NY Daily News
Night-shift workers living in places with spotty overnight bus and subway service may get a new way home under a MTA proposal.
The agency on Tuesday announced plans to hire an outside company to provide a publicly subsidized on-demand car or van service for riders in places where “bus service is less frequent than subway service or is unavailable.”
Transit honchos intend to use the service in areas outside of Manhattan that are more than a half-mile from the nearest subway or train station, have “limited or no overnight bus service nearby.”
The
proposal — which MTA officials note is required by the state law
setting up congestion pricing in lower Manhattan — was offered to
bidders in January. It appears to be targeted at app-based car service
companies like Uber, Lyft and Via, which serve a combined 700,000 daily
riders in New York City.
The program’s stated goal is to serve a growing number of people who work non-traditional hours, like medical professionals and service industry employees. It would give riders in the targeted areas subsidized car or van rides — and could be a boon for e-hail companies that have already cut into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s ridership.
MTA officials also want riders to be able to pay for the late-night rides with OMNY, the agency’s new digital payment system.
“We are seeking to leverage new mobility technologies to enable more New Yorkers to benefit from the public transportation network during the overnight hours, and to enhance the experience of overnight subway customers in low-cost ways," said Mark Dowd, who in November was hired as the MTA’s chief innovation officer, a role created through a state-mandated reorganization of the agency.
The program is scheduled to launch as a temporary pilot in June.
Uber, Lyft and Via have in recent years partnered with other cities to fill their transit deserts.
Via
in 2018 launched a program with Berlin’s public transit agency Berliner
Verkehrsbetriebe to provide on-demand van rides in an effort to
supplement the city’s bus, tram and train routes. Also in 2018, Lyft cut
a deal with the Detroit transit officials to offer discounted car rides
between midnight and 5 a.m. for riders using one of the city’s bus
routes.
Bringing that model to New York may prove tough.
J.P. Patafio, the head of buses at Transport Workers Union Local 100, said transit bosses did not tell him about the idea to outsource transit services. He likened the pitch to unregulated dollar vans.
“They (the MTA) need to invest in more bus service, and if they want a different type of service they should have put it in the (Local 100) contract the board ratified last month,” Patafio said. “We’re certainly not allowing non-union companies to do our work.”
Some
transit advocates wondered why the MTA is looking to pay to outsource
its services when the agency is in the middle of a “revenue neutral”
redesign of each borough’s bus network.
“Isn’t this what a bus is supposed to do?,” Tri-State Transportation Campaign executive director Nick Sifuentes asked. “Buses work well during off-peak hours because traffic is less of an impediment to service.
"That's the standard technique of privatization:
defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over
to private capital." - Noam Chomsky
10 comments:
Dumb idea...and totally unnecessary.
Giving city money to these private concerns never works to the city's advantage.
There are already loosely formed groups of daily riders who have arrangements with van drivers to get picked up and returned to specific spots. I see this a lot in the outer boroughs. Asians and Latinos do these as a matter of routine.
We already get screwed by private interests for shelter, planning consultants and shafted by most vendors and contractors. We don't need a city-run program that will inevitably degenerate into "ghost riders" and trips to nowhere.
Rob in Manhattan
I thought congestion pricing is suppose to fix the MTA. They are full of crap..
That makes no sense. Wouldnt that just cost more money to do? Are they idiots?
"We don't need a city-run program that will inevitably degenerate into "ghost riders" and trips to nowhere."
Exactly what I was thinking. This program is just asking for fraud. It doesn't help that Uber and Lyft are both publicly-traded companies, which means that they'll always be looking to beat Wall Street's quarterly earnings projections. This is going to be the rideshare version of the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal.
"subsidized on-demand car or van service"
How is that public transportation? I don't want to pay taxes to fund some restaurant worker's trip home at night. Wait for the damn train. Sheesh! Quit whining and wait for the train, pussies.
>I thought congestion pricing is suppose to fix the MTA.
The point of congestion pricing isn't to fix the MTA. The point of congestion pricing is to punish Eastern Queens residents for the sin of having a car, while sucking out as much money from our ever-shrinking wallets as possible.
As an added bonus, they get to track every single car in the City, and call it civic responsibility instead of an attack on civil liberties.
Well with the Queens Redesign bus routes plan you will create more low transit areas. Here you are wiping out an entire bus line and making people walk more than 30 minutes to get the bus to the train.
The people behind “The War on Cars” are going to love this.
When I drive around in Manhattan every other car has TLC plates and Manhattan has so many transit options and out here in Queens they want to take away bus routes.I don't hear anything from Transportation Alternatives on this.
How funny that Bloomburglar's bus unifying is being overturned by mayor Sandinista.
In the seventies, the figured out the optimal bus size is twelve passenger bus-taxi hybrid like you see at most commuter ail stations out of NYC. It was Koch who put private bus lines like Blue out of business over insurance. Most poor kids can't afford to drive because of insurance.
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