New York, NY -- On Wednesday, July 26th, Council Transportation Chair Ydanis Rodriguez delivered the following remarks before the full board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the board and welcome to our new Chair Joe Lhota. I want to thank you for your dedication to this agency and for agreeing to return at a time when our subway system needs all the attention as it can get.
From derailments to crippling delays to power outages to track fires, New Yorkers have been through a lot these past few months. As someone who rides the subway almost every day, I have seen and lived some of these experiences. I know how ready our riders are for relief.
The plan you put out yesterday is a strong first step. I want to thank you for the hard work you've done over the past month to assess the immediate needs of our system in a sober way and to compile the plan we heard yesterday.
I am hopeful that in the coming months, these measures will allow trains to run smoothly, with drastically fewer delays and clear communication with riders about what they should expect in real time.
However, we know that without a long-term vision, something that we still eagerly await, any short-term fixes will be short-lived. We must think big and we must be creative about how our system will not only survive but thrive through the next thirty years because we are doomed if it does not.
This city, this region and our entire country
relies
heavily on the MTA, of which our subway system is the backbone. It is one of the biggest reasons people move to our city and it stimulates our economy like nothing else. If it goes down, we as a city go down and we cannot allow that to happen.
This brings us to how we move forward from here. Without one or several new dedicated revenue streams efforts to update our century-old signal systems will stall. If we stay on the same timeline to complete the upgrades by 2045, I'll be 80 by the time they're done and I would love to be 60 instead.
Without more strict oversight and accountability-not only over agency
operations,
but contractors working on our most important and expensive projects-we will continue to burn through time and resources to the detriment of all.
There are ideas out there that will work. I think that given the crisis of this moment, we should not fail to capitalize on them. This means implementing a workable model for congestion pricing starting with the outlines of Move New York. It means considering new surcharges and taxes to make sure the MTA has the necessary funding in place for maintenance and modernization. It is also time to consider value capture strategies as an approach to any new system expansions, defraying costs from the capital program, even if not 100%.
As the governor has pointed out, other cities have done it, even those with systems older than ours. London is well on its way to having CBTC throughout its nearly
150 year old
system. France and Los Angeles are expanding their systems like never before, with the funding in place to do it.
At the end of the day, we need a full assessment of the system's needs over the next 30 years and to start putting the funding mechanisms in place to get this done. It is time to be bold and it is time to be aggressive in making our system one New Yorkers can be proud of. One that does not come 2nd to any system in the world.
That must be our goal because anything less is not worthy of our great city. Let's move this plan into the 21st Century and then let's go beyond it.
Thank you.
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