot of transit boosters don’t like to talk about. It’s an uncomfortable subject for two reason: 1) urban planners and unions have an ideological affinity, and 2) it’s hard to lobby for increased subsidies for transit when you admit that you’re making poor use of the money you already have. But despite planners’ reticence to talk about the problem, it needs to be addressed. Throwing money around is what governments do best, and while it might be an easy solution to problems in the short run, the money is running out. Some will surely quibble that we can afford to raise taxes and do more deficit spending, especially for something as vital as transit, but whether or not that’s true, the fact is that voters are increasingly doubting that it is, and so politicians are going to become stingier about doling out money for transit. Anyway, the most obvious area for savings is in actual wages and benefits, but many mainstream conservative and libertarian publications have written a lot about this issue, so I want to focus on just inefficient work rules. These are rules that are written into union contracts hashed out in a political process, and management doesn’t have the authority to overturn them. I found surprisingly little on the issue in the academic literature, but there’s plenty on it in newspapers, and so here’s a round-up of the major issues that I found with various American transit unions. The list is by no means comprehensive – either of all the cities that have these problems, or even of […]

Links

1. The fact that we even have to have a debate over whether residential development should be allowed in Midtown, where new residents will have perhaps a smaller impact on transportation infrastucture than anywhere else in the country (they can either walk to work or do a reverse train commute), is pretty pathetic. 2. The plan for San Jose’s Diridion Station is is so loaded down with boondoggles and bad ideas that it’s hard to keep track of them all. As if a stadium and HSR station weren’t bad enough it’s also getting a neo-Euclidean zoning plan (business and R&D park to the north, entertainment, retail, and office space by the station, and residential and retail to the south), “adequate parking,” and what looks to me like probably too much parkland. One panelist from the Greenbelt Alliance said it was necessary for the plan to include “parks, trails and public plazas.” But given that it looks like we’re only really talking about an area that’s a dozen or two blocks in size, is all that really necessary? 3. Second Avenue Subway on Bloomberg’s transit failures. Looks like my bike lane rabble-rousing is spreading… 4. More union shenanigans: Unsuck DC Metro uncovers with a FOIA request $2.4 million paid out in the last five years “in grievance back pay for work never done.” Some of it is paid out in petty seniority squabbles, some in more reprehensible cases, including to people who have literally killed, assaulted, and stolen on the job. Also, if you’re interested in how exactly unions suck the lifeblood out of American mass transit, Unsuck’s three–part series on the DC Metro’s escalator problems is an excellent case study. 5. Highway interchange transit-oriented development. Not a joke. Courtesy of the Overhead Wire.

Nicole Gelinas responds to Alon Levy on MTA pay

Last week commenter Alon Levy criticized the Manhattan Institute’s position on transit unions, and Nicole Gelinas in particular, as being too focused on overall pay levels while neglecting overstaffing. Nicole wrote to me soon after to defend her record on the transit issue, and it does indeed look like she’s addressed the issues that Alon talks about: Alon Levy takes my comments out of context. I have talked about pay cuts in regards to token-booth clerks – retail-level workers who earn more than $54,000 a year (plus benefits) to staff stations. The MTA, because it has no flexibility to cut the pay of these workers, has simply dispensed of the workers wholesale, leaving many station entranced unmanned. There is a disconnect here: the public prefers to see a person in the station; the MTA loses revenue when no one is there to monitor fare-beating (also, at some stations, including downtown, the NYPD must deploy people to stations to deter this fare-beating, at a much higher cost); and there are many people with retail skills looking for part-time jobs who would happily do the job at a market wage at less than $54,000 a year. The MTA should have the flexibility to hire part-time workers at lower wages and benefits to staff empty stations. She then points to this article she wrote back in 2009, where she takes aim at union work rules – which, as she pointed out in the email, is an indirect way of talking about staffing: Track workers are one obvious opportunity for smart cost-cutting. The MTA employs 1,865 of them on the city’s subways. According to seethroughny.net, a project of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, each gets paid an average of nearly $59,000 (not including benefits or health care), for a total of $109 […]

From the comments: Public transit’s problem is overstaffing, not wages

Alon Levy writes in the comments in response to an item in yesterday’s links about a Republican legislator in Texas looking to cut bus drivers’ salaries: Repeating my comment on the Austin Contrarian, and similar comments I’ve made on Second Avenue Sagas: the problem is more staffing than salaries. At New York City Transit, salaries are the same as at Toei – a little more than $100,000 in total compensation per employee. (No data for Tokyo Metro, alas.) The difference is that NYCT has 47,000 employees and Toei 6,400, a factor-of-7 difference, even though NYCT only carries twice as many passengers, and provides only four times as many train revenue-hours and stations. A train driver on Toei spends 700 hours a year driving a revenue train, versus about 450 in New York. And Toei isn’t even the most efficient agency: Tokyo Metro is three times as big as Toei but has only 8,400 employees. Republican outfits advocating pay cuts likely do not know anything about staffing levels. I’ve never seen the Manhattan Institute, which is arguing for union-busting and pay cuts in New York, say a single thing about staffing levels. On the contrary, Nicole Gelinas gleefully points out that if wages were lower, staffing levels could be maintained or increased – in other words, making New York more like a third-world city and less like a first-world city. It’s not a serious efficiency measure – it’s ideological opposition to unions, justified post hoc on financial grounds. I would suppose that this would be slightly less relevant to bus service – low levels of productivity there could be the inevitable result of sprawling land use patterns and being forced to run lots of low ridership routes. That could also apply to rail service to some extent, but the comparatively low […]

Links: Transit worker wages, farmers markets, parking, and beyond!

1. Austin Contrarian comes out in favor of a Republican proposal to lower bus drivers’ wages. I wish more liberal urbanists (i.e., urbanists) would comment on issues like these. I don’t see (m)any of them vociferously defending transit labor unions, but I also don’t see them criticizing them for making transit more costly and inefficient. 2. While NYC has a program that opens farmers markets in rich neighborhoods, regulations make it too difficult for private citizens to start their own markets, without government assistance, in parks and other open spaces in neighborhoods that could actually use them. 3. LA considers devolving some control over parking policy to neighborhood groups. Most of the powers that they’d give them appear to be liberalizing (reduce minimums, allow off-site parking to count), but it’d also give them the power to raise parking minimums. Can anyone who knows a bit more about LA tell me if this is, on net, a good idea? My gut says no – at least in my experience, the more local the power, the more likely people are to use it to stop dense development. 4. Apparently New York City maintains a dog run in Tribeca. Should the city really be subsidizing the laziness of incredibly wealthy dog owners in lower Manhattan? Regular parks at least increase land values nearby (well, at least in theory), but given that this one appears to be made of concrete and is covered in dog poop, I have a feeling that most of the neighbors wouldn’t miss it. 5. Lydia DePillis has a profile of DC-area real estate consultant/VIP Stephen Fuller. 6. Cap’n Transit on how regulation aimed at making buses safer could end up making us less safe.

Links

1. An excellent Wikipedia article about the old DC streetcars. I wish there were more economics, and I’d also like to know about the state-mandated consolidation that they talk about in the mid-1890s. Also note that streetcar use reached its peak in the mid 1910s – when people talk about interstate highways and the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy, they’re starting the story decades too late. 2. A dissenting (heh) view of Ed Glaeser’s book. My criticism of Glaeser would be that sometimes he starts speaking very generally and starts sounding a little whacky (which I think is what the reviewer here is picking up on). Perhaps his work wouldn’t be so popular if not for this tendency to paint in broad strokes, but I would like to see more specific analysis of land use laws and how Glaeser would like to change them. I haven’t read the book, though – does it get more nuanced than the excerpt in the Atlantic? 3. Human Transit publishes a reader comment and gives some great analysis of transit agency’s staffing and frequency. Apparently labor is the biggest constraint on frequency outside of peak hours, but many systems have labor and safety regulations that force transit agencies to overstaff trains. The efforts of unions to keep the unnecessary second man on transit vehicles are almost a century old, despite massive advances in transportation technology that have long since obviated the need. 4. This is cool. 5. DC’s gas stations are not long for this world as the condo onslaught continues. Urban gas stations rarely seem to me to be efficient uses of space (the gas station on Houston Street in Manhattan is the prime example) – does anybody know how rigid the zoning guidelines they fall under generally are? Are they zoned only for […]

The “Systemic Failure” of US transportation policy

Today I stumbled upon a blog that’s gotta be the best one I’ve found in a while. It’s about US transportation policy by a blogger who seems to be based somewhere in the Bay Area, and it’s called, fittingly, Systemic Failure. The post that first got my attention was this one about London’s bike sharing system likely being profitable in the future, which made me realize that this would be a great first government transportation program to privatize, especially considering that the government is keeping the price extremely low (it’s free for trips under 30 minutes) and the system is struggling to keep up with demand. I assume the reason that private companies didn’t try this earlier was that city governments have no framework for renting out small parcels of public space for use as bike racks – this despite having a vast infrastructure in place for renting similar parcels to drivers on a short-term basis (i.e., on-street parking!). But beyond that, (s?)he does a great job covering a range of transit issues, from the misguided attempts at federalization of transit safety by Obama after the WMATA Red Line crash in 2009 (1, 2, 3, 4) to the inanity of helmet laws (1, 2). The “Drunk Engineer” also offers blistering critiques of American protectionism in transit procurement, including one in which he describes the horrible inefficiency of Buy America provisions, which wreaked havoc on a Houston streetcar project and caused a Bay Area transit authority to have two completed Japanese pilot cars disassembled and shipped to the US where they would then be reassembled to conform with the law (another example here). Another interesting post that I found was this one about Senator Barbara Boxer’s insistence that Metrolink trains have two conductors onboard for safety reasons, despite the lack of […]

Private buses make a comeback in NYC

by Stephen Smith Transit activists have been bemoaning recent cuts in the MTA’s bus routes throughout New York City, but the cuts may have a silver lining, in particular for market urbanists: they may usher in the return of private buses to the streets of New York City. Private buses (and subways, and streetcars) were once the only transit options available to New Yorkers, but since the early 20th century, and especially after World War II, virtually all intracity routes have been subsumed by various levels of government, and the network has barely grown at all since nationalization (not withstanding the Second Avenue Subway, conceived eighty years ago by a private company). Now that’s not to say that private operators haven’t tried to compete – the outer boroughs’ immigrant communities have had robust networks of informal private vans (known in NYC as “dollar vans”), which operate illegally but have been hard to prosecute, likely due to the fact that they are used mostly by linguistically-distinct immigrant communities. The recent cuts even propelled the bootleg bus phenomenon out of its immigrant ghetto, when a brave bus operator named Joel Azumah made headlines by operating a bootleg bus route along routes cut in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. This experiment was quickly quashed by an unrelenting bureaucracy, but at least it demonstrated the mutual desire on the part of riders and entrepreneurs for private service. The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission appears to have headed that call, and under the direction of chairman David Yassky is trying to replace at least some of the old bus routes with private buses. Unlike the city’s much-abused private van service, where operators are technically not allowed to pick up riders off the street who haven’t called ahead of time, the buses would operate with many of […]

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