Patrick McGeehan

Hoboken was the first city in New Jersey to allow riders to rent motorized, two-wheeled scooters, joining a long list of cities that have embraced them in the past few years, including San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Sydney and Barcelona, Spain.

The scooters have been a big hit in many places because they offer an inexpensive alternative on congested streets and can be picked up and dropped off on almost any block.

But they have also drawn increasing criticism about the recklessness of some riders. And there have been complaints that the scooters are carelessly tossed aside on sidewalks, parks, plazas and even lawns.

In Hoboken, the problem has gotten so bad that the city has had to hire two officers whose job is to police unruly riders. Some riders have even been caught scootering while drunk.

“The rollout in some cities has been rocky,” said Steven Pedigo, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “We’ve had safety issues. We’ve had too many scooters in some cities.”

But if managed well, he added, scooter-sharing programs can reduce car traffic and help solve the “mobility crisis” that many cities are facing.

In Hoboken, the scooters are so coveted that commuters line up to claim them on weekday evenings. Residents returning from work in Manhattan simply point their smartphones at a scooter to unlock it, hop on and slip into street traffic at speeds of up to 18 mph. Each ride costs $1 plus 15 cents a minute.

But not all of the riders obey the rules. The scooters are intended to be parked out of the way of pedestrians and other traffic, but can be left practically anywhere. Some users break the rules by riding on sidewalks or after patronizing the bars and clubs that make Hoboken a hot spot for nighttime revelers.

On a recent weekend, the Hoboken police charged a 34-year-old woman from Jersey City with scootering while intoxicated. A few days before that, they arrested a 26-year-old scooter rider after she collided with a car and fell to the ground. A breath test showed that her blood-alcohol content was twice the legal limit, police said.

That was the third time the Hoboken Police Department had arrested someone for riding a scooter while drunk, Chief Kenneth F. Ferrante said, adding that offenders “face the same penalties as if they were operating a car.”

To take some of the burden off police, Hoboken hired two “micromobility code enforcement officers” who can ticket scooter riders for failing to obey traffic laws, said Ryan Sharp, the city’s director of transportation and parking.

The money to pay the officers will come from a revenue-sharing deal the city struck this summer with Lime, the company operating the scooter system.

Hoboken authorized the scooters as a six-month pilot program. The city has hired a consultant to assess the program, which ends in late November.

“Over the next four weeks or so, we’ll be figuring out how we want to proceed,” Sharp said. “All options are on the table.”

Hoboken is an ideal candidate for a scooter program, Sharp said, because 60% of its residents commute to work, mostly by train or ferry from Hoboken Terminal. Practically all of them live within one and a half miles of the terminal.

But Janna Chernetz, the deputy director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, says many cities are suitable for scooters if their residents and elected officials see them as a legitimate form of transportation, not just vehicles for joy rides. “It’s a cultural mind-set change that you need to share the road,” Chernetz said.

Lime, which has scooters in cities around the world, is the exclusive provider in Hoboken. The pilot program started with a second provider, Ojo, but the city dropped it in September after a 13-year-old boy crashed one of the company’s scooters into a woman who was pushing her 3-month-old son in a stroller on a sidewalk.

The woman, Kate Cohen, testified at a City Council meeting that neither she nor her baby was seriously injured. “I am so lucky that this wasn’t more serious, but I am haunted by the potential risk that remains,” she said.

Cohen did not call for a ban on the scooters, but said the city needed to do more to enforce the rules, including a prohibition against riders under the age of 18.

At that meeting, the council voted to ban the scooters from parks and the Hudson River waterfront, limiting their use to roadways and bike lanes.

In some cities, the reaction to scooters has been more drastic. In June, Nashville’s mayor abruptly ended a pilot program that involved Lime and several other scooter providers, including the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft, after a rider who had been drinking was killed in a collision with a car.

In an August letter to the Metropolitan Council, the legislative body for the consolidated city-county government in Nashville, Mayor David Briley, a Democrat, wrote that the safety of residents, workers and visitors “remains at risk with more than 2,000 scooters still zipping through our streets and littered across our sidewalks.” But the council voted against banning scooters altogether, deciding instead to reduce each company’s fleet by half.

In New York, lawmakers in Albany passed a bill this year that would legalize electric-powered bikes and scooters, with one notable exception. The bill singled out Manhattan as the only place in the state where scooters would not be legal. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has not yet signed it into law, so New York City has not yet authorized their use in any of its other four boroughs.

“New York City is one of the places that, without the prohibition, the companies would have launched in long ago,” said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “It has density, the ability to pay, a preponderance of short trips. And people are looking for an alternative to the subway.”

In the meantime, New Yorkers who want to try a rental scooter would have to cross the Hudson to Hoboken, Asbury Park or one of a few other places in New Jersey where they are available.

Despite the accidents and arrests in Hoboken, the scooters have been firmly embraced. On a recent weeknight, commuters leaving the PATH train station at the south end of the city waited impatiently as two young men unloaded 73 Lime scooters from a packed van. Within minutes, all but a few were gone.

Phil Jones, a senior director for government relations at Lime, said more than 30,000 users had taken a total of more than 500,000 rides on the company’s scooters in Hoboken in five months. Lime started out with 250 scooters there in May and now has more than 300 in Hoboken, a compact city with about 50,000 residents.

Jones said Lime had canceled the accounts of more than 500 people for violations of its rules, such as allowing children to ride or carrying passengers. Others have been warned or fined for lesser offenses, he said.

“We try to give everyone a chance to correct their behavior,” he said.

One regular rider, David Polinchock, said he was annoyed when he saw others riding scooters on the sidewalks.

“What Hoboken did really, really well for us is they put in the bike lanes first,” Polinchock said. “I get frustrated when I see people zipping down the sidewalk next to the bike lane.”

A former Brooklyn resident who used to bike to work in Manhattan, Polinchock said riding scooters in Hoboken was low-risk by comparison. “I got doored, I got cut off, there were potholes galore,” he said, rattling off the hazards of biking on the streets of New York.

Now living in Bloomfield, New Jersey, he rides the scooters between Hoboken Terminal and his office on the border of Jersey City, an inexpensive way to shorten his daily commute.

But, he added, not every city can handle them.

Polinchock described the harrowing scooter rides he took this summer while he was in downtown Los Angeles for a conference, and said he couldn’t imagine the vehicles ever making sense in Manhattan.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said of the notion.

This article originally appeared in

Riding While Drunk and Other Dangers of the Electric Scooter Craze

A new state law may soon bring electric scooters to the streets of New York City. But a mile away in New Jersey, Hoboken already offers a test case of the promises and the perils of the electric vehicles, which have taken hold across the world.

But as the seventh hurricane season since then approaches, the city is relying on something more modest as the first line of defense against another inundation of Manhattan: a row of glorified sandbags.

In the next few months, the city’s Office of Emergency Management plans to oversee the installation of 4-foot-tall sacks of soil along the East River esplanade, from Wall Street to just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

For up to five years, they essentially would form the only barrier to keep water from again rushing into the low-lying neighborhoods around the South Street Seaport.

City officials say they are a temporary step while permanent solutions to New York’s vulnerability to big storms are still being planned and debated.

But the barriers have already provoked derision.

“Six years of studying it and you come up with sandbags? Really?” said Marco Pasanella, whose family owns a 180-year-old building with a wine shop that faces the river on South Street. He said he felt no less vulnerable than he did on the night that Sandy flooded his shop and left the district without power for two weeks.

Along with the doubts about their effectiveness, the barriers have also been panned as unsightly interlopers along a stretch of waterfront popular with pedestrians and bicyclists — one woman called them “atrocities.”

They will cover only about one mile of the waterfront, leaving the area below Wall Street unprotected, possibly for another decade or longer.

Officials have admitted that they do not have a plan for protecting much of the financial district, which is home to about 100,000 people and accounts for one of every 10 jobs in the city.

They have concluded that Lower Manhattan is simply too congested, with 18 subway lines and a tangle of utilities running beneath its warren of narrow streets, for land-based defenses like fences that flip up from the ground.

Instead, they have a more ambitious vision and have begun planning to extend the shoreline of the island into the water to serve as a bulwark against rising sea levels and storm surges.

But making more of Manhattan will take a lot of time and money. In the meantime, the financial district will rely on a combination of commercial products that are typically used as temporary protections against flooding that look like they come from Home Depot: Hesco barriers and plastic tubes known as Tiger Dams.

The barriers are wire-mesh frames that can be filled with sand or gravel and linked together to form a low wall. They have been used to hold back raging rivers in many parts of the country, but emergency management officials said they were not aware of any other city using them in the way New York is.

“We’re in the Wild West of adaptation where it’s like anything goes,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president for energy and environment at the Regional Plan Association. “It comes down to the need to do something soon. Sometimes that looks a little uglier than the visions that are laid out.”

The city installed similar barriers in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and Astoria in Queens, where they either abut buildings or are tucked against or behind fences.

In Manhattan, however, they would stick up prominently between a busy street and the promenade. After being set up, they would eventually be decorated by artists in a process city officials call “beautification.”

Not everyone who has beheld them agrees.

“I saw the barriers in Red Hook, and they are not attractive,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, a former chairwoman of Community Board 1, which encompasses the financial district and the seaport. “They’re not contextual with the South Street Seaport.”

The barriers would be “atrocities,” said Alice Blank, a Tribeca resident who heard city officials present their plans to the community board at a recent meeting. “I guess what they were saying is, we’re going to put down these unsightly blocks and we’re going to paint them in the fall.”

City officials said the barriers can last up to five years and are worthy stopgap measures. “Our goal is to bridge the gap between the current hazard and permanent mitigation,” said Benjamin Krakauer, an assistant commissioner at the Office of Emergency Management.

While they seem like a makeshift solution to protecting urban centers, New York is not the only city to deploy them — other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles, have also used the barriers as temporary fortifications.

They filled gaps in levees in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005. In Los Angeles, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed a 3-mile line of them on a bank of the Los Angeles River out of concern about flooding from El Niño storms in 2016.

But after complaints from cyclists and equestrians about the barriers blocking access to a bike path and horse-riding trails, the Corps removed many of them after the El Niño threat had passed.

Other coastal cities facing similar challenges to New York, however, have opted not to use the barriers.

In Charleston, South Carolina, where flood prevention is a top priority, Mayor John J. Tecklenburg said the city plans to raise its sea wall by 3 feet and fit it with tracks for glass plates that could add an additional 2 1/2 feet.

But, the city’s chief resilience officer, Mark Wilbert, said the city had not turned to Hesco barriers because “there’s got to be a start and a stop on them, and where it stops the water will come around.”

In Lower Manhattan, the stopping point will be Wall Street. The barrier wall will start just north of the Brooklyn Bridge at Catherine Slip and extend nearly a mile to Wall Street.

Along the way, there will be about 18 gaps, mostly for pedestrian access to the riverfront. When a storm threatens, the Tiger Dams will be moved from storage in Brooklyn and filled with water to cover the gaps, Krakauer said.

That makeshift wall would not hold back a storm like Sandy, whose surge rose 6 1/2 feet as it swamped the historic Seaport district and destroyed one of its main attractions, Pier 17. But city officials told the community board that there had not been a storm since that would have triggered the deployment of the Tiger Dams.

In other areas of Lower Manhattan, the city’s Economic Development Corp. identified different ways of defending against big storms, at a cost of about $500 million.

Planning is underway for the installation of gates that would flip up along the esplanade north of the Brooklyn Bridge and attach to the underside of the elevated Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Along the Battery and in Battery Park City, esplanades would be raised.

But Elijah Hutchinson, vice president for resilience at the development corporation, said in a recent presentation that for the seaport and the financial district, “we don’t have a plan.”

City officials are embarking on the more sweeping plan of extending the shoreline of Lower Manhattan by as much as 500 feet, a project that Mayor Bill de Blasio said could cost $10 billion and would take at least six years to complete.

The city hopes to hire a team to design that extension by fall. But with no source of funding identified for the project, the plan could involve allowing developers to build on the landfill to help pay for it, city officials said.

Until then, a big section of the Lower Manhattan waterfront will not have so much as a row of big sandbags to protect it, a void that has left downtown residents and merchants feeling vulnerable, Hughes, the former community board chairwoman, said.

“Clearly, this interim plan has a big gap between Wall Street and the Battery,” she said, “and that gap also needs to be addressed.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-manhattan-flooding.html" id="f3290fd7-405c-3fa1-a917-9d6e3ce9e39b">The New York Times</a>.

Sandbags Will Be First Line of Defense Against Storm Surges

NEW YORK — After Hurricane Sandy devastated New York in 2012, city officials considered some drastic responses to storm surges, like long concrete sea walls and tall earthen berms.

The company already has been producing some of its most popular shows, including “Orange Is the New Black” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” in Queens and Brooklyn.

The proposed expansion would build on New York’s growing role in the booming business of film and television production. Soundstages have opened up in previously industrial sections of Brooklyn and Queens, and even on Staten Island, fueled in part by the state’s program of production credits, which offers savings on production costs incurred in New York.

“New York has created a film-friendly environment that’s home to some of the best creative and executive talent in the world, and we’re excited to provide a place for them at Netflix with our production hub,” said Jason Hariton, the company’s director of worldwide studio operations and real estate.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in a statement, said Netflix, which has 32 employees in Manhattan, planned to add “127 high-paying executive content, marketing and production development jobs” to that count over the next five years in an expanded executive production office in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. If Netflix creates those jobs and retains them through 2029, it could receive $4 million in Excelsior Jobs Program tax credits through the Empire State Development agency.

The tax incentives offered to Netflix are under the same program that was used to lure Amazon to build a campus in Long Island City, Queens. Amazon, which would have saved roughly $3 billion compared to the $4 million in credits Netflix is eligible to receive, pulled out of the plan earlier this year.

Netflix’s proposed soundstages, which it would lease after they are built in a former warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, could hold “thousands of production crew jobs,” Cuomo said. The site is a 165,500-square-foot warehouse that was once a printing plant, which will be converted into soundstages and operated by Gold Coast Studios.

Netflix, which got its start by delivering movies on CDs by mail, has become a major player in video production. Based in Los Gatos, California, it is known for spending billions to fund new productions and to license original content. But it is still a newcomer to studio operations.

Unlike HBO, Netflix has had to rely on other production companies to create its originals. That changed in October 2018 when the company acquired its first studio, a New Mexico facility that was used to make big-budget films like the blockbuster “The Avengers.”

Last year, the streaming giant spent more than $8 billion on content, and it plans to spend more than $10 billion this year. A few years ago, Netflix made no original movies. As of 2019, it will make at least 55 original films annually — about twice as many as the most prolific of the traditional studios — including some with budgets as high as $200 million.

Exclusive films and TV series have become critical to fending off new competitors. AT&amp;T;, the Walt Disney Co., Apple, Amazon and even Facebook are spending more on digital video, the new battleground for audiences and advertising.

Netflix has historically relied on outside suppliers. For example, Lionsgate produces “Orange Is the New Black.” But now Netflix has shifted to making more of its own content, which requires stages. With all the streaming production, a shortage of soundstages exists in Los Angeles, and an under-tapped pool of creative people in New York are happy to fill the gap.

Economics are behind the shift — a lot of big studios are embedded within conglomerates that are ending relationships with Netflix as they funnel shows to their own streaming services. Netflix is also working to source more content from overseas studios.

“We’re proud Netflix chose New York to grow its business and we look forward to the jobs, economic activity and world-class productions this project will bring,” Cuomo said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/nyregion/netflix-new-york-brooklyn.html" id="16bb86b7-f63d-3bcc-ab8b-e97b58b87ad1">The New York Times</a>.

Netflix, Which Made 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' in Brooklyn, Plans to Expand There

NEW YORK — Netflix, the video-streaming company, said Thursday that it would spend up to $100 million to expand its presence in New York City by creating a production hub in Brooklyn that would include six soundstages.

The rush-hour collision occurred near the Westbury station, about 30 miles east of Manhattan, setting off fires that terrified passengers before they could escape. The authorities said that at least seven people on the trains were injured; the three people who were killed were in the car.

After the driver of the vehicle went around the gates, an eastbound train pulling out of the station struck the car, according to Phillip Eng, the president of the railroad.

Another train, traveling westbound, then crashed into the vehicle and pushed it down the tracks before the front two cars of the train derailed and collided with the concrete platform.

By late into the night, the westbound train still lay against the Westbury station’s platform, part of which had been knocked over.

On Wednesday, the LIRR continued to have extensive delays because of the crash. In an early-morning report, officials said the collision damaged 200 feet of third rail, as well as the platform at the Westbury station.

The two trains were together carrying about 900 passengers, and some offered a harrowing account of what happened.

“It was like a bad movie,” said Michelle Asprer of Hicksville, New York, a passenger in the second-to-last car on the eastbound train. “It was so scary.”

She said her train stopped after Westbury without explanation. “There was a whole line of cars” at the grade-level crossing where the train stopped, she said.

She said she heard a westbound train approaching and “making a funny noise.”

“It hit us,” she said. “It hit the last car” of the eastbound train, she said. “The people from the last car were running up, saying ‘Move up, move up because the last car is on fire.'”

A passenger on the westbound train, Mike Picarella, 36, was in the back of the train when, around 7:20 p.m., he heard “a little thump.” He said he didn’t think much of it, but seconds later, there was a second, bigger thump, he said.

“You knew something happened,” Picarella said. “The train stopped.”

Realizing their train had hit something, the passengers stood up and then looked out the window, where they saw another train. At first many wondered if they had hit it.

But there was a fire was raging, too, flames knifing up from underneath the train, halfway up the windows. On the ground below was half of a crumpled vehicle.

Within a minute of stopping, the train started filling up with smoke, Picarella said, and passengers were quickly moved to the front. Eventually, the doors were opened to let the smoke out, he said, and passengers could then see that a train car had peeled off the tracks.

Picarella, who is a maintenance manager for New York City Transit, praised the response of local emergency responders and police, who he said arrived within minutes of the crash and got people off the train quickly.

Rescuers could not immediately identify the vehicle or its passengers because the car was damaged so severely, said Commissioner Patrick Ryder of the Nassau County Police.

Eng said that the authorities often warned drivers about the dangers of trying to cross ahead of trains.

“You’re not only taking your own life into your hands, but you’re taking the lives of others into your own hands: our engineers, our conductors, our customers and anyone else along the local road. It’s unfortunate,” Eng said.

Eng added that Wednesday morning service would undoubtedly be affected.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a statement calling for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the State Police, local law enforcement and the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate the crash.

“As we continue to gather information surrounding the incident, my heart goes out to the victims and their loved ones,” Cuomo said.

Crashes at railroad crossings have occurred with surprising regularity in the New York region over the past decade, federal data show.

At the same time, the number of accidents and fatalities at these crossings has fallen nationally, as grade crossings have been eliminated and safety improvements made, according to safety groups.

In 2015, a crowded Metro-North train passing through Westchester County at the height of the evening rush slammed into a sport utility vehicle on the tracks at a crossing, killing seven people.

The crash in Westbury was the second fatal encounter on the railroad on Tuesday. At about 3:45 p.m., a westbound train struck and killed a pedestrian between the stations in Baldwin and Freeport, said Chris McKniff, a spokesman for the LIRR. That accident caused long delays for commuters who were trying to get home from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.

McKniff said service had been restored around 5:45 p.m., about an hour before the crash in Westbury.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/nyregion/lirr-train-collision-accident.html" id="1955bb82-1bac-3680-a92d-2019ed5f0174">The New York Times</a>.

LIRR Collision: 3 Killed as 2 Trains Crash Into Car in Westbury

NEW YORK — A railroad crossing in Nassau County turned into a chaotic disaster scene Tuesday night when two Long Island Rail Road trains traveling in opposite directions struck a car that had swerved around lowered gates and onto the tracks, killing three people.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” Wadhwa said, adding that she had events later and that being stuck in New York would “really mess everything up.”

She was just one of thousands of travelers across the northeastern United States whose plans were upended Friday morning after a shortage of air traffic controllers triggered significant flight delays.

A few hours later, President Donald Trump announced a deal to temporarily reopen the government, easing the increasing strain on federal agencies, for a few weeks at least.

The threat of disruption to the nation’s air-travel system had ratcheted up the pressure on political leaders, who feared a chaotic situation that would anger many more people than the 800,000 unpaid government workers.

Aviation industry workers and travel groups celebrated the breakthrough but worried that it might not last long.

Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers’ union, expressed relief about the agreement but called for an end to a funding process that produces shutdowns.

“The constant funding crises that arise from stop-and-go funding continue to wreak havoc on our system and perpetuate the current staffing crisis, which has resulted in a 30-year low of certified professional controllers,” he said in a statement.

The delays Friday cascaded along the Eastern Seaboard, reaching as far north as Boston. As the FAA rerouted flights and slowed air traffic, passengers saw delays of up to two hours at LaGuardia, which was closed to inbound flights until late morning. The delays began to clear around midday.

The FAA blamed the trouble on a slight increase in the number of controllers calling in sick at two of its air-traffic control facilities on the East Coast, one near Washington and another near Jacksonville, Florida. Those facilities manage air traffic at high altitudes; some flights between the Northeast and Florida that normally would pass over the Atlantic Ocean had to take a wide detour over land.

On Friday, the controllers union said in a statement that it had not organized and would not condone a coordinated sickout by its members.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/nyregion/lga-flights-government-shutdown.html" id="1e780302-8226-3a7a-a172-961645b2860a">The New York Times</a>.

Shutdown Sets Off Airport Delays as FAA Announces Staffing Shortages

At LaGuardia Airport in New York on Friday, Divneet Wadhwa, 26, was stewing. Her flight to Toronto, where she was going for a wedding, had been delayed three times.

“People are looking forward to getting paid and hoping for the best,” said Mitch Narzem, a controller who had just finished a 10-hour shift in Fort Worth, Texas. “Getting paid will alleviate some headaches, but it is just a three-week temporary thing and who knows?”

Narzem, 53, said that going unpaid for a month had been an extra burden on controllers.

“When you’re working a lot of airplanes, you need to pay attention and your mind doesn’t need to wonder about other things,” he said.

Nicholas E. Calio, president and chief executive of Airlines for America, said the industry was grateful to the elected officials, but added, “As we have seen over the past 35 days, the pressures and strains of a shutdown are not sustainable; the disruptions to passengers, commerce and the economy are not tolerable. We urge elected leaders to continue working together to identify a solution that will keep the government open beyond Feb. 15 and will continue paying the dedicated federal employees.”

The disruption came on the day the controllers and other federal workers missed a second paycheck. Many are on furlough, but the controllers, who are responsible for keeping planes from colliding, had been ordered to keep working because they are considered essential.

On Wednesday, the controllers’ union and other labor groups warned that the prolonged shutdown had caused the “air safety environment” to “deteriorate by the day.” But on Friday, the controllers union said in a statement that it had not organized and would not condone a coordinated sickout by its members.

“This is not a widespread use of sick leave, rather a symptom of how critically staffed our largest facilities are,” the statement said.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates LaGuardia, as well as Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports, said 47 flights were canceled at LaGuardia and there were 580 delays, which represented about half the day’s flights. At Newark Liberty in New Jersey, at least 40 flights were canceled and nearly 300 were delayed; Kennedy did not have any cancellations, but there were more than 230 delays.

Delta said about 200 of its flights were delayed at LaGuardia and other airports in the Northeast. The delays frustrated many travelers, including Valerie Pacheco, 34, who flew into LaGuardia from Miami on Friday morning.

Pacheco’s friend was stuck in Vermont, she said. Instead of arriving at 10 a.m., the friend was due in at 1 p.m. — or later.

“I guess I’ll just have to sit here another two or three hours,” Pacheco said. “What I’m worried about is that they’ll cancel her flight altogether. Then we have a problem.”

The two had planned a “best friend’s weekend” in New York. “We were here to enjoy the city, and all that,” she said. “Now we’re getting a late start.”

Pacheco, who works in television production, said she feared that “we’re leaving our airports wide open for anything with this shutdown.” She added, “This is directly impacting us right now.”

The shortage of controllers caused some airlines to reroute flights. Peter Beadle was on a plane at Kennedy that was bound for Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After leaving the gate on time, the pilot announced that instead of flying over water, the plane would take a less direct path over West Virginia, Beadle said. That route would require additional fuel, so the plane had to return to the terminal.

“The pilot was apologetic, saying he’d never experienced this before and again confirming this was due to a staffing shortage of air traffic controllers,” Beadle said in an email. The pilot also explained that the controllers were doubling the distance between planes, further slowing traffic. The flight, which had been scheduled to arrive at 11:39 a.m., arrived more than two hours late.

The facilities that were short-staffed Friday are among about two dozen Air Route Traffic Control Centers, an official of the controllers union said. Each center controls a region, divided into several areas and monitored by dozens of controllers. They direct planes at high altitudes after receiving handoffs from local controllers.

The flight from Kennedy to Fort Lauderdale would normally have been guided by a center near New York City, then the one near Washington and, eventually, the one near Jacksonville, the official explained.

Union officials said the action the FAA took Friday was highly unusual absent a severe weather event like a hurricane. Normally, they said, support staff would develop a plan to reroute traffic so that it would have minimal effects on flight schedules. But that did not happen, they said, because many of the people who provide that help to the controllers were furloughed because of the shutdown.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere," Wadhwa said, adding that she had events planned later and being stuck in New York would “really mess everything up.”

She was just one of untold numbers of travelers across the Northeast whose plans were thrown into upheaval Friday morning after a shortage of air traffic controllers triggered significant flight delays.

A few hours later, President Donald Trump announced a deal to temporarily reopen the government, alleviating the increasing strain federal agencies were struggling under.

But the disruption to the nation’s skies showed how the shutdown ratcheted up the pressure on political leaders because it reverberated far beyond government workers and affected a large number of people.

The delays cascaded along the Eastern Seaboard, reaching as far north as Boston. LaGuardia was the only airport that had been closed off to departing flights from other cities because it was so crowded with planes taking off and landing on a weekday morning. Delays on flights into LaGuardia were averaging almost an hour and a half, the FAA said.

On Friday, staffing problems at two air-traffic control facilities on the East Coast, one near Washington and one in Jacksonville, Florida, prompted the FAA to slow traffic in and out of airports. Those facilities manage air traffic at high altitudes.

The agency said there had been a slight increase in the number of controllers calling in sick at those facilities Friday.

The control towers at the airports that serve New York City and the central air-traffic control facility on Long Island that monitors those airports were fully staffed, said a person who had been briefed on the situation.

“The president has been briefed and we are monitoring the ongoing delays at some airports,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Friday morning. “We are in regular contact with officials at the Department of Transportation and the FAA.”

In Washington, Democratic leaders pounced on Trump, blaming him for the air traffic slowdown.

“The #TrumpShutdown has already pushed hundreds of thousands of Americans to the breaking point,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote on Twitter. “Now it’s pushing our airspace to the breaking point too. @realDonaldTrump, stop endangering the safety, security and well-being of our nation. Re-open government now!”

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2. House Democrat, echoed the speaker — and also sought to assign blame to Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader.

“The Trump-McConnell shutdown is not a game and has real-world consequences to our economy and the well-being of millions of Americans,” Hoyer said in a statement, adding, “If this shutdown does not end immediately, the harmful impact will continue to grow.”

At LaGuardia, Amy Howell of Indianapolis, who was waiting for a flight home on Delta Air Lines that was scheduled to leave at 11:30 a.m., said, “I can’t worry about the things I can’t control. But I would like to get home.”

Howell was not casting blame on anybody for the government shutdown.

“I’m not mad,” she said. “But I would like to see my family.”

Valerie Pacheco was at a food court in LaGuardia waiting for a friend who was traveling from Vermont, but whose flight was delayed. “What I’m worried about is that they’ll cancel her flight altogether,'’ said Pacheo, who had flown in from Miami so the two could spend the weekend together in New York. “Then we have a problem.”

At Boston’s Logan airport, several Delta flights to LaGuardia and Philadelphia were delayed by up to nearly two hours. But some travelers appeared to be taking the delays in stride.

Megan Brendel, 57, from Norwich, Vermont, was headed from Boston to Norfolk, Virginia, for a board meeting of the Rhodesian Ridgeback Club of the United States, and was supposed to fly through LaGuardia.

“It’s an inconvenience,” she acknowledged, but she said she supported the president’s push for a wall on the southern border and didn’t mind having her travel plans disrupted. But she had harsh words for Pelosi — who she said was being “completely political” and “disrespectful to the office of the presidency” — and for federal workers who were calling in sick to work.

“I don’t think it’s fair that the air traffic controllers have called in sick,” she said. “They signed up for the job.”

The union that represents flight attendants Friday said they had been warning that the lengthy government shutdown would start harming the nation’s air travel system.

“The aviation system depends on the safety professionals who make it run,” the union said in a statement. “They have been doing unbelievably heroic work even as they are betrayed by the government that employs them. They are fatigued, worried, and distracted — but they won’t risk our safety. So the planes will stay on the ground.”

On Wednesday, unions representing air traffic controllers, pilots and flight attendants offered an urgent warning that the lengthy government shutdown had created serious safety concerns for the nation’s air travel system. Like many other federal employees, the controllers have been working without pay for more than a month.

A spokesman for the FAA confirmed that it was rerouting planes and slowing air traffic to cope with an increase in the number of controllers calling in sick.

The spokesman said the changes were having “minimal impacts to efficiency.”

On Friday morning, the departures screen at one of the terminals at LaGuardia began to show ‘Delayed’ across arriving flights.

The partial shutdown has caused strain across the air travel system. For more than a month, thousands of transportation security officers and air traffic controllers had been working without pay. Many took on side jobs driving for ride-hailing apps or in restaurants to try to pay their bills.

Staffing among air traffic controllers, who are responsible for keeping planes from colliding, was already an issue even before the shutdown, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers’ union

The number of certified controllers is at a 30-year low, the union said, and staffing at the centralized radar facility for the airports that serve New York City, which is known as a Tracon, has only about 130 controllers, far short of its full complement of 228.

At LaGuardia Airport in New York on Friday, Divneet Wadhwa, 26, was stewing. Her flight to Toronto where she was going for a wedding had already been delayed three times.

The delays were cascading along the Eastern Seaboard, reaching as far north as Boston. But La Guardia in New York was the only airport that had been closed off to departing flights from other cities because it was so crowded with planes taking off and landing on a weekday morning. Delays on flights into La Guardia were averaging almost an hour and a half, the FAA said.

The delays seemed to be easing late Friday morning. But the disruption was significant and ratcheted up the pressure on political leaders because it showed how the shutdown could reverberate far beyond government workers and affect a large number of people.

Concern that the situation in the skies could get worse was somewhat alleviated after President Donald Trump announced a deal to temporarily reopen the government and promised that workers would receive backpay as soon as possible.

Significant flight delays were rippling across the Northeast on Friday because of a shortage of air traffic controllers as a result of the government shutdown, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

“The president has been briefed and we are monitoring the ongoing delays at some airports,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. “We are in regular contact with officials at the Department of Transportation and the FAA.”

At La Guardia, Amy Howell of Indianapolis, who was waiting for a flight home on Delta Air Lines that was scheduled to leave at 11:30 a.m., said, “I can’t worry about the things I can’t control. But I would like to get home.”

Valerie Pacheco was at a food court in La Guardia waiting for a friend who was traveling from Vermont, but whose flight was delayed. “What I’m worried about is that they’ll cancel her flight altogether,” Pacheco said. “Then we have a problem.”

On Friday morning, the departures screen at one of the terminals at La Guardia began to show ‘Delayed’ across arriving flights.

The partial shutdown, nearing five full weeks, has caused strain across the air travel system. For more than a month, thousands of transportation security officers and air traffic controllers have been working without pay. Many have taken on side jobs driving for ride-hailing apps or in restaurants to try to pay their bills.

The delays seemed to be easing late Friday morning.

The FAA said it was slowing traffic in and out of the airports because of staffing problems at two of its air-traffic control facilities on the East Coast, one near Washington and one in Jacksonville, Florida. Those facilities manage air traffic at high altitudes.

In Washington, Democratic leaders pounced on President Donald Trump, blaming him for the air traffic slowdown.

Airport Delays Ripple Across Northeast Due to Air Traffic Controller Shortage

Mayor Bill de Blasio learned about the issues at La Guardia during a radio interview Friday as he attended the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington.

Patrick McGeehan

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Shutdown Sets Off Airport Delays as FAA Announces Staffing Shortages

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Shutdown Sets Off Airport Delays as FAA Announces Staffing Shortages

Shutdown Sets Off Airport Delays as FAA Announces Staffing Shortages

Airport Delays Ripple Across Northeast Due to Air Traffic Controller Shortage

Airport Delays Ripple Across Northeast Due to Air Traffic Controller Shortage

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Airport Delays Ripple Across Northeast Due to Air Traffic Controller Shortage

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Airport Delays Ripple Across Northeast Due to Air Traffic Controller Shortage

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