People Power Transit: so, who’s in charge of transit in NYC?

People Power 101

In a city with millions of daily bus and subway riders, it’s important that our elected leaders make decisions that reflect the needs and interests of the people that depend on transit service. The most effective path we have to enact change in our communities is through direct civic engagement — things like voting, commenting at public meetings, and contacting our city and state representatives. The problem is that a lot of the time, people don’t have the time, energy, or proper context to effectively participate in the overly-bureaucratic processes that govern our lives, particularly public transit riders. This is a big reason we’re excited to release our collaborative project with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, People Power Transit, a print campaign developed to educate transit riders on the power they have to enact change.

With a bit of education we can make sure people are prepared to more effectively advocate for themselves and their community. That starts with riders understanding exactly who we should be holding accountable to make the improvements we’d all like to see. So, who is that, exactly?

The Governor of New York and the Mayor of New York City are the most powerful decision makers in terms of transit, with both having the ability to make significant impacts on the day-to-day experience of riders. Here’s a brief breakdown of their influence on our transit system and why Riders Alliance focuses a great deal of our organizing efforts around these two targets in particular.

The Governor

When it comes to transit in NYC, as most people know, the MTA is the entity responsible for the operations, maintenance, and expansion of service for our subway trains and buses. What people don’t tend to realize is that the Governor of New York essentially controls the MTA and has the most power to unilaterally make decisions about where transit service goes and how good that service is.

Why is this? It’s because the Governor decides the MTA’s yearly budget, appoints a significant portion of the MTA’s Board, gets to pick the MTA’s CEO, and possesses so much unwritten influence over the MTA that they can pretty much command the agency to do whatever they want knowing that the Governor’s pen is what ultimately defines their funding, leadership, and overall priorities.

This influence is why Riders Alliance primarily targets the Governor for campaigns dealing with MTA service. For example, providing #6MinuteService on MTA buses and subways is directly tied to the MTA’s operating budget, which the Governor decides in the state budget each fiscal year. That means gaining the Governor’s support for #6MinuteService is actually the most important component in winning that improvement — not the MTA, not its Board or its CEO.

It’s this disconnect between who we can intuitively assume is responsible and who actually has the power to enact change that makes advocating for better transit incredibly difficult to navigate.

The Mayor

Besides the Governor, the Mayor of NYC also has an important role to play in improving transit. The most important thing the Mayor is responsible for is commanding NYC’s Department of Transportation, which controls NYC’s streets. Do you see where this is going?

While the Governor and the MTA are responsible for where buses go and how often they go there, the Mayor’s DOT is responsible for making sure our streets are able to accommodate high quality transit service if and when the MTA provides it.

For example, the Governor could give the MTA enough funding to have buses running every five minutes 24/7 in all five boroughs, but none of that would matter if those highly frequent buses were all stuck in traffic. The Mayor and the DOT are the ones that design, construct, and maintain the infrastructure needed to support transit like dedicated bus lanes and car-free transit corridors.

Why it all matters

Together, the Governor and the Mayor, although they aren’t the *only* entities that we should be holding accountable — the NYC Council and the NYS Legislature have their own part in this equation, too — they are the primary targets whose will can solve most every transit related issue our city faces.

And while navigating a political landscape that often feels like a massive, faceless bureaucracy can be difficult, we have to remember that it’s all controlled by elected officials who, at the end of the day, are each accountable to voters. Empowering people through education is the first step in organizing them into a concentrated voice and constituency for positive change that can influence those in power to do what’s right for the people they serve.