Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jesse McKinley

It started with a chance meeting in Brooklyn late last year, when an irate man told Gov. Andrew Cuomo that closing the subway tunnel for 15 months would hurt his community. It ended Thursday with a news conference so quickly thrown together that the board that oversees the subway was told 11 minutes before it began.

Cuomo — after taking a midnight tour of the tunnel in December and consulting with his own panel of experts — dropped a bombshell: The L train would not fully shut down in April as planned.

It was a remarkable moment in the fraught relations between a bulldog governor, a besieged transit agency and the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has long been frustrated by his lack of influence over the subways. Cuomo essentially overruled transit executives and the mayor by deciding to pursue his own solution.

Cuomo’s announcement circumvented the authority’s board, even though the governor has insisted over and over that he does not actually run the subway, in a move that could further damage the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s credibility. And Cuomo left de Blasio, a persistent adversary, scrambling to respond.

“I want to know for sure that this will work, but also why on Earth wasn’t it considered previously?” de Blasio said in a radio interview Friday.

Cuomo introduced fresh uncertainty over the L train’s future Friday morning when he said his plan to repair the tunnel, damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, still needed to be approved by the MTA board. He called for the board to hold an emergency meeting to consider the plan.

“If they decide to pursue this alternative plan, great,” Cuomo told reporters. “If they decide not to pursue the alternative plan, make a decision, right?”

The new repair plan relies on an unproven technology that has never been used in the United States, raising questions about whether it can work without causing major disruptions. And the plan was criticized as a simple patch job instead of a permanent solution.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/l-train-shutdown.html" id="37216d91-5fe2-3155-a119-00c20653d258">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The strategy for coping with the impending L train shutdown in New York City took three years of meticulous planning. Its unraveling took three weeks.

The L Train Shutdown Plan Was 3 Years in the Making. It Unraveled in 3 Weeks.

Cuomo — after taking a midnight tour of the tunnel in December and consulting his own panel of experts — dropped a bombshell: The L train would not fully shut down in April as planned.

Cuomo’s announcement circumvented the authority’s board, even though the governor has insisted over and over that he does not actually run the subway, in a move that could further damage the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s already dim credibility. And Cuomo left de Blasio, a persistent adversary, scrambling to respond.

“I want to know for sure that this will work but also why on Earth wasn’t it considered previously?” de Blasio said in a radio interview Friday.

Cuomo introduced fresh uncertainty over the L train’s future Friday morning when he said his plan to repair the tunnel, damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, still needed to be approved by the MTA board. He called for the board to hold an emergency meeting to consider the plan.

“If they decide to pursue this alternative plan, great,” Cuomo told reporters in a conference call. “If they decide not to pursue the alternative plan, make a decision, right?”

The abrupt turn of events, while mostly welcomed by subway riders, was met with confusion and frustration among some elected officials and transportation advocates. The plans were made in secret. The city had already started to pay for contingency plans to replace a critical tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn that carries 250,000 people each day. People had rearranged their lives, moving and finding new jobs to avoid the pain to come.

The new repair plan relies on an unproven technology that has never been used in the United States, raising questions about whether it can work without causing major disruptions. And the plan, for all of the governor’s promotion, was criticized as a simple patch job instead of a permanent solution.

Cuomo’s 11th-hour dramatics are well known. He has fashioned his political brand around a series of concrete accomplishments and an aggressive response to disasters and other headline-grabbing events, like his campaign to make sure the Second Avenue subway opened on time. He has not been shy about wading into city affairs, including the management of the New York City Housing Authority and placing state troopers on city streets.

His L train announcement Thursday came together hastily. An email arrived at 12:34 p.m., alerting board members that the authority’s chairman, Fernando Ferrer, had accepted the Cuomo panel’s recommendations. Cuomo’s news conference began at 12:45 p.m.

His panel of experts had been working for weeks behind the scenes, even on Christmas and New Year’s Day. Ferrer said leaders at the transit agency welcomed the new approach.

“We’ve actually, over the last three weeks, literally spent hundreds of hours collectively working on this project,” Mary Boyce, dean of engineering at Columbia University, said.

When Cuomo was asked Thursday whether the board had to approve the repair plan, Cuomo said, “I don’t believe so.” Ferrer clarified that the board would, in fact, have to approve a new contract for the work.

Veronica Vanterpool, a board member appointed by de Blasio, said Ferrer’s stamp of approval was premature. She said she did not have the answers she needed to vote in support of the new plan.

“The original proposal would have fixed and repaired the tunnel for 50 or 60 years,” Vanterpool said. “It’s not clear to me the longevity of this solution.”

Vanterpool said the announcement had undermined the board.

“This continues to show that the board is essentially an afterthought,” Vanterpool said. “We’re not consulted, we’re not briefed, but yet we’re expected to move important projects along.”

The authority’s board makes decisions for the regional transit system — which includes subways, buses, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad — and votes on issues like fare increases. The governor names six representatives to the authority’s board, including the chairman. The mayor appoints four members. The executives of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties each recommend one member, while the members that represent Dutchess, Orange, Putnam and Rockland counties share one vote.

Cuomo’s repair plan relies on a new technology that Cuomo said had not been used in the United States but had been used in London and Hong Kong. The approach uses a “racking system” to house cables on the tunnel’s wall, instead of encasing them in a separate structure known as a “bench wall.” During Superstorm Sandy, the bench walls were damaged by salt water from the storm’s floodwaters.

De Blasio said he wanted to proceed with preparations for the shutdown because there was still uncertainty over what would happen.

“We should not, in my opinion, turn off all of the efforts that had been underway to prepare for the shutdown until we are 100 percent certain what’s going on,” the mayor said.

Andrew Smyth, a professor of civil engineering at Columbia, said his dean reached out to him, and within days he found himself underground with Cuomo.

“It happened very, very quickly,” Smyth said of the December tour.

Smyth said he had expected some push back from the contractors who had designed the previous solution but said they were extremely accommodating.

“It was really a very positive working collaboration,” he said. “Some of us going into it were a little bit skeptical.”

Elected officials were also surprised to hear the shutdown had been called off. State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Democrat whose district includes the Manhattan stops on the L train and welcomed the new plan, said he had only been briefed just before the announcement.

While Cuomo said a stranger had drawn his attention to the shutdown, Hoylman suspected that other constituents, and colleagues, were also a factor.

“The pending chaos is probably what motivated the governor,” Hoylman said. “And people whispering in his ear that this was not going to go well.”

New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, chairman of the council’s Transportation Committee, said New York’s efforts to prepare for the L train shutdown should be assigned a monetary value and counted as part of the city’s future contributions to the MTA.

“That’s money that could have been used for other things,” he said.

Rodriguez said council members and staff had spent hundreds of hours preparing for the shutdown and meeting with residents, including holding a hearing last year. He said that he supported the new plan but that it should have been introduced much sooner.

Council Speaker Corey Johnson said that while the averted shutdown was good news, residents deserved better than a surprise change, especially since many had already uprooted their lives.

“I’m having a tough time with this,” he said. “For years, the MTA told New Yorkers that a shutdown was unavoidable. Now, at the last minute, we’re presented with a new proposal with no details on cost or a solid time frame.”

Joseph Lentol, a veteran Democratic assemblyman from North Brooklyn, said he was pleased by the new plan but still concerned about the potential effects on businesses focused on entertainment and night life.

Still, Lentol said, he was “happy for my constituents, if this plan can work.”

“This is what governors should be doing,” he added. “Coming to the rescue.”

It started with a chance meeting in Brooklyn late last year, when an irate man told Gov. Andrew Cuomo that closing the subway tunnel for 15 months would hurt his community. It ended with a news conference so quickly thrown together that members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, which oversees the subway, were told 11 minutes before it began.

In between, Cuomo took a midnight tour of the tunnel with a panel of experts he drafted to find a better way.

The experts came up with a different plan to repair the tunnel — a critical link between Manhattan and Brooklyn that carries 250,000 people each day. They worked relentlessly on it, even on Christmas and New Year’s Day.

On Thursday, Cuomo and the experts dropped a bombshell: The L train would not shut down in April.

The decision was mostly celebrated by L train riders who got to keep their lifeline to Manhattan, but it also raised questions about whether the new plan could actually work and why Cuomo waited until the last minute to weigh in.

On Friday, Cuomo introduced fresh uncertainty over the L train’s future when he reversed course and said the repairs would need to be approved by the MTA board. He called for the board to hold an emergency meeting to consider his plan.

The announcement Thursday came together so hastily that even the MTA board was kept out of the loop. An email arrived at 12:34 p.m., alerting board members that the authority’s chairman, Fernando Ferrer, had accepted the panel’s recommendations. Cuomo’s news conference began at 12:45 p.m.

Asked whether the board had to approve the repair plan, Cuomo said, “I don’t believe so.” Ferrer clarified that the board would, in fact, have to approve a new contract for the work.

Veronica Vanterpool, a board member appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, said Ferrer’s support was premature. She said she did not have the answers she needed to support the new plan.

Smyth said he had expected some push back from the contractors who had designed the previous solution, but said they were extremely accommodating.

Elected officials were also surprised to hear the shutdown had been called off. State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Democrat, whose district includes the Manhattan stops on the L train and who welcomed the new plan, said he had only been briefed just before the announcement.

Veronica Vanterpool, a board member appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, said Ferrer’s support was premature.

<h1>NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio threw his support behind congestion pricing Tuesday as the best option to raise money for New York City’s failing subway, announcing an unusual alliance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his frequent rival, to fix the system.</h1>

Their joining forces could give congestion pricing momentum as state lawmakers debate whether to embrace Cuomo’s proposal to toll cars entering the busiest parts of Manhattan. The idea has long faced difficult odds in Albany, and a proposal by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg was defeated a decade ago.

But with the subway in crisis and the streets of Manhattan choked by traffic, Cuomo has argued that the proposal is the best option for raising billions of dollars and reducing congestion. For months, de Blasio had resisted endorsing congestion pricing and instead favored a tax on wealthy New Yorkers.

With state lawmakers facing an April 1 deadline to consider congestion pricing as part of the budget, de Blasio decided to back the idea to help mitigate the region’s transportation crisis.

“This crisis runs deeper than ever before,” the mayor said in a statement, “and it’s now clear there is no way to address it without congestion pricing and other dedicated revenue streams.”

Cuomo and de Blasio, two Democrats who are often bitter opponents, put aside their differences to show unified support for congestion pricing in the hope of persuading Democratic legislative leaders to rally their members. Democrats control both the Senate and Assembly for the first time in years, but some lawmakers are reluctant to approve new tolls, fearing a backlash from drivers.

Cuomo and de Blasio released a 10-point plan that called for reorganizing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway, buses and commuter railroads. They also proposed two new funding sources for the transit system: a tax on recreational marijuana sales, if they are legalized in New York, and an internet sales tax.

The two leaders embraced an idea that is popular among subway riders: using revenue from a state tax on cannabis sales in New York City to pay for subway upgrades, which state officials said could generate $125 million per year for the system. A separate tax on purchases like furniture from online retailers could raise an additional $320 million per year. Those two sources could allow the authority to issue bonds to raise $7 billion. Congestion pricing is expected to generate $15 billion, for a possible total of $22 billion in new revenue for the transit system, officials said.

Transit advocates, who have pressed for new revenue sources for months, praised the plan.

“The governor and mayor are working together to address the transit crisis, and now we need the Senate and Assembly to do their part and pass congestion pricing as part of this year’s budget,” said John Raskin, executive director of the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group.

On Tuesday afternoon, Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie, D-Bronx, said there was more support for congestion pricing in his conference than in years past, but that there were ample questions about the plan.

“I think there’s still many concerns from members, particularly those members in Queens and Brooklyn, who represent transit deserts,” Heastie said in Albany. “So, I would say more people are open to it, but by no means is it a fait accompli.”

Without congestion pricing, Cuomo has warned that subway and bus fares could rise by 30 percent. Transit leaders say they are facing a huge budget deficit and need billions of dollars to upgrade the aging system.

The authority’s board is expected to vote Wednesday to approve a fare and toll increase of about 4 percent. The plan from Cuomo and de Blasio urged the agency to continue its practice of limiting fare increases to 4 percent every two years.

Their plan did not say how high congestion tolls might be, but they would not likely take effect until 2021. A task force created by Cuomo proposed last year that drivers pay $11.52 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.

Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, has called for city control of the subway and, in a statement, criticized the plan by Cuomo and de Blasio.

“While I am glad to see the Mayor finally taking an interest in congestion pricing and the Governor being open to MTA reform, I strongly disagree with the idea that giving the state more control of city-generated revenue and our transit infrastructure is going to magically solve our problems,” Johnson said.

Cuomo said the joint proposal addressed some concerns raised by past congestion-pricing plans. It calls for charging lower tolls outside of the rush hour and establishing tolls to enter Manhattan’s central business district rather than tolling the East River bridges. A driver could, for instance, cross the Brooklyn Bridge and take the FDR Drive north, without paying the congestion fee.

“This is a different plan, I think, than previous congestion-pricing plans,” Cuomo said in a radio interview. “The mayor has a number of issues that he felt strongly about, and so did I.”

Congestion pricing, which has been embraced by cities including London, Singapore and Stockholm, has been debated in New York City since at least the 1970s.

The plan calls for toll exemptions for certain groups: emergency vehicles, vehicles transporting people with disabilities, and people who have an “identifiable hardship” or limited access to medical facilities within the congestion zone. It would also establish a “regional transit committee” to review toll and fare increases, and move to centralize legal and human resources work for various MTA agencies.

Revenue from congestion pricing, the cannabis tax and the internet sales tax would be put in a “lockbox” for the authority’s capital plans, which pay for repairs and upgrades across the network. The top priorities will be the subway, accessibility, buses and the expansion of transit in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

The plan will face hard questions in the state Legislature, particularly in the Assembly, where Democratic leaders have expressed concerns about the effect of congestion pricing on commuters not well served by public transit.

In the Senate, leaders have been at war with Cuomo after the collapse of an agreement to build a campus for Amazon in Queens. Cuomo has blamed Senate Democrats for scuttling the deal — he did so again Tuesday — and neither the Assembly or the Senate offered an immediate endorsement of the 10-point plan, with representatives from both chambers saying it was too early to gauge its chances.

Still, Mike Murphy, a spokesman for the Senate, said his conference would work with the Assembly, the governor and the mayor to “finally move forward on solutions to the MTA catastrophe.”

“Clearly, there is a crucial need for a dedicated stream of revenue to fix the crumbling MTA,” Murphy added.

Heastie also seemed skeptical about spending money from any marijuana plan on subway repairs, saying that cannabis revenue should instead be directed toward low-income communities “that have been impacted by criminal justice issues.”

On Tuesday, Heastie said he “was very clear with the governor and the mayor” that any marijuana revenue should first go to “community investment.”

The MTA’s acting chairman, Fernando Ferrer, said he supported the plan, which included measures to reform an agency known for sky-high construction costs and a lethargic bureaucracy.

“This proposal is a holistic cure for much of what ails the MTA,” Ferrer said in a statement, “and I hope to see it enacted swiftly for the benefit of our 8.5 million daily customers.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f673f385-f32c-498c-8fd4-3a354f2e5b71" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/nyregion/subway-congestion-pricing.html">The New York Times</a>.

Boost for Congestion Pricing in Manhattan as de Blasio Supports Cuomo Plan

Their joining forces could give congestion pricing momentum as state lawmakers debate whether to embrace Cuomo’s proposal to toll cars entering the busiest parts of Manhattan.

Boost for congestion pricing in Manhattan as de Blasio supports Cuomo plan

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Pulse Ghana is the most followed news and entertainment platform, informing and engaging young Ghanaians round the clock, providing updates by the hour.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jesse McKinley

Articles written by the author

The L Train Shutdown Plan Was 3 Years in the Making. It Unraveled in 3 Weeks.

The L Train Shutdown Plan Was 3 Years in the Making. It Unraveled in 3 Weeks.

The L Train Shutdown Plan Was 3 Years in the Making. It Unraveled in 3 Weeks.

The L Train Shutdown Plan Was 3 Years in the Making. It Unraveled in 3 Weeks.

Boost for congestion pricing in Manhattan as de Blasio supports Cuomo plan