I watch the line get longer and longer until it snakes along the curb and into the drop-off zone in front of the Island railroad station in Great Neck.
In this early morning hour, the buses – the N57 and N58 – pull up regularly, discharge much fewer passengers, and then fill up with the waiting people.
One thing you notice: 99.9 percent of those boarding the bus this morning are minority, the vast majority women. Most are bound for Kings Point homes and likely earn minimum wage. Most are hesitant – even suspicious – of Tara Klein of Vision Long Island, which advocates for sustainable development and transportation alternatives. Klein is handing out flyers about the upcoming MTA public hearing on March 23 at Hofstra University.
By July, if Nassau County and the MTA don’t come to an agreement, Great Neck’s entire bus service to the north – the 57 and 58 buses – will be ended entirely, and Sunday service would be ended on the N25, which brings health care workers, patients and visitors to North Shore and LIJ hospitals and medical complexes on Community Drive and Lakeville Road from the railroad station. The 1,500 riders that use the service each day will have to find some other form of transportation, or quit their jobs.
In all, the MTA plans to cut more than half its existing bus routes, meaning that 16,000 riders will lose their bus service.
Even more significantly, since the Able Ride service, which handles disabled passengers, is mandated within 3/4 mile of a bus stop, eliminating those bus stops will also eliminate all practical transportation for these individuals.
At a time when communities everywhere are looking to increase public transportation and reduce dependency on gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing, air-polluting, traffic clogging cars, and also look for ways to develop the economy and create jobs without the negative impacts of density, the idea of losing a public bus service seems outrageous and intolerable.
At this point, though, there seems to be a game of brinkmanship between Nassau County, which actually owns the public buses (paid for with federal grant money) and infrastructure, and the MTA which operates the buses.
But as in all games of brinkmanship, it is innocent civilians – the public – who get caught in the crossfire.
And so we searched for the source of the stalemate, and more significantly, a way out.
First, to set the stage: The Long Island Bus carries 100,000 riders a day – some 31 million riders a year – making it the third largest suburban bus system in the country.
In Great Neck, some 1,500 riders a day take the N 57 (386 riders) and N 58 (1,100 riders), the only public transportation to the north end of the Peninsula.
Nassau County owns the buses (purchased with federal grants), the terminals and the infrastructure, and in essence contracts with the MTA to operate the buses. Even so, it is the MTA that has decided which routes to cut (they claim based on ridership); the county, which in this case is the owner and “client” has no say.
There isn’t a single example of a public bus system that operates without a public subsidy. The present impasse between Nassau County and the MTA is over the size of that subsidy, but also, whether what MTA claims it needs – $36 million – is justified.
In the late 1990s, when Nassau County hit its fiscal crisis, the MTA stepped in to help fund the system, “a perk that no other suburban county enjoys,” said Ryan Lynch, senior planner and LI coordinator of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a regional transportation policy watchdog organization.
Nassau County puts up $9.1 million, but MTA claims to be putting up $24 million to cover the shortfall between the $134 million per year operating expense, minus revenues from fares, state subsidies and dedicated state taxes that go to the Long Island Bus. They claim there is still $33 million gap to operate, minus the $9.1 million that the county has been paying.
“Today, given our own fragile fiscal condition, this is something we can no longer afford. This is distinctly unique to Nassau, MTA doesn’t provide a subsidy to any other bus service or county in the state, including Westchester,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.
“This is an unfortunate result of a county that refuses to meet its own obligation to fund its own bus system. We had to make a difficult choice here, to cut services,” Ortiz said.
Except that Nassau County’s is the only bus service that MTA operates outside of the five boroughs: Liberty Lines operates Westchester (which pays a $17 million subsidy for essentially the same number of riders as Nassau County) and another private company operates Suffolk (which pays a $30 million subsidy).
What is more, MTA has refused to show its books or how it arrives at the $25 million “gap,” or to explain the math when the MTA claims to also have cut $10 million in spending in 2010 and $6 million in 2011. Shouldn’t these cuts have reduced the gap?
The county is suspicious of MTA’s “bookkeeping” as well as its motives in this standoff.
“We send them $9 million, they get $26 million from the federal government, $25 million from the state – all this money goes to LIBS,” says Brian R. Nevin, senior policy advisor and communications director to the county executive. “We say, ‘Show us your books, show us where the money is allocated – whether it is public relations reps, lawyers. We’ve been asking for a year, and they have not been able to provide it to us…”
In fact, when we did our own calculation, based on these numbers, we get $130 million in revenue, even before taking into account advertising revenue from the bus shelters, which the county says MTA has refused to disclose. (We figured 31 million riders at $2.25 each is $70 million, plus $26 million from the federal government, $25 million from the state, $9 million from the county).
Meanwhile, the county offered to increase its subsidy by $6 million – to a total of $15.1 million only to be rebuffed, without any counter-offer.
Add to that the ongoing resentment over the MTA payroll tax and the scandal a couple of years ago over the bookkeeping irregularities.
“Today, Nassau County taxpayers give the MTA nearly $100 million more in tax revenue than ever before through payment of the payroll tax. Rather than thank our businesses and residents who bear these costs, the MTA has chosen to cut Long Island Bus services by 56 percent,” Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano said in a statement. “Because their action is unacceptable, I have solicited proposals for public-private partnership to operate bus service and help our residents.”
The “privatization” that Mangano has in mind essentially means finding another operator to replace MTA (rather than selling off the buses and infrastructure, as we feared), which seems perfectly acceptable.
The county issued a request for proposal in which it offered a subsidy. Three companies responded – Veolia, First Transit and MV Transit. The county has made some modifications to its RFP regarding service levels and will have final bids by March 21 at 5 p.m.
The county, we understand, did not specify a $9 million subsidy, but all three bids came in asking for less than $9 million from the county.
After talking with Nevin, I was reassured that Mangano was not using this latest budget “crisis” as an excuse to slash public bus service.
Even Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos has taken a stand to acknowledge the economic and social importance of the public bus system:
“Nassau County residents depend on LI Bus to get to work, to school, visit doctors, shop and enjoy everything Nassau has to offer,” Maragos said. “Nassau’s economy depends on LI Bus. This is not the right time for the MTA to pull the plug on the Nassau County subsidy.”
Maragos did his own study to evaluate three options for the county to keep the Long Island Bus Service running – staying with the MTA, privatizing using peer county models and selecting the best among the request for proposal issued by the county.
Using figures that have come from the MTA and Nassau County, there does not seem to be a real budget “crisis” at all. But even so, there are other ways to make up the difference: With 31 million rides a year, a quarter increase in the fare, to $2.50, would generate $7.75 million more revenue. Adding advertising on buses (which Nassau County Legislator Judi Bosworth has proposed), and raising fees for bus-shelter advertising (remember how that was supposed to solve the revenue problem?), would also go a long way to fill the gap, without making the Draconian service cuts.
In Great Neck, though, MTA does not just propose to reduce service but eliminate all service to the north, and eliminate Sunday service on the N25 to the hospitals.
“The loss of service on these Great Neck bus routes would be devastating because it hurts riders that have little or no other means for transportation – hard-working people without cars, students, seniors, disabled riders, at a time when these people are struggling,” Village of Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender said after visiting with bus riders and hearing their stories. “These MTA cuts have been announced because Nassau County won’t honor its long-time obligation to subsidize the service typically paid to the MTA by the host county for the benefit of its residents. The Great Neck Plaza Village Board is opposed to these service cuts because of the inconvenience and negative consequences to affected riders, the adverse economic effects to our local economy, and additional congestion created when transit service is slashed.
Losing all our bus service would be a travesty. Indeed, instead of losing the loop bus service, Great Neck should be campaigning for a trolley-style bus, perhaps just during commuter hours and as a shopping/entertainment bus on the weekends, that would run up and down Middle Neck Road, with bike racks like I see just about everywhere else I travel (Lee, Massachusetts; St. Petersburg, Florida; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon and Louisville, Kentucky where the trolley is free).
Nassau County had been making much of the Nassau Hub plan (you don’t hear much now, but it was a hot topic for about a week), in which the transit planners discussed the need to expand mass transit and pointed to buses as the most cost-effective and efficient means of solving the growing transportation problem.
“We have a responsibility to provide government service, to provide for our residents, and to make this county work,” Bosworth said. “I don’t understand how you can jeopardize a public bus system that so many people depend upon for so many reasons, most people aren’t riding the Long Island Bus because they don’t feel like driving, but because it’s their only way to get to work, a doctor’s appointment, visit family, their only way of functioning in our county.”
“The basic fact is that our community will be underserved in a basic need –transportation for those who cannot afford to commute any way other than public transportation. While it is obvious that Nassau County is in dire financial straits, it is unacceptable that one of the richest counties in the nation cannot provide the basic needs of its populace,” Village of Lake Success Mayor Ron Cooper, whose residents do not have access to Great Neck Park District commuter lots, and who has a stake in health care workers reaching the hospitals and offices in his area.
An MTA-sponsored hearing is on Wednesday, March 23, from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Hofstra University, in the Adams Playhouse. You must register in advance to speak. The MTA hearing hotline is 718-521-3333. You can also e-mail your comments at the mta.info site.
To get involved with the committee to Save Long Island Bus, contact Jobs with Justice at LIJWJO1@aol.mail, or call 631-346-1170 ext 310.
