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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we're happy to have back with us the chair and CEO of the MTA, Janno Lieber. There's so much mass transit news these days, ridership plateauing at around 60% of pre-pandemic levels, increasing crime, and even faster-increasing fear of crime. Mayor Adams's policies aimed to get homeless people off the trains, especially at the end of the line terminal stops. Also, the crackdown on fare evasion and more Chairman Lieber, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you for joining us today.

Janno Lieber: To be with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with ridership is 60% of pre-pandemic still the right number?

Janno Lieber: Yes, that's weekday subway ridership. It's a little stronger on buses and a little stronger on the weekends. What we're seeing is there's only 37% of people back in offices so we're missing a lot of business trips, inside Manhattan. We're missing tourists inside Manhattan, we're missing some commuters. Students are riding, essential workers are riding and people take going to medical appointments and taking their kids to childcare. COVID really showed us that there are a lot of people who depend on the subway, that's the gap between 37% office workers and 60% of total ridership.

Brian Lehrer: I guess that's why the weekend ridership isn't down as much as the weekday ridership because younger people who are not going to work but they're going out plus essential workers who we should always say work seven days a week, 24 hours a day on various shifts. They're the ones riding the trains?

Janno Lieber: Absolutely. What COVID has taught us is just how important ridership, would have, the whole transit system is to making the city viable. We have density, that's double Chicago and Boston, eight or nine times Sunbelt cities, we need mass transit. It performed during COVID and it's got to be there for the future.

Brian Lehrer: How about the commuter rails, Long Island Railroad Metro-North, similar to the weekday subway numbers?

Janno Lieber: Long Island Rail Road Metro is a little behind Long Island Rail Road, but it's basically in the same level as the subway ridership. We've seen significant increases in recent weeks, actually on the commuter rails, and that is a good sign. We've added service and definitely, people are starting to come back from those more white-collar communities in the suburbs.

Brian Lehrer: You're spoken about budgetary implications for the system. You just had a reference to that fleetingly, in your previous answer too, can you do some of those numbers for our listeners?

Janno Lieber: The budget impact of lower ridership is significant, it's in the billions of dollars to our operating budget. The good news is the capital budget, which is the money that we use to fix the system, expanded new lines, and do major construction projects is in solid shape, but with lower ridership. The MTA is operating budget, what we use mostly to pay our workforce is significantly impacted.

That's why I'm starting to talk to elected officials and stakeholders and people about the fact that we need to come up with a plan to fill that offset. If there's a permanent reduction of return to work, and there may be, everybody's adjusting. We need a financial model that makes sure that the MTA is going to be there and reliable, even if people are going to work a little bit less. We need the system to be frequent and reliable.

Brian Lehrer: What could that alternative model be? Because I guess we need to acknowledge the system is for the riders, the riders aren't there to fund the system. It's a service, it's not a business, is there a financial model that's sustainable, that serves the ridership that is if, in fact, we're converting more permanently to a lot of the professional class working from home?

Janno Lieber: It's a really good question. I think the switch needs to be first of all a change in thinking. Historically, the MTA has been asked to fund more than half of its costs through farebox revenues and raising fares periodically, and so on and so on. I think we need to start with what COVID has taught us is that we have to start thinking about the MTA and mass transit as an essential service like police, fire, or sanitation.

What probably makes sense is for the discussion to begin about what recurring sources of revenues other than fare hikes, or service cuts, or layoffs, which we don't want to do, what are the recurring sources of revenue that will fill what looks like a gap, at least for the near term in the MTA budget. I'm hoping that that conversation will start to unfold the second half of this year.

Brian Lehrer: We can take phone calls for the Chairman and CEO of the MTA, Janno Lieber 2120-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, or tweet your question @BrianLehrer. Lieber you just touched on the importance of fares. Let's talk about fare evasion, you just had this blue-ribbon commission. How much does the MTA lose per year to fare evasion? Is there a number that's reliable?

Janno Lieber: Yes, everything is estimates, because but based on the current rates of fare evasion, that we're seeing, the loss to the MTA budget is in excess of $500 million a year. That's a huge number. The reason that I impaneled, that group, that blue-ribbon panel on fare evasion is I think that it's not just about financial impacts. It's really about the fact that a lot of the riders who want to play by the rules are feeling like they're suckers because they're paying the fare and they see people sail right past them through the emergency gates.

It's a fairness issue for a lot of people, it also is an issue that needs to be looked at from the standpoint of education. Especially kids understand that this is part of being a New Yorker. We need to come up with some strategies to make sure the MTA remains affordable. We don't have a program for low-income people to get half-fare Metro cards, we have new fair discounts like the Lucky 13, which gives you a discount for if you ride more than a dozen times in a week. We're cutting the cost of commuter railroads for people who live inside the city and travel inside the city.

We need an affordability and education approach as well as some additional enforcement to catch people who might have weapons or be beheaded to do crime in the system.

Brian Lehrer: Where does the problem of fare evasion meet the problem of mass incarceration and criminal justice reform to stop and ensnaring mostly young people of color in the criminal justice system for small things?

Janno Lieber: You're right. I'm not interested in criminalizing a kid who makes a mistake, that's not the point of this. That's why I put so many civil rights leaders who have spoken out about fairness in the enforcement of fare evasion on this panel. Al Sharpton is number two, a guy named Michael Hardy is on it. There David Jones has been the most passionate advocate of a more even-handed approach that didn't just focus on certain communities, and certain demographics is on the panel. We're definitely going to avoid that problem that you've alluded to with fare evasion becoming part of the mass incarceration process.

Part of the evenhandedness that we're going to do is we're going to go after the people who are evading tolls and covering their license plates, not just people who jumped the turnstile, were don't pay on the bus. We have to go after all aspects of fare evasion throughout our system and the tolls on the bridges and the tunnels are also experiencing fare evasion. We have to go after that as well.

Brian Lehrer: I'll mention that I think we have David Jones, scheduled for the Friday morning show, a longtime advocate for policies that help poor people in New York City, and interesting that he's a member of your fare evasion commission. We'll talk to David Jones more about that aspect of it I think on the Friday morning show. I guess right now if you're just joining us is the chair in MTA, the CEO Janno Lieber will take some phone calls in just a minute at 212-433-WNYC or tweet a question for him @BrianLehrer. You mentioned the crackdown on toll evaders in addition to train and bus fare evaders.

MTA is in charge of a lot of those tolls within the city as well. Was this predictable? When you got rid of the toll booths, even though when we're on the road, we say, "Oh, thank God, there's no more tollbooth on the Henry Hudson bridge anymore, wherever we're driving," that it would be easy to make some kind of fake license plate and avoid it altogether?

Janno Lieber: I think that the benefits of what they call open road tolling have been really significant, especially reduce pollution from idling and so on. We definitely have to address this problem. People go on the internet buying fake license plates or out-of-state temporary plates that can't be traced or using plastic covers. We're going to crack down on it and it's that has already begun. We are just this last weekend we caught a guy who was trying to do some kind of James Bond routine where he could flip the plates on his car periodically. We're going to get those guys. It's $50 million a year out of the toll bidders, and we're going to grab that money because we can't spare it.

Brian Lehrer: Liz in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Janno Lieber. Hi, Liz.

Liz: Hey, Brian. I know that this has been raised many times, and it's not a popular idea in New York City, but what about charging for street parking as a way to pay for the MTA?

Janno Lieber: Hey, listen, thank you for the question. Our approach is, whatever the folks in elected office want to do to help us narrow the budget deficit at the MTA so we can provide frequent service, reliable service, and safe and comfortable service, we're all for. That is not an idea that we reject, every idea that would contribute to the MTA's bottom line, before, we just want the legislature and everybody in Albany to get together and figure out what's the plan.

Brian Lehrer: Is there, if not a one-to-one relationship, at least a strong correlation between making it harder to own a car in the city or at least to drive in the city and sufficiently funding the MTA mass transit?

Janno Lieber: One of the great things about New York is the MTA helps make New York in one way affordable because you don't have to own an automobile, which costs $10,000 plus per year all in. Making service, MTA mass transit service faster, more reliable, and more appealing in all ways, that is definitely part of the equation so people don't have to own cars, and they're not incentivized to own cars.

We're also doing congestion pricing, Brian, you've spoken about that many times. We hope that the Feds will approve our environmental review by the end of this year or early next year, and then we'll be implementing congestion pricing. That will cut down on congestion, improve air quality, and also generate revenue for the MTA. That congestion pricing really goes to your point about trying to reduce the number of cars.

Brian Lehrer: A couple of tweets coming in. One person writes I'm reading these together because they're of a piece. "I just spent two weeks in Spain and a week in Madrid, their subway was clean, efficient, affordable, and covered the city effectively. Why are other cities so much better at funding and maintaining their subways than New York City?" Another one writes, "What is not fair is paying city-state and federal tax and still having to pay for a crumbling late filthy train system." That represents at least one strain of thought, among listeners out there. What would you say to that?

Janno Lieber: Listen, I think our system is incredible. We got 407 huge stations. We have 7,000 rail cars, we run incredible service over an incredible footprint, and it is one of the things that makes the city affordable. Could service be better? Absolutely. We are coming back from a period when we were short of people because we weren't hiring during COVID, and we didn't know whether there was going to be money to keep the lights on. We're catching up with that. We want to run more frequent service. We kept the trains extremely clean during COVID, and that was something that our riders loved, and we want to keep it that way.

The system is old, but we're investing in it. We're expanding service, we want to make more neighborhoods have mass transit service. We're redoing the entire bus system, borough by borough to make sure that we have a much more modern contemporary route system, so buses can be a lot faster than they are. Even in Manhattan faster than walking. We are investing in this system. We're improving it. We just need to make sure that, whatever the frequency of people coming to office that we're not eliminating incentives for people who use the system by cutting service.

Brian Lehrer: Another question via Twitter, listener says, "No one is blanked off that people are sailing through the emergency exit. Study after study shows government loses millions of dollars putting cops on fare evasion beats and more when it goes through the courts. MTA prosecutes poverty, make fares free for those making under $80,000." What do you say to that listener?

Janno Lieber: I don't know what the right level is, but we together with the city of New Yorkers sponsor the fair fares program are actually subsidized. It did have additional discounts for people who are in at low-income levels. That's great. We've also made it easier to get the discounts from Omni by not making it that you had to pay for a weekly at the beginning of the week, but you could get it automatically when you use Omni.

We're cutting the cost of the use of the commuter railroads inside the city of New York so people can get to and from faster. Now that there's a little more room on those commuter railroad trains, Long Island Railroad, and Metro-North. I think we're addressing affordability, which is already solid, but we want to do more. That is part of the strategy for reducing fare evasion addressing this problem.

Brian Lehrer: If you're trying to recoup up to $0.5 billion a year in fare evasion, I think that's the number you gave, what's the budget for the extra crackdown on fare evasion or for enforcing it at all?

Janno Lieber: First of all, I lean away from the crackdown idea because what we're trying to do is to develop a strategy that's not a crackdown, that's not over-reliant on enforcement, but as I said, you have tools of education and affordability, as well as a more balanced and even-handed enforcement approach. The city of New York is committed, this mayor, as you know Brian, is committed to subway safety.

He was a transit cop, he believes passionately that we have to get people more comfortable back in all the public spaces, but especially in the subways. The city of New York has partnered with us to try to address some of these issues of fare evasion. As I said, it's not going to be about lining people up and cuffing a lot of kids. The key strategy is adding education and new affordability strategies to the strategy, as I said.

It's really about fairness for the people who do pay at the end of the day because otherwise the social compact starts to break down and people feel like, "Why should I pay because the five people next to me didn't?" That is part of the motivation here. The subway system is our most sacred public space, we have to have a sense of fairness and shared sacrifice, shared commitment, and that's what this is about not enforcing.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you another public safety and how much police presence in the system question. I'm going to read a couple of lines from a story by our reporter, Matt Katz, on WNYC and Gothamist this week about, Fear of Crime in New York City Versus Actual Crime in New York City. He wrote, "What has increased perhaps more than crime is the fear of crime. In 2001, all categories of major crimes were higher than now, but in February of that year, just 36% of New York City voters described crime as a very serious problem." A Quinnipiac University poll found."

The same posters ask New Yorkers the same question this February, and even though crime rates are lower than in 2001, 74%, that's twice the rate called crime a very serious problem. Is that something you would like to amplify as head of the MTA having to do with the perception of the system?

Janno Lieber: Yes. Listen, I am not interested in arguing with people who feel uncomfortable. Part of this says, we've had a couple of high-profile incidents, there's no question that has increased the sensitivity. Whether or not the exact the specific numbers are and how they compare to the past, you and I, Brian have been around in New York for many years, and I was a kid in New York in the '70s, when obviously crime was much, much worse. There's no question there's been improvement, but what people are feeling is a sense of disorder on the system.

It's not just the technical statistics of crime, it's also that there are people breaking the rules, there's smoking, there's open drug use, there's vandalism. When people see that, they think, what might that person do to me? That is part of what I think we need to address as a group, in trying to make the subways which are really important public spaces in terms of our sense of the New York community. Because every day, they're the place where New Yorkers prove out the viability of tolerance and diversity in small spaces. We have to make it more comfortable to eliminate these things that are making people feel vulnerable. That's what we're trying to do.

Brian Lehrer: Few more minutes with Janno Lieber, CEO, and chair of the MTA. Here's one of your MTA conductors calling in I believe. Chris in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Chris. Do I have that right? You work as a conductor?

Chris: Yes. Good morning, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear just fine.

Chris: Yes, I'm a conductor and I have a common question for Mr. Lieber. One, the subways are absolutely not safe. I'm there every day. I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I'm 57 years old. The police, we have the rage. I'm out there every day, we have the rage. People walking around the subways and the cops, NYPD will take them off a northbound train where they harass him tormenting our ridership and my co-workers and putting them on the southbound train. The subway every-- I was attacked last week, trying to because we have to get passengers off the train if someone in the train is going to the yard. I was attacked last week, hopefully, luckily, God, I was able to get away from this person who I asked to leave the train because the train was going through the yard. He told me to cut off my radio and he attacked me.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, are you saying the police are there, but they're not actually removing dangerous people from this--

Chris: They will patrol the 24 hours in a day. We have a 24-hour system. During my shift, you might see the cops come patrol for about a half-hour and they leave. The public, the ridership is not safe. The New York City Subway system is a magnet and a haven for criminals, like Mr. Lieber said. We're the size of a big city. Every day, we need constant police presence. Anyone who tells you that the subways are safe, they're not being honest with New York. Every anyone who rides New York, who rides the subways every day, knows this system is not safe. It's the most danger--

Brian Lehrer: Chris, Thank you for your-- let me get your response. Thank you. Thank you for your service in the underground. Thank you for your call. Well, Mr. Lieber, there's the two sides of the coin. Some people say there are too many cops down there, other people say the cops down there don't do enough.

Janno Lieber: Number one, we want to protect our MTA workers. We are actually supporting a bill in Albany that would make it a misdemeanor to attack any MTA worker. The idea that certain kinds of workers in the MTA system could be assaulted. It's just a violation, frankly like a fair beating ticket doesn't make any sense. We are seeing more assaults on our workers. We want to deal with that. That's only fair to them. They have been heroic. The issue that Chris is talking about is real that we do need to have a more effective police presence.

The Mayor himself is a transit cop. He is the one who is moving cops to the trains and the platforms, which is something we were asking for, for some time before this mayor came into city hall. I think that over time, that will make a difference. Chris has made some comments about the effectiveness of those patrols. I respect that, but I also think that there's a commitment in the NYPD and in City Hall to making sure that putting cops where riders feel vulnerable and where our workers are vulnerable is going to overtime deter the violence and intimidation that Chris has described. We're hopeful the commitment is there.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Adams did just invite New Yorkers to use their cell phones to take pictures of cops who were spending time on their cell phones. I think a lot of that is allegedly happening in the subways. On fare evasion, a listener tweets, "How about floor to ceiling toll gates in the subway system as a preventive measure?"

Janno Lieber: It's a really good. One, there's no question that those emergency exit gates, which are an attempt to comply with the fire code. God forbid people could get out in a fire emergency. That design has not worked because it's become a superhighway for fare evasion honestly. One of the principal things that this panel is going to look at is, are there different designs for the fare gates? Maybe it'll be floor to ceiling as the tweet suggested. Especially this exiting requirement, how do we comply with the fair code without creating something that's goin to be open? Go.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I know you got to go in a minute. Let me get one more call in for you. Jay, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Janno Lieber, Head of the MTA. We have 20 seconds for your call.

Jay: Okay. Hi, two quick questions. There's definitely a lack of bus service in the outer boroughs. One thing I'm curious about is why little use lines can't use smaller buses. I see lots of buses going, which are hardly a quarter full. Even the size of a large minivan could probably carry most of the customers. Another thing and this is controversial. I think it would help both service and cleaning if the Subway went back to not 24-hour service, how many people are really riding between say 2:00 and 6:00 AM, so couldn't buses on those routes take care of the need?

Brian Lehrer: Jay, thank you. All right, Mr. Lieber, last remark. Anything you want to say to Jay, and anything else?

Janno Lieber: I think the broad response is we are redoing all of the bus routes in the system with the kinds of things that your caller mentioned in mind to make them faster, more efficient, more attractive to more people so we won't have empty buses, especially empty buses that go to trolley terminals that went around, that cease to exist a hundred years ago, which is some of our bus routes. Queens is especially important.

We're in the middle of that bus redesign right now, but more broadly, Brian. I just want to make sure that I don't finish with you and your listeners without emphasizing. We are still five million riders a day. We are still the linchpin of New York City. We are still the thing that makes New York possible with its density because we could never do New York if we didn't have mass transit instead had to rely on private automobiles like Sunbelt Cities. We are in a period of change and we're readjusting and we're coming back just like office work is, but the Subway System is the special sauce and the bus system and the commuter rail system.

We have to get together. The governor's been a great leader on this and we're relying on her and the mayor to lead us to the promised land of a new financial model that'll preserve all this. That is so important.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, I want you to know that we don't take you for granted. We really appreciate your accessibility coming on, answering my questions, answering a lot of listener questions and we look forward to more, but we really, really appreciate your openness.

Janno Lieber: Love to talk to you. Thanks again, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Janno Lieber, Chair and CEO of the MTA.

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