Janno Lieber on Free Buses, the State of the MTA, & The Promise of the Interborough Express

The New York Editorial Board's interview with MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber.

Janno Lieber, Chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the New York City subways and buses, as well as the Long Island and Metro-North railroads, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of October 23, 2025. (photo via The MTA)

Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.

Full Transcript

Ben Smith
The weird thing about media these days: it’s now no longer required that people talk to journalists. The ‘Department of War’ just tossed everybody out the other day and brought in some bloggers. So we appreciate you showing up. I think, Nicole, who just literally wrote the book on transportation, will start us off–

Janno Lieber
Can I spiel a little bit?

All these journalists here — most of you have covered us, maybe not every day, all day, but you’ve seen it. I’m actually very proud of where the MTA is right now. When I came in with a weird episode — Cuomo sort of tapping me, sort of, sort of, and Hochul going ahead with that decision — ridership was very COVID-y, was down in the 20% range. Safety was — Nicole’s, you know, one of the world’s experts on all these numbers — but safety, especially relative to proportionate ridership, was not great. And there was this incredible perception that the city was, that people were not coming back to, especially, Midtown, but the city in general.

We just this week had the JPMorgan Chase opening, where, whatever you think of the building and motivations behind it, it is coming at a moment when Midtown in particular is celebrating an incredibly hot real estate market. Commercial leasing is out of sight.

Ridership is, apples to apples, pushing 80 to 90% of pre-COVID, which is amazing considering hybrid work is a thing and a lot of that additional ridership is coming from folks on the weekends and nights. We put on a ton more service. Safety, I’m sure we’ll get into it, but just the bare statistics, we’re down 12-and-a-half percent versus where we were with COVID, on subway crime. Even assaults, which have been the thing that’s given us all special concern, the idea of a random attack, this year is down — both misdemeanors and felony assaults. And we had our billionth rider [of 2025]. You know, we didn’t make that number in ‘20 or ‘21 and in ‘22 and ‘23 we’re making it like two, two-and-a-half months earlier.

These are huge signs of progress, in tandem with the city’s revival. And I think that the comeback of the system — we live in the stats world, and I think all of us are trying to be more substance-oriented in how we evaluate things — but on the numbers, the best subway service in a long time. Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North are out of sight. Metro-North is three times the ridership that they had when I got in. Long Island Rail Road is two-and-a-half times, I think. And they’re all hitting these incredible records. Who would have thought the suburbs would beat the city in some way, numerically, on ridership coming back?

And a lot of that additional ridership is coming from the Bronx stations, which are getting a lot more service and especially reverse-peak service. So people are going to work in Westchester and Connecticut. We changed the pattern of service. And Long Island Rail Road Queens stations, because we cut the price dramatically with CityTicket and we provided a ton more service to people in St. Albans and Laurelton and Locust Manor and all those predominantly minority stations along the way on the Long Island Rail Road in the city that used to be told, “No, we can’t stop for you,” in effect.

So I’m really proud. And this is a big year for the MTA. We got congestion pricing done. We got the capital program, the biggest capital program ever. Somebody wrote on social media, which I don’t have, but somebody pointed out to me that I’m no more than “a panhandler in a decent suit.” And I kind of embrace that, because getting money for the MTA is a big deal, and we have succeeded both in the operating budget — and Hochul has emerged as a transit champion, which, you know, for somebody from Buffalo was not always a given. So she’s been for the MTA, a great partner. We’re finalizing the tap-and-ride system, making that huge transition. We are ahead of projections on where we were going to be in terms of the switch to tap-and-ride. We’re at 85% now. We thought we weren’t going to get there, even by the end of this year. So this has been an amazing year, and a cap of a little bit of a positive four-year journey for the city, but, you know, for the MTA, which I always say is like the thing that makes New York City possible because of density — and, so, that’s my spiel.

Nicole Gelinas
Thanks for coming. And as soon as you start succeeding with your agenda, someone else comes along with their own agenda. So we’ll start right off with the free buses. A leading mayoral candidate [Zohran Mamdani] says he will eliminate the fare on all city buses. Doesn’t give himself a lot of room for compromise there. Do you see this as his decision? And what are the positives and negatives of free buses?

Janno Lieber
Well, the positives are that all the candidates are talking about transit. So we have to start with acknowledging that. I grew up in a New York where the MTA was a problem, but people didn’t talk about it in the forefront of mayoral campaigns the same way they are. So that is a positive, and he has made transit a priority. So I’m going to take that as very positive.

We got to know Mamdani when he first came to the Assembly, because he was interested in transit and he came and pestered us for a lot of data. He got involved with the pro-transit side in the 2023 effort to protect MTA in the city and New York from what’s happening in the rest of the country in transit, which we call the fiscal cliff. That after the money that Washington gave in the COVID era runs out, and you’ve still got lower ridership and your costs have been rising, and your finances — and we see, and we see what’s happening in Philadelphia, Chicago, and so on. He’s been a pro-transit guy, and the others have certainly made transit part of their discussion.

I’m expecting that with something of the magnitude that’s being talked about that there’s going to be a serious policy process. The one thing that I’m going to resist is bumper-sticker decision-making. The ecosystem of transit in New York is a huge thing that makes the city possible and prosperous and more equitable, and everything that we value.

I don’t want to digress into my crazy philosophy, but I think it’s like our town square. A lot of how we form our opinions of whether this community is working or not is based on sharing public space with strangers. So it’s hugely important. We studied congestion pricing for five years, and we knew what the risks were — about where traffic might go, and where air pollution impacts might be. Something of this magnitude deserves to be studied.

Among the issues that I want to ensure gets a lot of attention is — first of all, transit is one of the very few things that makes New York affordable. It’s not an affordability problem, compared to the whole country, people spend a lot less on transportation as part of their budgets. It’s an affordability solution, but we want to make it more so. And the Fair Fares program has been successful with targeting affordability. But what’s good about Fair Fares is you can use that discount if you’re low-income for the subway or the bus.

So one of the first things I want to get into is, why would we say the bus is free, but [not] the subway — what does that mean? Are people going to ride the bus instead of the subway? I grew up on the West Side of Manhattan. So the folks who ride the 104 down Broadway instead of people who take the Number 1 are going to get a benefit? What’s that going to do to ridership on the subway? What’s that going to do to the poor people who take a slower, I mean, the lower-income people who are taking a slower form of transportation, strictly because of cost? Is that fair to the folks, mostly working class and low-income, who live in the boroughs and who are using the bus mostly to get to the subway?

Why is the bus the whole focus? Let’s talk about how to make transit— it’s affordable, it’s a good thing it is, but let’s talk about how to make it more affordable. And we do have tools like the Fair Fares program, where we could raise the eligibility threshold. And now one thing that’s like a little shocking is because it’s pegged to the federal poverty level, which is so low, that you have people who are working full-time in minimum-wage jobs who don’t qualify because they’re above 150% of the federal poverty standard, which, of course, is no relationship to New York costs.

So let’s look at whether we can have a hit for equity that is the spirit, I think, that is animating some of this discussion by looking at Fair Fares as an option, rather than strictly looking at, “Let’s make buses free.”

Nicole Gelinas
So it doesn’t seem like you think this is his decision to make — even if he came along and said, “Here’s $700 million a year for the next five years.”

Janno Lieber
Not just about the revenue, which is actually going up above the number that’s cited even in our financial plan. It’s about all these secondary and tertiary impacts, like are people going to take the bus instead of the subway? What does that do to subway revenue? Then you have to look at all these other economic impacts. Am I going to need more buses? Am I going to need more bus drivers? Am I going to need another depot? All these questions haven’t been studied. Let’s study them.

As to the question of whether he gets his side, obviously, a lot of this is about who’s going to provide the money and I think that the legislature is going to have something to say about that in a tough budget year. And at the end of the day, the MTA board sets the tariff policy. Let me just say that again: the MTA board sets the tariff policy, OK. The mayor has four votes on the MTA board.

Nicole Gelinas
You would need bondholder approval. Is that a correct reading of that? I mean, you pledged the future bus revenues explicitly to the bondholders.

Janno Lieber
I always hate it when Nicole reminds me of something I should have mentioned. But yes, of course you’re right. Of course you’re right that it is a very complicated issue because our revenue bonds, which have been the core of the MTA financing strategy for umpteen years, pledge all the revenues, and dramatically altering that package has issues.

Nicole Gelinas
Let me just ask you one last thing on buses. Assemblyman Mamdani often cites the assault figure, that assaults fell 40% on the free bus pilot. They only fell 20% citywide. Do you put stock in that argument, that free buses will reduce assaults because the fare-beater won’t be interacting with the driver?

Janno Lieber
The bus pilot was really limited in scope. What we saw was most of the additional ridership that was cited was, for lack of better term, cannibalized from the buses that still were fare-paying, and to the extent there were new riders, it was people going a block or two. And it also, needless to say, created a lot of confusion and complexity.

We are actually making progress on fare evasion, not strictly by enforcement. A lot of it is communication, just reminding people. Frankly, there’s a lot of confusion. COVID — we told people, “Get on the back of the bus, don’t pay.” Right now, there’s a lot of people who play by the rules in all their other walks of life who see nobody else paying. Literally, we’ve created an environment which is confusing. The SBS bus, where we say, “Don’t tap when you get on, buy a ticket here at the machine.” We have confused people and I worry that even if we don’t do the whole free bus program, the rhetoric itself is going to have consequences. I mean, you ever ride the B-35, Ben? There are people who are getting on and going to church who don’t pay, and part of it is because five people in front of them didn’t pay. It’s a confusing thing.

Ben Smith
Is that a sin?

Janno Lieber
That’s between them and whoever they worship.

Alyssa Katz
Just a really quick follow-up bus question. While we’re talking about mayors: one obstacle to better bus service, free or not, is double parking of cars, which is rampant, something that the NYPD, I think, or the DOT, or somebody in New York City, controlled by the mayor, is supposed to enforce. So why hasn’t enforcement been functional at all, and what needs to change? What have you tried to do regarding the departments and the mayor so far on this?

Janno Lieber
You’re absolutely right that there’s so much the mayor can do, and should do, within his or her power, right off the bat to make buses run faster. You mentioned double parking, but there’s so many things.

There’s a law on the books about having bus lanes and busways, and they just violate it. That’s for starters. We’ve gotten the power from the legislature to do these automatic camera enforcements. So we have, not on every bus line, but I think at this point on about 20% or 25% of our bus lines, we have cameras that automatically take pictures of [cars] that are violating — double parking, that are in the bus stop, and if they’re there, I think it’s three to five minutes later, when the next bus comes, they automatically get a ticket. It has been successful because we only have, like, 8% recidivism. People get the message when they get a ticket, they stop doing that. So enforcement, yes, but we’re also developing tools outside of the direct enforcement model that can help us clear buses. We need busways, we need bus lanes, and we need the enforcement and maybe the power to have more of these automatic camera enforcements.

Josh Greenman
I have one last thing on buses in the Mamdani promise, which is, he always says “fast and free, fast and free,” I wanted to drill down on that for a second, because you seem to be saying that if you make them free, in many cases, it won’t make them faster. His equation is, make them free, it will enable all-door boarding. That will speed up the process of people getting on and off. You’re suggesting that there will be maybe a lot of mode shift, and that might maybe overwhelm bus lines and slow them down. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Janno Lieber
No, I’m not really taking a position. In the very limited pilot that was done, there was a loss of speed because there were all these additional riders, even if they weren’t paying, right?

Akash Mehta
Because there wasn’t all-door boarding for–

Janno Lieber
There was. There was all-door boarding. But let me just say this: All-door boarding is accomplishable in a paid model. We’ve been reluctant because we felt to get there, because I wanted to get fare evasion down to reestablish the position that the patterns of behavior that we lost during COVID, which is you get on the bus, you know, hopefully you say good morning to the bus driver, and you do something to pay. We can do all-door boarding in part because once we have OMNY — you know, true tap-and-ride, universal — and we can have fare enforcement agents, not armed, go up to people and say [to] anybody, “show me your OMNY card. Show me your phone, show me that you paid.”

Josh Greenman
But why not do it now and allow all-door boarding?

Janno Lieber
Right now, it’s associated with the avoidance of payment and I think we need an enforcement model that starts to, that says, wherever you got on, you’re going to be subject— because right now, somebody can get on the back and say, “I paid.” If they’re ever asked by an Eagle Team member, one of our fare enforcement people, let’s say, “I paid at the front, by coin, on the bus. You can’t validate every rider the same way you can a 100% tap and ride system. I want to get there. And then you have, universal, which is like what they have in Europe, where you can go up to anybody and say, “Please show me your fare payment.” So that’s what I think we’re waiting for to move towards all-door boarding, which I think is a positive if we can get there, once we get to OMNY.

Harry Siegel
One more on buses and behavior while we’re spending a lot of time there, talking about unarmed enforcement models. The trains, we have the guys at the gates now, but bus fare evasion numbers have hardly moved despite a lot of fanfare about fare inspectors. I wanted to ask about the RFPs the MTA put out for behavioral change experts to try and reduce some of that, and why those haven’t been awarded so far?

Janno Lieber
John [McCarthy, MTA Chief of Policy and External Relations], maybe you want to comment, because John was helping me to think that through. It got, honestly, turned into a little bit of psychotherapy. It looked like it was headed towards a psychotherapy clinic, and it did not seem like that— There’s some basic stuff. I think New Yorkers are— I don’t have the illusion that we will ever wipe out fare evasion entirely. I’m concerned about opportunistic fare evasion. I’m concerned about people that we all know, all of us who are walking towards it, they’ve got their OMNY open on their phone, or they’ve got even a MetroCard or OMNY card, and they see the [emergency] gate open and they go for it, and I wanted to eliminate those, that incentive structure. It’s not, to me, an exotic issue of, you know, that requires getting everybody on the couch. It’s basics. You create a structure that makes it very clear and doesn’t create all these random opportunities to fare-evade.

Ben Smith
Now, does it make you feel crazy that you have to explain to people that they have to pay for the bus in such complex terms?

Janno Lieber
What makes me sad is when, you know, I literally grew up riding the bus to school, and the bus driver was a figure of authority and was treated respectfully. [Snaps fingers], “Kid, kid, you owe me a nickel. You owe me nickel, right?” I got that a couple times — wise guy. I’m passionate about public space – it has to feel safe and welcoming and everybody has to be playing by the same rules, and it affects your view of this community. This is like a huge passion of mine. And when you have a kind of environment which feels rule-breaking at the entry point, like the turnstile, when it feels like there’s somebody holding the gate, and they’re shaking you down for money, and that is a message of, this is an unruly — not unruly, that’s an old-timey word — but this is a place where people don’t play by the rules, and it makes you feel like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And then you see somebody smoking, and then you see somebody, you know, it has an impact. This is our public square. I’m bananas, but I think it’s sacred space, because it’s where New Yorkers form their impression: Can I get along with all these people who are different from me?

Akash Mehta
I think Mamdani, if he were here, he would say, “Yes, exactly. This is the public square where New Yorkers form their impression of the city and it should be like parks, or like CUNY used to be. It should be something that we’re proud of, that it is free to all and accessible to all. Do you, as an aspiration, as a long-term aspiration, do you think making buses free and maybe going beyond that, making other forms of transit free, is a worthy aspiration? Or do you think that imposing a price is a way to safeguard it?

Janno Lieber
I mean, respectfully, I don’t think that that’s a debate. You can tell how I feel about prioritization of one mode over another. I’m interested in making the system maximally affordable. It is affordable. I don’t want to lose that. It is, you know, one of the things that makes New York affordable. I want to make it maximally affordable to those in need. I don’t really have the option, because of the economics of this system, of saying I want to talk about free transit.

There’s been experiments around the world. Others have, I have not studied, but other systems have experimented with universal free transit, and there have been some downside consequences which would need to be studied, because all this stuff deserves to be taken seriously. We are like an incredibly business-like organization, and we’re not doing things– We’re not treating New York like it’s Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory: Let’s just attach the electrodes and see what happens. That’s not the way to run something that’s this important and this central to New York. It’s not a bumper sticker organization. I understand politics brings out bumper stickers, but I’m not in that business. We’re in the business of running an organization that is viable economically, is viable politically, and delivers great service, so I don’t really feel like that’s something that I need to be focused on because it’s not viable.

Josh Greenman
You mentioned that you’re not on social media.. And you also mentioned, you know, the importance of the gates, the fare gates, on social media. Recently, these pictures circulated of these new fare gates going up at City Hall. It turned out it was in SEPTA, in Philadelphia, but there were lots of reactions from New Yorkers, like a little bit alarmed this might be happening in New York, on the far left at least. Why don’t we have fare gates that are — and when, if we’re getting them, when are we getting them — that are much more resistant to fare evasion. I understand that the exit door is part of the issue, is a big part of the issue, but the emergency door could be changed as part of that.

Janno Lieber
You know, we spent a lot of time on this. I got to give credit to Demetrius Crichlow, who runs New York City Transit, and he’s really been a great partner in this. And, you know, this is a hard issue. We lost credibility. The combination of the physical changes to the turnstile – the turnstile is completely outmoded — you’re right it’s not effective anymore by international standards, but the changes that have been made to the turnstile— no back, you know, making it impossible to backcock, the little moons, but most of all, delayed egress and those gate guards who, you know, are not policemen so they can’t give out tickets and they can’t stop somebody who climbs under or whatever. But together, we have achieved a 30% reduction in subway fare evasion. Huge accomplishment. Everybody brushes it off but that is a huge accomplishment and we’re going to keep going.

How are we keeping going? We’re getting a billion dollars in the new capital program for modern fare gates. I don’t know about the Philadelphia episode you’re describing, but these are the rectangles that open, but they’re also transparent and they’re not absolutely perfect, impervious to fare evasion. I’ve seen them in Europe. I had a kid who did a semester abroad in Stockholm, and you see them all over in Europe; they’re not impervious to fare evasion, because there’s still what we call piggybacking, two people trying to go in at once. But you know, literally, Jamie [Torres-Springer] is going, we’re testing out four, there are four competitors for this contract. They’re all going to be putting in, the next three or four months, installations at, I think, four or five stations each. And we’re going to see which ones are the best. And I’m sure New Yorkers will be — and social media will be ecstatic — trying out how to fare-evade on these. So we’re going to try them out, and we’re going to have a new generation of fare gates by the end of this capital program. I don’t disagree. It takes a while and money and procurement and installation and so on, but we’re going to have those new fare gates at stations that are responsible for 75% of our ridership.

Josh Greenman
And then you don’t need cops at the gates. Or are you OK with cops at the gates?

Janno Lieber
Interestingly, there have been more arrests in the system in general this year than last year, by a goodly amount. They’re dramatically more than 2019. There is a little less fare evasion enforcement. But I like– I don’t want a cop at every gate, but I think some of it is good, because what we do at the gate is we get 75 guns a year. You know, we’re getting a lot of guns from people who– it’s bizarre that people who are carrying have warrants and I-cards out and fare-evade, and then they get stopped. And we get a lot of folks who, you know, are troubled for other reasons on fare evasion. So I’m not uncomfortable with a certain amount of police enforcement of fare evasion.

Ben Smith
A couple other modes of transportation. Did you have an LIRR question?

Akash Mehta
So the MTA just, I think this week, rejected federal mediators’ proposed deal with the LIRR union, and I believe it was in part because the plan that the mediators put forward didn’t address the rules. And I guess my question to you on that is: how do you think about the trade-offs between a potential strike and getting these work rules to a place you’re comfortable with?

Janno Lieber
I mean, listen, the system that we have is insane, right? We have the Taylor Law that applies to New York City Transit — subways and buses. And then, because in 1928 when they were doing the Railway Labor Act, they created some definitions, somehow swept up commuter railroads, even if they’re state-sponsored. So we have this other system, which is controlled by this very bulky national mediation board process. I think I’m trying to convey to you, we are treating the commuter railroad more like part of an integral transit system that serves more and more of the same population, not, “Oh, they’re the suburbanites. They have one [system] and then there’s the city.” By the way, everybody who comes in on the commuter railroads ends up on the subway, if you look at the numbers. So it’s all one system. So that’s crazy.

Number two, the thing that’s most objectionable about what’s going on with the Long Island Rail Road is they’re trying to collapse the system of pattern bargaining — I was in public-private real estate for a while. Every project I did was union. I have a great relationship with the labor groups that I’ve worked with. But pattern bargaining is like— if you don’t have pattern bargaining, you have chaos. And we have the New York transportation world and labor in general, in public employment, I should say, has followed pattern bargaining. And this group of outlier unions, I’ll call them, has insisted that they want to go outside the pattern.

We have said we’re staying in the pattern, but we will pay more in wages, but we have to have offsets in productivity and getting rid of these insane, antiquated labor rules, a lot of which — the railroad industry work rules sometimes date to the 19th century. And in this case, you’re talking about some of the most egregious, insane work rules that really are galling when the public—

Ben Smith
Like what?

Janno Lieber
One of them is, if you drive an electric train the same day you drive a locomotive train, you get double pay for that day. If you then take the train back to the yard, and you’re told to set up your train so it’s ready for the rush hour in a certain order, you do a “yard move” — triple pay for the day. It’s bananas. It’s completely bananas. There’s no productivity, there’s no benefit to the public. And we’re going to fight hard to make sure that some of those rules are addressed.

Another one is the clerks who sell tickets — they won’t, like when [it’s] rush hour [at] some Long Island Rail Road station in a remote area, they won’t come out of the booth. We made a deal with the station agents in the subway system, get out of the booth and start to help people with the machines and directions and be customer service professionals, other than sitting in the booth doing nothing in the tap-and-ride era. But these people won’t come out of the booth because they won’t do anything else once the ticket sales are over.

Josh Greenman
We’re a long way from OPTO.

Liena Zagare
How much of a financial impact would changing these rules have?

Janno Lieber
You know, honestly, I can’t tell you offhand. What it does is it enables you to— the value of some of those rules, we change them and that enables us to actually pay people more than the standard, 3-3-3-and-a-half percent, 3-3-3-and-a-quarter-percent wage increases that were the pattern we have given in Metro-North, for example, where we have much more than half of the workforce under contract in this cycle.

You know, I have 80 separate unions to negotiate. So you break pattern, if the pattern is allowed to collapse, I mean, again, the pattern can be used to shape something or customize something for each union — want to do a little more productivity, you get a little more wages — but we’re not going to break the pattern.

Nicole Gelinas
Just one last thing on labor. Is my colleague Ken Girardin right that the Long Island Rail Road should go under the Taylor Law and not be governed by federal law?

Janno Lieber
Let me think about it — yes.

Akash Mehta
Another rule that has gotten a lot of attention is the requirement for both the driver and a conductor on subways. And the state legislature passed a bill to prevent you in contract negotiations from, in future contract negotiations, from changing this. And I believe almost no one voted against this bill in the state legislature. How did that happen? Were you involved? Were you consulted?

Janno Lieber
No. In the end of the session, the legislature passes a lot of bills very quickly, and that one slipped through. It’s been proposed for 20-plus years, and somehow it was allowed to slip through at the last minute this time. I don’t consider it serious, because the idea that we would now have to put— again, the public— It’s not a secret. We believe in investing in the MTA. What we don’t want the public to feel is there’s enormous lack of productivity, a lack of efficiency, and forcing the MTA to put extra people on Times Square shuttle, Franklin Avenue shuttle, and the G train, and any, if in the future we were running shorter trains more frequently, which in some neighborhoods might be a good way to serve people, that the idea that you’re just featherbedding, I think would outrage a lot of people, and I don’t think it’s a serious proposal.

Akash Mehta
You said Hochul is a champion of transit. Have you been in touch with her about this bill?

Janno Lieber
We have consulted with the office, I’ve not talked to her personally about it, but we’re in contact with the team about it.

Nicole Gelinas
On featherbedding. I mean basic discipline where you have more control — I mean the IG just came out and said that LIRR workers were cloning [workplace check-in time] cards. But why weren’t they fired? Some of them did suspensions, some of them were able to retire or resign. I mean, this is like, willful positive fraud against MTA, why not sue them for—

Janno Lieber
It’s outrageous. It’s freaking outrageous.

First of all, credit to the IG who did it. It was a very long investigation. Number two, the people who I wanted to punish the most, and who were punished the most, are the supervisors. The idea that these are the people who are supposed to be making sure that everybody’s doing their job, and they were actually complicit in this, is beyond outrageous. And for reasons of the way that the rules are set up, some of them were able to retire before discipline was applied, but we went through and made sure that every one of them paid hundreds of thousands of dollars because they lost benefits. They weren’t allowed to trade in their vacation time. They lost accrued pension time.

I talked to Rob Free of the Rail Road and the team over there, and we went through and made sure that the supervisors in particular were getting burned to the tune of hundreds and thousands of dollars. We can’t prevent them from retiring, but we used every lever that we had to make sure that the penalty was maximized. There’s a disciplinary process that I don’t control personally, that in some cases, when they weren’t supervisors, gave people six months to a year suspensions, which feels minimum to me, because of the outrage level that I feel. But costing people a hundred grand for that penalty, it’s not insignificant. But I’ll tell you that whatever the rules are, if something like that ever happens, we’re going to do everything in our power to make an example.

What is not going to happen ever again is that people are going to be able to do this without using biometrics, because we restored the biometrics. There was a big fight with the union about biometrics during COVID, because we all thought finger touches and the transmittal — it turned out to be different — and getting it restored was a big fight with all the unions. We’ve restored it everywhere.

Ben Smith
It’s 40 minutes, and we haven’t mentioned Andrew Cuomo. He appointed you in an acting way. You worked closely with him. What did you learn about him and when you worked with him? And are you looking forward to potentially working with him again?

Janno Lieber
Number one, I’m going to obviously work with whoever is the mayor in the City of New York and optimize what the relationship can deliver for transit riders, bus and subway, commuter rail. So we’re going to work with whoever prevails in the election. I had a good relationship with Andrew Cuomo when he was the governor, but I was the guy building projects that he liked, and he supported what we were doing, and we were getting a lot of stuff accomplished.

Josh Greenman
So what about the rest of the MTA? How was their relationship?

Janno Lieber
Well my observation is: it was complicated. There was a very fractious board. There was a lot of friction and tension at the board. Some of it the Executive Chamber was drawn into. That’s no secret. There was friction between the city and the state at that time that manifested itself at every level. I wasn’t in the middle of that.

The one thing that I got drawn into that was part of all the frictions that have been so well documented, was the decision about the L train where, I mean, listen: whatever was the background, whatever was the motive — in that case, Cuomo was right. It was possible to do that work, to accomplish that work, without fully shutting down the L train, and my outfit, which has since, was expanded, but my outfit was given that responsibility. We delivered that project six or nine months ahead of schedule, huge cost savings, and we never had to shut down the L train; we maintained, although limited, service.

Ben Max
The question on that one, though, is the length of time that it’ll be applicable, right? I don’t remember the years at this point, but it was like, if you do the partial patch that you did it’s x number of years— the repair work that you did was more of an immediate versus long-term fix — or no?

Janno Lieber
This was not a complicated issue. The bench wall in there was completely antiquated and irrelevant. You need a new bench wall, because all the cables and all the stuff that’s operating — almost all of it could be hung from what we call snake trays on the wall. And the whole project, the shut down, was being driven by the decision that we’re going to demolish and rebuild all the bench walls. It was insane. It was a bad choice. And by doing this partial, you know, structural rebuild of it — you described it as temporary, it’s not temporary.

Ben Max
Well, I’m asking.

Janno Lieber
You’re patching it with a structural material, which is being monitored and can be replaced. But the main thing is, we didn’t have to shut down services for 300,000 people a day. So you know, in that one, Cuomo does get credit. And you know, he relied a lot on these Columbia engineers. It wasn’t all his own idea in the middle of the night, but he gets credit for dealing, I think, in a somewhat innovative way with the problem. But as far as all the other dramas of the MTA, I was mostly an observer.

Ben Smith
A bigger-picture question. I think his philosophy of governing, and also things he’s proudest of, is this idea that, basically, if you want to win people’s trust, you’ve got to build big, monumental, physical things that they can see: bridges, Moynihan, LaGuardia. If he came to you as mayor and said, “Hey, what’s my next Moynihan? I want to leave office with just another monumental, gorgeous, new public space.”

Janno Lieber
Well he’d be the mayor — it’s really the governor over the MTA who has the most influence.

Ben Smith
Say he wants to help, he would bring some money.

Janno Lieber
IBX is a transformative project. We have a 14-mile long rail line right through the middle of Brooklyn and Queens.

The demand lines for travel have changed in New York, there are jobs in all these so-called “secondary downtowns.” You know, whether it’s Long Island City or downtown Brooklyn, people are moving between Brooklyn and Queens. Somebody told me, I haven’t checked this stat: there are as many people who move between Brooklyn and Queens for jobs as across the East River. Hard for me to believe, but they’re big numbers. People are moving around. Brooklyn and Queens are business centers and job centers that the original subway system was not designed to accommodate. We have an opportunity to use this virtually abandoned — it’s got one train a day — rail line to create a whole new connectivity and to serve communities that are basically off the rail map. Now, East Flatbush, when you go past the junction, you know where Brooklyn College is, where the 2 and the 5 end, there’s no subway service for huge swathes of Brooklyn — you will be serving that, you will be connecting as you go, you know, across from the Brooklyn waterfront up to Queens, you’re crossing one subway line after another. So there are roughly 20 stations, I think 17 of them connect to other subway lines. It is a dramatic opportunity. And the other thing I love about it is — like [LIRR] Third Track, like Penn Access — which we should talk about, because it is a deep problem right now — it is getting more transit out of the infrastructure we have.

I think that Second Avenue subway is a good project because it has high value on a cost-per-rider basis — everyone likes to talk about cost-per-mile, but it is, in my view, the wrong way to evaluate projects. But I love the idea of taking an existing infrastructure and squeezing a ton more service out of it, and here you got a rail line which is pretty intact.

Alyssa Katz
So I live in a large co-op complex right on the IBX in Midwood. So I know the potential of it.

I also know the neighborhood dynamics around it. And I know while support has evolved over time, as certainly as my area has gentrified a little, and transit riders have moved in, you have an old guard that is very, very opposed. And I would say that’s up and down the line. The line goes through Bay Ridge, Midwood, Borough Park, in between that, a lot of areas that are car-oriented and very hostile to transit. And there’s a real political challenge in getting support. So what is your assessment of that challenge and what your strategy is for overcoming that?

Janno Lieber
Part of the answer is in the prior question. What can the mayor do to help transit for his or her constituents in New York? Building support and a land use plan that really leverages transit to address the housing crisis that is our principal affordability challenge. Of course, I’m not going to quarrel with your assessment at all. There are a lot of low-rise neighborhoods where people are anxious about change. But that’s true with all change, with change in general, and especially physical change and demographic change that comes with going to multifamily where maybe there’s single-family housing, or low-rise to high-rise. Look at what’s happening in Gowanus, Fourth Avenue. Good, solid neighborhoods are being created along transit lines. And I think we have to effectively tell that story. The mayor is going to have to lead on that issue.

And just one other thing that’s also an opportunity: One of the principal barriers we have in transit, but it’s true of government in general, is jurisdictional fragmentation. And it makes no sense that we, unlike the rest of the world, haven’t figured out how to routinely leverage the value of transit to create funding for building transit — to do value capture — and this is the project that really should do it. So there should be some land-use planning that is connected to value capture, and because the city doesn’t want to give up property taxes, they haven’t been able to do it.

Alyssa Katz
Two follow-ups on that one. Have you or the MTA had conversations with mayoral candidates around any of these questions so far?

Janno Lieber
No. Trying to stay out of the campaign.

Alyssa Katz
The other question is sort of a comment, but I want your reaction. Under our laws, certainly, even now with the new constitutional amendment on the environment, you paradoxically can have just one neighbor or a few neighbors who say, “Oh, well, we think this project hasn’t been properly evaluated in the environmental impact statement, or whatever it is. We think it’s going to cause environmental harm,” which is such an irony, and they can sue and tie you up in litigation for years. So how do you manage actually getting anything built within that kind of contentious environment?

Janno Lieber
It’s a good question. I mean, listen, we’re pretty experienced at that, from the congestion pricing debates and the whole congestion pricing process with five years of NEPA. I mean, the abundance movement has really made a powerful case that, that in many cases, the effort to use environmental concepts to control development has backfired and is keeping us from dealing with a lot of things that are needed for valuable social goods that have some urgency associated with them. So I am for re-examining environmental processes without ditching them.

I also think that because of the Robert Moses story, we have in New York a political culture that routinely sees development as threatening to communities and human beings and even, especially, transit, because of the Cross-Bronx story and others like it. So we have a default setting that in some of our political culture — not everywhere and it’s changing a little bit — inhibits viewing infrastructure development sometimes as a benefit. And we have to address that in our laws and also in how people talk about and build coalitions around projects.

Ben Smith
Is the Trump administration as hostile in private to public transportation in cities as they seem to be in public?

Janno Lieber
It depends who you talk to.

Ben Smith
[Federal Transportation Secretary] Sean Duffy?

Janno Lieber
I haven’t spoken to Sean Duffy. I tried to catch up with when he came to New York for his inaugural ride on the subway — I believe the DeKalb to Broadway-Lafayette section of our system. But, the FTA administrator [Marc Molinaro] is from New York, and I don’t view him as hostile to public transportation and to cities and to New York. But he’s operating in an environment that, you know, he’s got, certainly a lot of rhetoric [around him], remains to be seen whether it’s action, but we’re going to respond to all of this stuff in a businesslike way. That’s the only way that I know how to deal with it. One by one, we’re going to respond to the questions they ask, and I’m sure we’re going to be able to answer the safety questions. We just answered their DBE, their surprise change to the DBE program. That was the stated reason for quote-unquote suspending funding for the Second Avenue subway. And we, you know, we’re going to be able to respond to all these questions professionally and accurately. And I’m not worried about that. It remains to be seen whether there will be excuses for taking anti-transit actions, but so far, I think we’re in good position.

Ben Max
You said you’re staying out of the mayoral race, but if there’s a Mayor-elect Mamdani and you’re going in to meet with him in November, what — maybe it’s what you already said, so we can move along — but what’s at the top of the list if you have a new mayor, and assuming it’s not someone with a long background with the MTA, like Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani or anybody else, what do you come in and say to someone running the city, what they really need to understand better and what they need to prioritize?

Janno Lieber
I mean, listen, I wouldn’t presume to say what they need to understand better. But I would say, you know, there you have in the power, and under the law of the City of New York, you’re obligated to do a lot of things to make buses faster. And let’s get started. That’s what I would say. Let’s get started with the things that are in your power to do. Let’s team up with some of these other things that cross jurisdictional lines, like planning for the IBX and, you know, I’m open to discussions about affordability, but I want to study, I want an appropriate preparation and study and analysis, we’re not operating on a light-switch-turn to do some radical change and see if, what happens. That’s not how the MTA works.

Nicole Gelinas
What do you think of Cuomo’s latest idea, to transfer responsibility for the city’s part of the capital program to the city government?

Janno Lieber
I mean, I think we made, I think it’s sort of superannuated. Honestly, we’ve, the MTA capital program is now, honestly, is one of the best-run infrastructure operations in the United States. I would, you know, we can get into all the details, but we’re getting enormous amount of work done. We’re doing it efficiently. We’ve got a long way to go, but the idea of segmenting it, and treating any part of the MTA as it’s separate from the regional transportation system, and giving it to the city, which, frankly, if you look at the Department of Design and Construction, they struggle to just do street infrastructure with sewers, and they can’t get Empire City Subway, the guys who control the fiber, to come at the same times as Con Ed, to come at the same times as DEP for the sewer, and, you know, the streets are open on Broadway for like 10 years. So the city does not have a great track record of delivering projects. The MTA has gotten a lot better, and we’re, there’s no—

Nicole Gelinas
Well, the jails.

Janno Lieber
The problem with the jails is you’ve got three of them that are being built by a company, as I said before, Tutor Perini, that is really tough to work with. And we’ll see whether the jails actually get built.

Nicole Gelinas
Safety on the subways, assaults are still two-thirds above where they consistently were in the decades before 2020. We’ve had four murders on subways this year, better than last year, but far higher by multiples than the pre-COVID average. Why has it been so hard to get crime and disorder back down to pre-COVID levels? I mean, what are your top three reasons?

Janno Lieber
I’m not sure you and I look at, describe the situation the same way. I think that we, the numbers are, can’t argue with, that crime is down. You, you’re making the point that there’s certain types of crime that are alarming, which have gone up. And you know, those are, that is the concern that we share, that there are people in the subway who are, who are taking a swing at people, and part of that is a recidivism problem we have. We put up, you know, Nicole, didn’t get much attention, but I’m going to try to reopen the conversation. The governor was doing discovery [reform] and a couple other big things that are tough to do in Albany.

So our proposal, which she supported, didn’t get a lot of attention, but I think that if somebody commits multiple violent crimes, even if it’s a misdemeanor, because remember, a felony, it doesn’t become a felony assault unless, it’s almost attempted murder in terms of its impact, or it’s a cop or an MTA worker, and that automatically is, so there are a lot of misdemeanor assaults, which, you know, frankly, because the prosecution of misdemeanors is so low, you know, I’m not a criminal justice expert, but they’re basically not being prosecuted.

So there are a lot of violence that happens that’s not resulting in people having consequences or getting forced to enter a program or otherwise. So that is the recidivism issue, I think, is the one that I am concerned about. People have a tendency towards violence of some kind. There was one case where the guy, listen, this is obviously connected to the mental health issues, but I can’t be a full-time psychological expert. If somebody, was one guy who punched a woman and you cannot imagine how much damage she did to her face, in Grand Central, on the lower level. Grand Central’s got a really good safety record, but in the lower level, he punched her and then he was let out, and then, like, three weeks later, he came and punched an eight-year-old kid, and neither of those qualified as felonies because they weren’t close enough to, I don’t know, whatever the standard is for harm. And so I want those, I want there to be a standard where you do violence, you get treated, it’s an aggravated charge, and it gets treated more seriously, even if the violence for whatever reason is categorized as misconduct. So that’s my concern.

The other thing that we have had some success with, Nicole, and I believe, it’s not going to change the stats, but it’s made some positive impact. Is our so-called SCOUT program, where we were the leaders in saying, OK, we’re going to go, there’s people who are seriously mentally ill, who really should be, who qualify for involuntary commitment because they are a danger to themselves or to others. We got clinicians who are willing to pull the trigger on 958s. We’re talking about a small population, but [the teams] go out, and they have police backing them up. Now the cops are not the ones doing the interaction, but they’re there to make sure the clinician feels safe enough to really get into it with the person and to evaluate them for serious mental illness and potential commitment under the law of the state of New York. And that has been a successful program. The city has copied it. They call it PATH. And I think we’ve gotten like 500 people out – now, some of them cycle back, but the subway, in my experience, and everybody here is, I think, a usual rider, so you have your own impression. There are a lot fewer of those really, really seriously mentally ill people who dominate the subway environment. You feel empathy for them, but they also scare people. There are many fewer of them in the system now than there were two years ago, and we’ve been able to alter that now.

The most important thing is, where do they go? If you do involuntary commitment, when they get off the drugs or they, you know, they get back on the meds or whatever that they’re brought back to, they no longer qualify for involuntary commitment, which can happen in a couple days even, where do they have to go? We can’t— Our outreach system really prioritizes just getting people to shelter — “Do you want to go to shelter? Do you want to go to shelter?” I’ve been on those platforms in the middle of the night and watching outreach workers. God bless them for doing – I have a brother who’s in that business – but those outreach workers don’t have much to offer. If you’re just offering shelter, you have to be offering something that is a better, more appealing offering, and also has the ability to really treat the mental-health issues aggressively. That’s, that’s the gap in the system that I think the governor, and to some extent the mayor, are trying to address, and that’s super important for safety reasons as well as the mental-health reasons.

Nicole Gelinas
Did the clinicians ask for the police?

Janno Lieber
Clinicians love the police. The clinicians, and that’s what’s wrong with Mamdani’s proposal on this, the idea that the clinician, the mental-health professional, is going to go out and deal with the most severely damaged folks who are suffering, in many cases, open wounds and lesions and maggots. I mean, I’m literally, you see this stuff, and I’ve seen it up close, and I’ve seen it in photographs and so on, and they’re going to deal with them without cops standing behind them in the event something goes wrong? Not fair. You have to have that backup. The key is the cops have to hang back to let the interaction take place. But that’s what we’ve done well with the SCOUT program. The governor, to her credit, has been a huge supporter of both SCOUT, cameras on trains, and a lot of things, Nicole, that have contributed to, I think, beating back the crime trend.

Ben Max
Obviously so many of these issues are interrelated that you’re touching on, but you’re talking about criminal justice, mental health, housing, land use planning — you sound like someone who could potentially run for mayor or governor at some point — is that something you’ve thought about?

Janno Lieber
Never. No, not running for anything.

Liena Zagare
Can I go back to the subways and ask—

Janno Lieber
It was that crazy a question that you’re not even going to let him get a follow-up in? If I can just bask in the, in this sort of pseudo-compliment of it—

Ben Max
Well, you know, you’re from the business community.

Janno Lieber
Yes.

Ben Max
The business community has been in a very rough spot in this election. If there’s a Mayor Mamdani, it will be looking for the next candidate well in advance, and you’re just taking that off the table, as someone who has such deep experience?

Janno Lieber
I’m not running for office, but, but I’ll tell you one thing that I hope that whoever wins this election recognizes New York’s success is, you know — whether you’re a Democrat or Republican or a Conservative, Right to Life party, a liberal or conservative — this is a city that has its success and dynamism is based on private-sector business, wherever you are on the political spectrum. And we, we’re accustomed to looking at business as an interest group, but you know, whether you’re left, right, or center, that’s what made our city great.

We were a port city, and then we were a manufacturing city, and then we were the city of Mad Men and advertising and law and finance, and now we’re a tech city, and you need to harness that and not view business as the enemy. You need the business community, which is moderate. You know, it’s not a right-wing business community. You need to be focused on, how do we make this a more attractive business city, which is why the housing crisis is the issue that must get the most attention, because the day that smart, ambitious kids — young people, they’re not kids — young people stop coming to live in your neighborhood, your neighborhood, your neighborhood, because they can’t afford it, is the day that businesses will accelerate, if they’re not or, stop coming here and stop hiring people, because that is where our our danger zone is that if we can’t attract the young people who are the smartest and most ambitious, the businesses will feel less compunction to come here and to stay here.

Liena Zagare
Why are subways so dirty, and how much of that affects the perception of dangerousness, and why is it so hard to deal with?

Janno Lieber
Yeah, I actually, I walked up here from Broadway-Lafayette, and I was like, wow, the streets are dirty.

Alyssa Katz
It was pretty good today, better than I’ve seen it.

Janno Lieber
I didn’t see dirt, you know, a pile of garbage in the station. On the street, I saw a lot of garbage. But listen, that’s an issue that I am turning my attention to more and more. I would say, there are some unique complexities from the subway environment that have to do with, like being underground at a level, which is, you know, there’s a lot of water and humidity, and just keeping it feeling clean and and so on, is, and having it be clean, and the collection of garbage, and how to do that with work trains on the overnight. But the bottom line is, I think you’re not wrong, and I pick up the garbage, and I want us to do a better job of it.

What we’ve done, is making it feel, installing LED lighting to make stations feel brighter. You know, when you have an environment that feels brighter, and that’s dank and dark, it encourages people to look after a little bit, and I’ve asked transit to go back. We lost all our cleaners during covid, and then, because people didn’t want to clean, we had to hire, in effect, a temporary workforce. And, and there was some ground lost in that exchange, to rehire the whole workforce, retrain a whole new generation, and we’re trying to improve stations in a lot of ways, brightness, safety, and you know, what we call rejuvenations, like investing in a station renewal to make it cleaner.

But I think the routine cleaning operation needs improvement, and I’ve talked to Transit about making that another way— we talked about service, we’ve talked about how to figure out getting all the work done. One of the challenges is, like 24/7, getting all the work done, not killing service. And there are many different things that we focused on, fare evasion, success there. I do agree with you that cleaning is something that we got to do better.

I’m just warming up, guys. You all are trying to get out here. I see, there’s a lot of good food.

Harry Siegel
Small narrow question: Amtrak, Penn Station, Andy Byford, Donald Trump, all the themes you’ve been mentioning about keeping the city vital, jurisdictionality and overlap, cluster-fuckers, et cetera. Please discuss.

Janno Lieber
OK, well, the number one Amtrak issue on my mind, and it’s really serious, is Penn Access, which is a project that, like people in Co-Op City, Morris Park, Parkchester, they’re spending like an hour-and-a-half getting to a job in Midtown. And they don’t have the opportunity that much of the Bronx does now to go north for jobs, which so many people in the Bronx do. When you go stand on, go to Fordham Station at rush hour. There are more people on the northbound platform than the southbound, because they’re going to the jobs in Connecticut and Westchester, and so Co-Op City, Parkchester, Morris Park, Hunts Point, are on that Hell Gate line, Amtrak. For 100 years, they’ve been running the trains, the New York Central, they never stopped in the Bronx. We made a deal with them, that we’re going to turn that two-track railroad into a four-track railroad, and we’re going to stop in the Bronx. This is consistent with what I talked to you about before, with turning the commuter railroad to serving the city people, and those people are off the map.

Amtrak has screwed up that project. We had— the first two years, we were supposed to get 48 weekend outages. We got six. When we started getting the outages, they don’t provide— they did the same thing to East Side Access. It is responsible for at least a billion dollars of the overage on East Side Access— when you’re operating, when you’re doing work on the Northeast Corridor, it’s Amtrak’s territory. They’ve neglected the maybe, in fairness to them, they didn’t have the money, whatever, but they’ve let it fall apart.

When you go to fix something, because we are 95% of the riders on the northeast corridor in the area, they say, you got to fix, you got to fix all my stuff. So 65% of the Penn Access project to provide Amtrak to Metro-North service on the Hell Gate line through the Bronx is Amtrak state of good repair. So they didn’t give us the outages. When you get the outages, people don’t show up. They’re over— they’ve never managed to get enough people to do the flagging and the supervision. You got to have a track foreman. You can’t turn off the electricity without electric traction power professionals. And then even when they’re there, and even when you get the outages there, they have their, like, they can’t enforce the rule book on their staff. So everybody says, 17 people standing there, looking at one person work, and you can’t get a second task. It’s insane.

So we have lost the schedule on this project, and we’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to do something to change it. My priority is to talk to Amtrak, and I’m going to do it soon, about, we got to find a way to give those people service and not have this turn into East Side Access and it takes another five years. The project’s been going on. It’s federally funded.

You know, I would have thought the Trump administration should be interested in reforming Amtrak because they’re sort of emblematic of a lot of the shortcomings of government, right? Bureaucracy, delivery problems, labor challenges, and so on. So far, we haven’t seen that, and I need the help from the feds to deal with Amtrak. Again, Amtrak, it’s not that they’re evil people, but these are problems that have been going on since I got there eight years ago, and literally on East Side Access, it was like a billion dollars and a couple years worth of delay. I’m not saying that was all them. The MTA and my predecessors had a screwed-up project. But all that work in Harold Interlocking was Amtrak-supervised, and it’s all Amtrak territory, so some of these same problems were harder. So that’s my biggest Amtrak issue. Penn Station, honestly, you know, I worked on it with Senator Moynihan way back when, on the Moynihan project, and it’s amazing, and it’s a success. Again, Cuomo gets credit for driving that one over the finish line.

We’ve done an amazing change in, like, in Penn Station with— if you haven’t been in this, in the corridor, runs from Seventh, Eighth Avenue subways, we doubled the width of the corridor, we raised the height, because the city street is above, it’s not Amtrak, and we put in all new retail. And the Long Island Rail Road rider satisfaction has gone from 50%, the Penn rider satisfaction going from 50% to 80% in a matter of two years.

So what the riders are telling us is, don’t tear it up again for something that’s like a beauty project. So you know, you saw what happened: Trump said, because he, I guess Hochul had talked to him about let’s work together on Penn Station. So as punishment for congestion pricing, they took it away. They sent in Andy [Byford) to work on it. Andy’s a rail operations professional, I don’t know if he’s ever done a development project before, but all this is unfolding. But our priority is, don’t screw things up. Number two is the practical stuff, vertical circulation of the platforms. That’s what we were working on. We actually had a 30% design, which in design terms is a very advanced level of detail, like ready to be sent to the contractors for bidding. It’s all about your vertical circulation, the platforms, ventilation, because it’s a fire hazard. There is not enough, unlike Grand Central, you know, it’s basically not enough egress, and for fire code reasons, and more entrances and egress — you know, pretty practical stuff.

A couple of the concourses that are especially dingy, like the Hilton corridor, if you’ve ever walked down from the back end of the Seventh Avenue trains, that tiny little corridor that’s still got the 1920s tile in it that separates the NJT from the Long Island Rail Road portions of the station, you can blow all that up. All the lower level is filled with mechanical rooms and rooms where there are Amtrak offices that do not belong in the station. So you could blow all that out, raise the ceiling and have a pretty simple project.

I am concerned that Andy, and he did it again yesterday, keeps talking about, the president wants this, the president wants that, the president – that it’s all about a more, you know, visually high-drama project. I think we have shown that you can do a great transportation environment without spending, you know, $62 billion and blowing the whole thing up.

And the last thing I would say is they’re not really including us in any meaningful way. They took our design! So far, we said to Andy, hey, you got to pay for the design. We paid millions for that. You took our grant away — they confiscated the grant. They took our design away. And by the way, Long Island Rail Road, it has 160 years left on its lease, and the lease says you can’t touch a ceiling tile without our approval. So at some point, they will have to talk to us, and that’s what we will be saying: let’s do the practical stuff, let’s not spend a lot of money and kill the transit experience for, you know, some – a beauty project.

Nicole Gelinas
Do you support posting the project monthly oversight reports on Second Avenue Subway, other big projects?

Janno Lieber
Michael, who’s, you know, the reason that’s happening? Michael Aronson yelled at Marc Molinaro, and Marc Molinaro said, sure.

I’m not against transparency. The challenge is, if you’re trying to get a project moved, if everything becomes a public debate, it’s harder to— people become defensive and so on. But if they’re going to do it, that’s fine, as long as they also post our team’s responses.

Nicole Gelinas
You could post it yourself.

Janno Lieber
Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is, the point is, it should, what we’re shooting for, with, whether it’s the oversight professionals, and one of the concerns we have is the feds use all these oversight professionals whose principal incentive structure is more work for oversight professionals, right?

So they’re always, like, second guessing, like “your schedule contingency is three days off,” and like, I get it. But, you know, we’re interested in accountability for budget and schedule, so we really don’t, we’re not going to object to anybody talking about it.

Akash Mehta
Talk to us more about costs. We’ve talked about union rules, and we talked a little bit about environmental regulations. Two other drivers of costs that researchers have pointed to, for the MTA, which spends, I know you said you prefer the rider metric, but these are physical projects. You know, on a per-mile basis, the MTA spends more than just about anywhere else.

Two other drivers that people have pointed to are the amount, the extent to which we outsource projects to contractors, and then just the physical size of the stations. And I want to ask you about each of those. For contractors, correct me if I’m wrong, I know you led construction for the MTA — I believe we used to have 1,600 in-house employees who managed the vast, who did most of the construction management themselves, and now we have far fewer, and we outsource much more to contractors. How do you think about that?

Janno Lieber
So I think that you can do per-mile for tunneling budget. That’s a legitimate question, because that’s a generic— unless you have to measure a little bit by the size of the tunnel, but that’s an apples-to-apples comparison.

You cannot use per-mile as the metric when you’re including stations, because the stations are designed based on their volume, like their capacity you have to design. Some people say, Oh, complicated issue. But literally, you need more vertical circulation, based on— we have, you know, 1,000 people on the train. It’s much more than a light rail system has. You need to build a lot of vertical circulation capacity than other systems to make sure that those people can get out within a three-minute window under NFP, National Fire Protection standard 130. It’s just totally different. The fact that we’re 24/7 means that we have to duplicate a lot of systems, because you can’t turn them off entirely to do maintenance and to do work.

So there are legitimate reasons that per-rider is, in many cases, the right metric. We were actually, we looked at a lot, because we take so much heat on this. We do. We are meeting international cost standards for tunneling. And you know, if anyone’s interested, we can go through it, where we get killed is on the stations, and that is because, not only, but mostly because of the capacity issue. The size of stations is a real issue, and we have shrunk the stations on the Second Avenue line from the design. When I got, and I arrived at the end of the Second Avenue phase one project, when it had just gone to [inaudible], I went to 96th Street, and you open up the door to go to the back of house at the north end of the station, it’s like a labyrinth that goes on for blocks. Every single New York City Transit department had its own room, and too many of those have got brown paper on the window, and who knows what’s going on. I took [Andy] Byford there because I was, when he was there, because I was trying to tell him, we’re going to squish down the back of the house. And he first was resisting, because he’s standing up for Transit and all of their departments, and eventually he gave way. We didn’t get to do the project together, but in principle, he gave way.

So we have squished the stations down. We have pushed a lot of the the support services out of the station environment, or the subway environment, and into what we call, what’s the, what’s the term of art, the above-ground thing, where you have, you have, like a ventilation tower, and then you build office space in tandem with it, so you’re not digging as much. You’re doing it above grade. So we’ve been intensely focused on this. Jamie [Torres-Springer], who’s done really a great job on this, has squeezed over a billion dollars out of Second Avenue phase two just doing that. So we’re intensely focused on the issues that you’re raising. I think that’s what I’m saying.

Akash Mehta
Well, I want to get back to the contractors piece at some point. But also just on station size. You shrunk them, I think, from like, those stations, those three stations, from double the length of the platform to like, 30 to 50%.

Janno Lieber
Too much Nolan Hicks.

Akash Mehta
But they’re still far larger.

Janno Lieber
Let’s get into it, because there’s, we’re so intensely focused on this issue, that in order for me to answer that level of detail, I probably need to bring you together with Jamie and his team.

Akash Mehta
Let’s do it.

Janno Lieber
But happy to do it. Let you get into it. As far as the in-house stuff goes, I’m actually for that. We, we have jacked up the portion of the capital program that is being done by in-house labor. And if it’s simple stuff, if it’s pretty straightforward stuff, we’re going to continue to look at that as more of an option. What you’re talking about is technical; as projects get more about the technical side, we are having more and more, truthfully, this is just economic reality, just hiring scheduling professionals and other technical professionals to work full-time at the MTA becomes more challenging. So there’s definitely, some of those technical expertises that we use consultants for on projects, but in general, we are thrilled to look at opportunities to grow in-house.

I don’t accept the Alon Levy theory, which, you know, you’re articulating — that somehow, if we just had like this massive in-house force, we would be building everything way, way cheaper. That’s like, hiring— you cannot compete with private-sector engineering. And we don’t have one project after another, like he loves, like Madrid, which built all these subways in a row. We have, you know, one big project, and then we— they come much more episodically for us. So having a huge in-house force who’s only focused on building new is both economically non-viable, but also we just don’t have the right profile of the amount of work.

Ben Smith
This has been phenomenal. I feel like people are going to eat this up, there’s so much here. There’s one last question…you talked about the vitality of the private sector. You’ve worked in development, worked in infrastructure, for so long.

Can you just quickly paint a picture— I feel like I’m still coming from a place where it’s like, oh, maybe Midtown is going away, and being replaced by residential housing, going to the outer boroughs or the burbs, and then I think, as I listen to you, I feel like, maybe this is like three years out of date — can you just give us, what is happening in New York?

Janno Lieber
It’s really interesting. I don’t claim to be like the soothsayer on this at all. All I can tell you is what we see, which is that for a long time, we were all like, oh shit, what is going to happen with core Midtown? Nobody’s there. Park Avenue seems dead, and it ain’t anymore. They’re having the leasing, that for the last year-and-a-half, have been unbelievable leasing years for core Midtown.

Is there also an acceleration of the conversion of older office buildings to residential? It appears to be. I’m not enough of an expert to say just how fast. But that’s also a good thing. We all thought that was the holy grail. It takes a while for those projects to come together financially, every one of them is complicated and so on.

So what we’re seeing is kind of what I believe, we hope, which is, you know, the newer office stock is, seems to be attracting people, even with the era of hybrid work. The dramatic contraction of a lot of service firms, like law firms, seems to have flattened out. That people are coming back to office, whether we think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It seems like it’s stabilized in terms of the amount of transit, people traveling to work, and the older office buildings may be getting converted. I don’t know.

The other thing that’s happening is that there seems to be a market for new construction in office buildings, which is what people want. You know, we’re not all experts. I did a little of this with the World Trade Center. It makes a big, new makes a big difference to companies, and they seem to be back in the business of wanting to pay more for new.

So all those things augur well for New York. Look, I don’t have the deep understanding of, like, how much hybrid work, and will there be more satellite downtown in, you know, clearly, like, the vision of lower— downtown Brooklyn as a satellite office center has dissipated to a great extent . It’s clearly shifted to almost all residential, right? I don’t know about Long Island City or others, but it seems like things are OK.

The big challenge always comes back to housing. Are the people going to be here? That fire, that motivate the companies to come and expand here? And that’s our big challenge, and I hope that whoever’s the next mayor will really give real priority to that, among everything else.

Ben Smith
Thank you so much.