Tuesday, August 2, 2011

MTA throwing money down the crapper


From WPIX:

New York City subway riders are familiar with frequent service disruptions at night and on weekends.

But a report released Sunday by the state and city comptrollers says MTA needs to do a better job of keeping straphangers informed about changes that affect their rides. The report by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and New York City Comptroller John Liu found that projects that disrupt subway lines often go over budget and that New York City Transit's efforts to publicize the service changes are inadequate.

It also found that at times service is disrupted when track work isn't happening. The report examined a random sample of 50 out of 3,332 service disruptions from Jan. 1, 2009 to Jan. 4, 2011 and found inefficiencies.

The auditors said, for example, that NYC Transit should recalculate how many buses it uses to fill in for out-of-commission subway lines. Subway diversion projects often go over budget, the report said. The auditors examined 12 contracts and found that four of them were over budget by a total of $26.6 million.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The weekend service is unreliable and affect so many who work. Other such as myself, bypass uncertainty of the service by driving into Mahattan and elsewhere to reliably get around.

Anonymous said...

Daily News has an editorial criticizing DiNapoli and Liu's report:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/08/02/2011-08-02_strictly_small_bore.html

Anonymous said...

They needed an audit to figure this out? All you have to do is go to Queens or Queensboro Plaza on any weekend night with service changes and look at all the MTA personnel and contractors sitting around smoking and joking in the stations, not doing a shred of work.

Anonymous said...

This past weekend there were warnings that the E train would be running on the F track from Queens. It wasn't.

Anonymous said...

The warnings are for this weekend.