Mayoral hopeful Brad Lander is making some very huge public transit guarantees.
In a plan set to be rolled out Wednesday, Lander is pledging, if elected, to make sure that no New York Metropolis straphangers wait longer than 6 minutes for a subway prepare or longer than 8 minutes for buses on dozens of traces. That may make for drastic enhancements as in comparison with the sloggy established order.
To make these formidable objectives a actuality, Lander’s plan floats a drastic operational shift: wrestle management of the subway and bus programs from the state-run MTA and place them below the mayor’s purview through a model new metropolis company, Massive Apple Transit.
“The goal is to be as ambitious as we can,” stated Lander, a progressive Democrat and the town’s present comptroller.
On this Could 11, 2016, photograph, a No. 7 subway prepare rides the rails within the Queens borough of New York, with the Manhattan skyline within the background. (AP Picture/Mark Lennihan)
However the blueprint doesn’t clarify how Massive Apple Transit can be funded or present a timeline for such a large overhaul.
The MTA, which took over operations of the town’s subways and buses within the Nineteen Sixties, will get an annual working funds of almost $20 billion. The state supplies the majority of that funding.
When pressed for particulars on how he would bankroll his envisioned new company, Lander stated the state ought to nonetheless play a task.
Inserting the town’s transit programs below municipal management is an idea that has been bandied about earlier than with out success.
In 2019, when Lander was a Metropolis Council member, then-Council Speaker Corey Johnson floated a plan to create primarily the identical company. Johnson’s plan additionally proposed naming it Massive Apple Transit and specified it could soak up the MTA’s “New York City Transit, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority, the MTA Bus Company, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, and a portion of operations at MTA Headquarters.”
Lander’s plan hyperlinks to Johnson’s roadmap and lifts the verbatim language from it in explaining which MTA entities he would really like Massive Apple Transit to take over.
Lisa Daglian, head of the Everlasting Residents Advisory Committee to the MTA, stated getting Massive Apple Transit on monitor may very well be a tall order.
“Both the devil and the angel are in the details,” she stated. “It’s an ambitious plan.”
Lander’s roadmap is without doubt one of the first transit plans launched by a candidate in June’s crowded Democratic mayoral major, which ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a favourite to win.
Lander’s plan is mild on many particulars, although.
It merely says Lander would obtain 6-minute most subway wait occasions by leveraging “City Hall’s influence to ensure the MTA delivers signal improvements, new train cars, real-time train arrival and elevator status info, and service expansions.” As for the promised improved bus occasions, Lander’s doc solely says he’d “work with the MTA” to fund “more frequent service on at least 50 bus routes throughout all five boroughs.”
Apart from the pledges to enhance subway and bus occasions, Lander’s 29-page roadmap features a slew of reforms to different elements of the town’s public transit and public area infrastructure. Amongst these are vows to make the town’s outside eating program year-round, full a number of bike lane and road security initiatives which have stalled below Mayor Adams’ administration and negotiate with Lyft to make Citi Bike memberships out there at $5 per 30 days for low-income New Yorkers.
On one other value entrance, Lander proposes instituting a $2.90 flat fare for driving on Lengthy Island Rail Street and Metro-North trains anyplace inside the metropolis, a drop from the present $5.
To incentivize public transit over driving, Lander additionally desires to “offer free transit passes” to anybody with tickets to main occasions, like live shows and sport occasions, together with the 2026 World Cup, which is predicted to carry lots of of 1000’s of vacationers to the town.
For metropolis authorities staff, Lander desires to supply a particular credit score to those that are eligible for parking placards however determine to depend on public transit as an alternative. Such staff, together with cops, lecturers and firefighters, would as an alternative get “the equivalent cash value” of a placard below Lander’s plan, however it doesn’t say how huge such a stipend can be.
Initially Printed: April 30, 2025 at 7:00 AM EDT
