At tomorrow’s MTA board meeting, New York City students will ask to meet with MTA Chairman Jay Walder and discuss the agency’s plan to begin charging students who currently use free MetroCards to get to and from school. Pointing out that hundreds of thousands of students and parents will be impacted, members of the Urban Youth Collaborative Student Union are asking that the MTA stop cuts to the program.
These students deserve a meeting, and the Working Families Party is asking supporters to sign on to their requests. But this energy also needs to be directed at Albany lawmakers, who are lashing out at the MTA for the student fare hike — even though it was they and Gov. Paterson who helped create the MTA’s current crisis. Last year, Albany politicians slashed state funds to the agency– including funds for the MetroCard program, which is jointly paid for by New York City, the state, and the MTA. As the Daily News pointed out in an editorial last week:
… New York has a new gold standard for chutzpah – in the form of 24 members of the Assembly who are excoriating the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the lawmakers’ own crimes against straphangers.
Two months ago, these two dozen – led by Richard Brodsky of Westchester – voted to wipe out state funding for student MetroCards. That decision is the reason parents are facing the prospect of having to pay for their kids’ transportation to and from school.
It is also the reason parents are furious. So, now Brodsky & Co. have had the gall to attack the MTA as “disgusting,” “shameful” and “immoral” for following through on a decision made by them.
The Assemblymembers — most of whom are from New York City — claim that transporting students costs the MTA “close to zero” because students are simply riding buses and trains that NYC Transit would run anyway. But that’s not true. As Straphangers Campaign senior attorney Gene Russianoff tells Streetsblog, 20% of bus service during the morning peak is needed to handle the student load. After school lets out, student traffic also creates an early afternoon rush period that would not otherwise exist.
[Update 2/24: In the comments, a member of the Urban Youth Collaborative shares the message that was delivered at this morning’s meeting, which is a little broader than was first indicated. It reads in part:
…The students need our own hearing because this issue affects us the most, and our voices will not be heard at the scheduled public hearings. We understand that the MetroCards are not just the responsibility of the MTA, but also the Mayor and the Governor. Since we haven’t heard back from you, I’m here personally to invite Chairman Walder to meet with students to figure out how we can save the MetroCards and put pressure on the Mayor and the Governor to do their part. ]
Today one of our student leaders address the MTA Board and personally asked for a meeting between Chairman Walder and students around the issue of student metrocards since the initial request by letter was ignored. Here is his testimony:
“Hello, my name is Praz Braua and I’m here representing the New York City students and the Urban Youth Collaborative. On January 28th, the UYC sent a letter to Chairman Walder requesting a hearing on Student MetroCards. The students need our own hearing because this issue affects us the most, and our voices will not be heard at the scheduled public hearings. We understand that the MetroCards are not just the responsibility of the MTA, but also the Mayor and the Governor. Since we haven’t heard back from you, I’m here personally to invite Chairman Walder to meet with students to figure out how we can save the MetroCards and put pressure on the Mayor and the Governor to do their part. In the last 24 hours we’ve gotten 2,200 signatures supporting our request. Thank you.”
Thanks for the update, we’ll mention this in the article. Sounds like a very reasonable, fair, and smart message to me.
Great! Thanks for your support. We’d love to see the article when it’s done.
Sorry, Steven, it doesn’t seem much more reasonable, fair or smart to me. It still tries to put pressure on “the Mayor” and “the Governor,” who have both spent serious political capital trying to ensure a steady funding stream for the MTA.
As you say, they should be targeting John Sampson, Dean Skelos and Shelly Silver, as well as individual legislators. These students seem to have a really hard time with the idea that they have State Senators and Assemblymembers who are not voting in their interest, and who are up for re-election this fall.
This seems like a real no-brainer to me; I’m trying to figure out why it’s so hard for them. Maybe they feel more comfortable attacking “Mr. Walder,” “the MTA,” “the Governor” and “the Mayor” than someone that their parents might actually know socially? Maybe they are afraid that they might actually succeed in bringing down, say, Hakeem Jeffries and then face retaliation for it?
Don’t want to lose your student Metro Card? Come out and make your voice heard! The MTA is holding hearings next week in every borough! Click here for the hearings schedule: http://www.mta.info/news/pdf/public_hearing.pdf
I called the students’ message “reasonable, fair, and smart” because it’s now a decisionmaker-focused message and not just an MTA-focused message. That’s the fundamentally correct strategy; choosing to concentrate on Sampson vs. Bloomberg vs. Paterson is just a tactical choice that individual groups will make based on their position, what resources they have, and so on.
I think these students ought to be congratulated for having more initiative and being savvier about politics than many people who are five times their age. And frankly, suggesting that city officials be left out of the student MetroCard issue just doesn’t make sense.
The point, Steven, is that the Governor and the Mayor have already decided in favor of transit. It’s not a tactical choice to waste your efforts persuading people who are already on your side. You do agree that the Mayor is refusing to fund student fares in order to help transit, right?
Unless, of course, you think that the whole thing is a big game of three-card monte, and if we get both the Senate and the Assembly to vote in favor of bridge tolls then the Governor will suddenly be against them…
[…] after Gov. Paterson and the State Legislature cut $143 million from the MTA’s budget (including money for student MetroCards) last year and revenues from the payroll tax passed last year came in lower than state bureaucrats […]
With all due respect to Cap’n Transit, I don’t recall where the Mayor and Governor spent serious political capital looking for steady funding for the MTA. The Mayor’s congestion pricing proposal was done in such a dictatorial manner it never had a chance of passing, no matter what it’s merits. And the Governor?
That said, he’s certainly right that legislators have to be held accountable for thier actions, and thier hypocrisy.
I don’t know if it’s true that state legislators didn’t spend any political capital, even if they suck. Senator Brian Foley and some of the other suburbanites are probably going to lose their jobs for voting for the payroll tax.
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The same way that it is the responsibility of the MTA to provide transportation around the city, even though they are guarenteed to lose money on the service at the end of the day, if they can keep crime rates low and keep the student dropout rate from increasing, it is their responsibility.
In the end, the MTA is one of the agencies that is vital for the health of the city. If one agency (the DOE) is finacially unable to provide a service, the MTA should step in.
As far as the cost of the actual students taking the public transportation, the actual cost is close to nothing, since they have to run the service anyway. There are ”special” buses just for students (I don’t know who pays for them, but some of them could be consolidated to improve efficiency), but in schools near train stations, there is literally almost no extra cost for the extra riders.
By the way, for those of you who were wondering, I wrote a letter to the MTA and they said that about 69.5 million rides were taken by students last year, and about 71 million rides were taken by students last year. About 140.5 million rides were taken in total by students. Therefore, if they all bought a MetroCard with a 15% bonus, there would be an average fare paid of $1.93. $1.93 x 140.5 million = about $271,165,000 in lost fares every year. That would probably be how they arrived at the $214 million figure. However, between students dropping out and students trnsferring to closer schools, I say they would be lucky to get half that amount.
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