Public streets play a big role in our day-to-day lives. And if you’ve visited any large metropolitan city, you’ve seen just how much traffic can fill up roadways. New York City became the first city in America to implement congestion pricing, a program aimed at generating revenue and making streets less crowded. But the initiative hasn’t been immune to opposition, including from the Trump administration, which has ordered the city to end the program. Janno Lieber is the chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He joins WITHpod to discuss the effects of congestion pricing in NYC, legal fights ahead and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Janno Lieber: The best precedent for this is when Bloomberg instituted no smoking in restaurants and bars. And some of the same people who are crazed about congestion pricing were saying, it’s going to kill the city’s nightlife, nobody will ever come to New York again to go to a restaurant. You did it. Everybody said, hey, this is great, I don’t have to get my clothes cleaned every time I go out for a meal. And there was no discussion further because everybody loved it. It’s a little bit like that analogy.
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
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Chris Hayes: In 1789, Benjamin Franklin was writing to a correspondent, Jean-Baptiste Le Roy having just sort of gotten through the constitutional convention. And he said, our new constitution is now established and has an appearance that promises permanency, but in this world and you know what comes next, because it’s become a sort of cliche, nothing can be certain except death and taxes. I would add one thing in addition to that, which is in the modern world, nothing can be certain except death, taxes and traffic.
I’ve just been on a book tour and it’s very funny how it’s almost like a schticky (ph) thing, wherever you go in the country, you can make a joke about the traffic there, where people’s eyes light up in recognition. Like if you’re in Houston, you can be, make a joke about Houston traffic. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can make a joke about Los Angeles traffic. And everyone’s like, yeah, our traffic is really bad. But what you realize, when you’re on tour, is that everyone’s traffic is bad and traffic is bad everywhere.
And the reason I’m saying this is because one of the things that I’ve thought a lot about is, I spend all day thinking about national politics, but when I think about my life and like the little micro instance, when I’m thinking about some policy issue, that’s really relevant to my life, a shocking proportion of them come down to like how the public streets are used. That’s like a big part of my life. People double parking, people parking in front of the hydrant, whether there’s a delivery truck in the way as I try to scoot my kid to school, whether there’s a delivery truck in the way while I try to get my bicycle, whether the trains are running on time.
Like this is, and again, this is very New York centric, but I think it just broadly expands out because we spend a ton of time in motion. We spend a ton of time commuting. And recently there was this huge deal in New York City, which was after years and years and years of extended drama, New York City became the first city in America, but certainly not this first city in the world to implement congestion pricing. You’ve probably heard about this if you’re outside of New York. Let me tell you this was like the war of the roses. I mean, this was just an unbelievable epic saga that we were going to do it. Then we were not going to do it. Then Kathy Hochul suspended it before the midterms. Then she put it back on and she produced the fee, and now it’s on. And then, of course, here’s what’s happened in quick succession.
After all of this propaganda about how it was going to be the end of the world, it went into effect and the polling on it basically switched overnight. Majorities were opposed before it happened. And after basically a month of it being in place, a majority now likes it. And let me tell you, as someone who moves around the city a lot, it is night and day in Manhattan. You have to pay an amount of money to go into Manhattan below 60th Street. It’s automatically done with tolls. It’s reduced congestion tremendously. So that’s one thing that’s happened.
And the second thing that’s happened is that Donald Trump and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, have said, we’re killing it because we can’t have nice things. And so I thought today, we’ve done this once before, we did a subway conversation on the podcast and I was joking the whole time, like, if you’re waking up and you’re downloading just on your podcast app in Duluth, Minnesota, why are you going to listen to an hour about the New York City subway? But people did, and they liked it.
I’m a transportation nerd. I’m a New Yorker. I think this congestion pricing fight extends out in all sorts of different ways to tons of different places about how we deal with this central problem that chews up hours and hours of our life.
So today, very, very happy to have the chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is an enormously consequential and powerful entity here in the New York Metro area that basically oversees how New Yorkers get about in the New York Metro area. Janno Lieber who’s been in the position for a number of years now and is overseeing the implementation of congestion pricing among other things. Janno, welcome to the program.
Janno Lieber: Good to be with you, Chris.
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Chris Hayes: Can you tell us first, the MTA’s one of those great, it’s got this kind of Robert Moses/new deal, like imposing authority kind of structures. Like what is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority?
Janno Lieber: You know, it was formed 50 plus years ago, putting together all of the problem children of transit in the New York region. The Long Island railroad, which is a commuter railroad, was bankrupt. The trains that went to the Northern suburbs, which are now called Metro North were bankrupt. The New York City subway system, which started as two private companies and one public entity was also bankrupt. It was owned by the city of New York.
And Governor Rockefeller put them all together, not because he wanted bankrupt organizations, but because he wanted to cross subsidize with all the tolls from the bridges and tunnels that Robert Moses has built. And it also had the side benefit of kind of clipping the wings of Robert Moses, who is one of his political rivals.
So from that was born the entity we have today, which oversees the buses in New York City, the commuter railroads, the toll bridges and tunnels. We have 75,000 employees and we carry about 6 million people a day right now. And we got a big old $20 billion year budget, which all of which is the thing that makes New York possible.
Chris Hayes: You mentioned one part of that, which I’m obsessed with. I’ve been thinking about writing a book about this for years. Someday I’ll write this book. I want to write a book about the history of New York City’s subway system. There’s been a few, but I want to write one. But anyway, the fact that the New York City subway system was born as a private. We think so much these days of privatization. You take some government function, and you contract it out to a private entity. The New York City subway system evolved in exactly the opposite direction. It was a private enterprise first and then got absorbed into being a public entity.
Janno Lieber: Yeah, it’s true. I mean a big factor though is sometimes has forgotten. It was that the city fathers, and they were all fathers in those days, wouldn’t let the private companies raise the fare.
Chris Hayes: This is the problem.
Janno Lieber: — the bankruptcy —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Janno Lieber: The bankruptcy was a slight problem for 40 years. The fare was a nickel. And eventually the poor saps who had built the thing gave up and handed it back to the government.
Chris Hayes: It’s an amazing story. They do have rate regulation, which they won’t let them, and it’s enormously charged political issue for understandable reasons.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, so you’ve got this artificial price and then they basically go bankrupt. They join the MTA. So you talk a little bit about this idea, which is that the core of the MTA and in some ways the core of congestion pricing of cross subsidization, what does that mean and how does that work?
Janno Lieber: Well, it’s not that complicated. In New York, the thing that makes New York possible because of our density, which is nine times a Sunbelt City like Phoenix or Houston is mass transit. We couldn’t put all these people together to create economic value, and we’re 10% of the national economy, something like that. We couldn’t make New York work if we just relied on people taking private automobiles in the city and around.
So, in effect, we subsidized mass transit with all different kinds of mix of fees and taxes and other things in order to make it possible for the city to exist and for people to get around.
Mass transit is also an amazingly good affordability shot for the city. The city’s expensive in almost every way, but mass transit at under three bucks a ride is like 15% the cost of owning an automobile and it’s a shot in the arm for affordability in our city.
Chris Hayes: So, we use some of that revenue from people driving their cars to subsidize the subway system.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. I mean, to answer your original question, yes. The tolls that we get from all those bridges and tunnels, what used to be called the Triborough, the Battery Tunnel, the Midtown Tunnel, the Whitestone, the Throggs Neck, all of that is used to a great extent other than their operating costs to make mass transit affordable. And we have a lot of other inputs, but those are important.
Chris Hayes: This is a general question, but I think worthwhile for folks that are listening that aren’t in the New York Metro area. Why can’t you make the math of mass transit pencil out on its own? Basically, no one can do that. Why is that the case?
Janno Lieber: Listen, all over the world, whether it’s London or Paris, the national government pays for mass transit, and they pay for the workers’ healthcare and pensions and everything else. We are no different, mass transit, the cost of operating it exceeds which you can charge people realistically and still have that affordability benefit. So it is subsidized, but hell, nobody beefs about the fact that the federal government paid to run the air traffic control system and build all the airports around the United States. And we pay a ton to build roads as well. So all transit, transportation in the United States is subsidized. Just a question of picking your poison. In New York, we got to have it be mass transit.
Chris Hayes: How are the finances? I mean, there was a real crazy thing that happened around COVID where, obviously, revenue just goes away. Ridership falls through the floor. This happens in mass transit systems around the country. There’s a bunch of money for mass transit and transit systems in that first American Rescue Plan that sort of patches these holes in budgets. There’s a real question about ridership recovering. Like how has the MTA transit system come out of that shock?
Janno Lieber: Yeah. It’s a good question. So during COVID the MTA went out and organized a lot of transit properties across the country to say to the feds, and Trump was the president then, and we got New York Republicans to support us. People forget those good old days when Republicans from New York stood up for mass transit not too long ago. Mass transit was essential for all these cities. And you couldn’t let it go down because people were staying home during COVID. And actually, in those couple of COVID relief bills, we did have money for COVID related shots in the arm financially for mass transit. It helped us to bridge the period until we got to the return of ridership.
But we were still left when we called the fiscal cliff. It was true of all transit properties across the country because ridership had gone down so far and it was taking a while to recover. There was a huge financial gap. Kathy Hochul and the New York State legislature actually stepped up in 2023 and addressed our fiscal cliff, which was smaller and percentage trims in other places, and got us to where we are now, which is we are back to plus or minus apples to apples about 85% of ridership of where we were before COVID and the system is operating.
The performance is great. On time performance, historic records in the commuter railroads. We’re back to a very solid financial footing, thanks to that, what we call the fiscal cliff action that the governor and the legislature took back in ‘23. But a lot of other transit properties around the country —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: — are still in crisis because of those same conditions coming out of COVID.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, 85% is an interesting number to me. I should say, I take the subway every day.
Janno Lieber: Thank you for your business.
Chris Hayes: Well, I’m happy to give it. I love the New York City subway. It’s a great part of my day. I truly love taking the subway. I love the subway system. I would say from again, first person, it actually is operating at very, very high levels of like efficiency and on time. You get delays. There’s a police investigation at a certain stop. That happens, but generally it’s been very good. I feel like my eyeball test feels like it’s closer to a hundred, but that 15% gap that didn’t come back after COVID, is that just people working from home essentially?
Janno Lieber: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like that’s the wedge.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. We got more jobs in New York City than we’ve had even before COVID. Our economy has recovered pretty strongly. Yes, we were missing riders in the peak hour, and those are predominantly hybrid workers or people who work from home now. What we’re seeing is when people not a work trip, we’re actually in the 90 plus percent range. And the commuter railroads are over a hundred percent of pre COVID on the weekends and at nights.
Chris Hayes: That’s what I’ve seen. Yeah.
Janno Lieber: But hybrid work still taking a toll during the rush hour, morning, and evening.
Chris Hayes: But that’s sustainable, that equilibrium.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. I mean, listen, the economics of mass transit in New York are always back and forth, but yeah, we’re in solid shape. The big issue for us now going forward, I know you’re aware of that, is the capital program because we got to rebuild this a hundred year old system that has been frankly neglected for a lot of that century.
Chris Hayes: I mean, when I say I love the New York City subway system, I love it because it’s mine. I wouldn’t say that. I mean, it’s gross. Like there’s just no question. It’s one of the grossest systems you’ll ever go on and this is just the truth. I’ve lived in a lot of places. Like I watched the little rats scurry along and have their dalliances or whatever they’re doing in the tracks every day. And it’s not like people compare it to other places. It is what it is. I love it. But the capital program brings us to the congestion pricing. So —
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — give us a little bit of the history of this. This is initially a Bloomberg idea and it’s inspired by other cities, particularly London, that have done this. Give us this sort of like story of where congestion pricing starts and what we learn from it and then how it comes to New York.
Janno Lieber: Well, it starts with a Columbia professor named William Vickrey, like more than 50 years ago. He was an economist who did the studies that showed why it made sense. The only way to manage traffic, which even in the 1960s was getting out of control in New York was through a pricing mechanism. And it used to be, it started out Chris, as, you know, as a kind of a conservative market-oriented solution. This was not a leftist ideological thing.
Chris Hayes: Taxing and externality.
Janno Lieber: Exactly. Tolling things that would offset the impact of cars. But lo and behold, as you said, Mayor Bloomberg in back in 2006, 2007, pushed it very hard, got close to getting the New York State legislature to adopt it. Didn’t quite make it over the finish line and the idea hung around. But in 2019, then Governor Cuomo embraced it as part of the NTA capital program solution. How are we going to get money to rebuild this creaky old, somewhat dilapidated system? And honestly, I’d say nobody in Albany thought it was actually going to be implemented. Everybody signed off on it and they figured something would happen because it was so controversial.
But during COVID we started doing these massive federal environmental studies that are required for anything of this scale and complexity. It’s a separate issue. Why we have to do all of that? Your friend (inaudible) has been writing a lot of that.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Janno Lieber: But we did all the work and during the end of the Biden administration, the feds came to the conclusion that this had no negative environmental impacts under the law and gave us the approval. And you mentioned there was an up and down with Governor Hochul’s view of the issue, but in the end we got the approval in December and we had actually spent half a billion dollars to put in all the cameras, to develop all the software, and we were ready to go and we started in January 5th and, lo and behold, the skies parted and all of a sudden people are saving 10, 20, 30 minutes a day getting in and out of the city of New York and you can get across Canal Street, which is a goddamn miracle.
Chris Hayes: I mean, let me just say there’s an intersection in New York, which is Delancey and Chrystie. I don’t know if you know Delancey and Chrystie.
Janno Lieber: Of course.
Chris Hayes: It’s the approach to Williamsburg Bridge going east west. And there’s a bike lane that runs north south. And I ride that bike when I ride to work. It’s the worst intersection in the city, I think. I mean, it is a disaster. Congressman Dan Goldman, he represents that. And every time I see him, I just hector him about this intersection. In fact, I take pictures on my bike ride and I text it to him like, this is Delancey and Chrystie right now, because it’s such a nightmare.
And it’s worked, like you can pass through Delancey and Chrystie. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s rare in life that you see a policy that feels so much like an on, off switch as what’s happened with congestion pricing.
Janno Lieber: It is and the proof of that, Chris, is that the people who everybody thought were going to be most against congestion pricing, which is people who drive to New York and are subject to the toll. All of a sudden, they’re polling that they love it. And they’re the biggest supporters.
Chris Hayes: They’re getting the most benefit. This is the thing. Janno, I got to tell you, before we get into what’s happened, I want to just talk about the politics of this because the politics was so insane.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I truly can’t quite properly characterize the level of panic that was whipped up around this thing. I mean, how much is the toll?
Janno Lieber: It’s nine bucks, but you got a $3 credit if you come through one of the other toll crossings, so it’s six bucks for a lot of people who are coming to the city.
Chris Hayes: So it’s either six or nine. It was going to be a little more. Hochul knocked it down. But again, that’s real money. So once a day, so nine a day, times five, let’s say, max you’re doing it 45 bucks a week. You know, 45 bucks a week is not nothing. That adds up. That’s real money. I don’t want to like pooh-pooh it. That said, you would think that like the governor was proposing an 80% income tax based on the level of insanity. I mean, true nuttiness around this policy. People that I love, like good people with good politics, losing their mind over this. I mean, why was that? Like, do you have a theory for that?
Janno Lieber: I don’t know. I think that it’s not too complicated. In some ways people are told something which is, they think of as free is going to cost money. And the way that the press played it —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Janno Lieber: — is they would go up to guy who are driving off of the free bridges, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Queensboro Bridge and stick a mic in their face and say, do you want to pay? And the answer is no. They are regular humans. But like I said, what you said is lived experience is more powerful and people, all social media, plenty of people driving into the city and saying, oh my God, I’ve been against it. I’m for congestion pricing.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Janno Lieber: Because this is so different. So we were counting on that. That happened in London. That happened in Stockholm. It happened in Singapore, that the polls shifted dramatically. Now, in fairness, the Murdoch press also whipped up the hysteria to enormous degree —
Chris Hayes: The “New York Post” was insane on this. I mean, it truly —
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — a completely monomaniacal deranged crusade. I can say that. You’re being diplomatic, but it just a totally disordered —
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — obsessive propaganda campaign.
Janno Lieber: But your friends in local news follow “The Post” to a great extent, and TV news did it a little bit too. A lot of those folks are drivers. Listen, there’s also mixed into this, the old-fashioned suburbs, distrust of the city —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Janno Lieber: — and which has been amped up since COVID by the somewhat, maybe ideologically or politically driven portrayal of this city constantly as a dystopian hellscape. And that’s the way our subway is portrayed as well.
Now, don’t get me wrong when bad high-profile crimes happen in the city, especially in the subway where people like you, everybody uses, they feel that could have happened to me and it can influence (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Janno Lieber: — people’s views. But there is a lot of — there’s a lot of stuff in the air politically about trying to agitate folks who live in the suburbs who are, I guess, independents or swing voters or whatever, against the city. And that’s clearly being used as a little bit of a political leverage point.
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Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Also, it just seemed to me that the people who had to drive to the city for financial or business reasons, the toll wasn’t going to affect their decision making and was going to be written off basically as a cost of some business. Right? And, and the people that have are driving into the city anyway, you’re already paying for parking, which means there’s already a certain amount of disposable income —
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — in your pocket. If that’s the way you’re commuting into Midtown.
Janno Lieber: Well, you got it exactly right. All the studies, and we did study the heck out of it, showed that there are almost no people of low income who drive to Manhattan for work, because you can’t afford the parking.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Janno Lieber: And there was hysteria about all kinds of things. Would Broadway go out of business? It’s up 25%. Would restaurants die? Restaurant reservations are way up. Would people stop spending money in Manhattan, Midtown, and downtown business district? Well, there’s a billion dollars more of credit card receipts in the first two months of the year. All that stuff has been disproven —
Chris Hayes: Really? That’s true. What you just said is true like every year.
Janno Lieber: Oh yeah. It’s all true. And small side benefits, less kids being hit by cars.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I like that.
Janno Lieber: All of a sudden, huge safety benefits. And as of yesterday, it turns out that there’s 70% less noise violations for excessive honking and actually noise in the street. So everybody’s benefiting and everybody’s loving it. The politics doesn’t go away entirely.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, although they really have shifted. I mean, it’s very rare to get these kind of conversion stories. I mean, even with something like, let’s take the Affordable Care Act, right, which had in some ways a similar structural political dynamic. There was intense ferocious opposition to it when it was being proposed. It didn’t have majority support, and I think that was true of the polling and in congestion pricing, like it was opposed by a majority. And then over time as its implementation happened, it is now something you can’t take away. It has strong majority support, but that was an eight-year process, maybe a five to eight-year process. Partly, that’s because the implementation was delayed.
With this, we’re talking like, again, it’s just rare in policy that like you flip a switch things, change, people say it, and then the polling shifted.
Janno Lieber: And you’re right, the best precedent for this is when Bloomberg instituted no smoking in restaurants and bars. And some of the same people who are crazed about congestion and pricing were saying it’s going to kill the city’s nightlife. Nobody will ever come to New York again to go to a restaurant. You did it. Everybody said, hey, this is great. I don’t have to get my clothes cleaned every time I go out for a meal, and there was no discussion further because everybody loved it. It’s a little bit like that analogy, that precedent.
Chris Hayes: Except now we have a grenade tossed in. So it’s like this sort of amazing story, it’s back and forth. Never thought it would happen. Did all the blocking and tackling. Did all the NEPA process. Did everything. Got it, spent half a billion dollars, delayed it, put it in, ta-da. Everyone loves it except okay, the feds now are saying, what? What is the lever they’re using to undo this?
Janno Lieber: Well, honestly now we’re into legal process. So they sent us a letter that said, we’re rescinding the approval that was granted to you a couple months ago. And the grounds weren’t made clear. We immediately filed suit in federal court, which had the same federal court that had issued 200-page decisions saying you did everything right, and it’ll have to be adjudicated whether their attempt to rescind the approval is valid. I think we’re on solid ground without getting into all the legal issues.
I’m very optimistic about it, but it’s still political issue and Governor Hochul is trying to prevail on President Trump to at least think about himself, put on his old hat as a New York real estate owner, because the real estate community in New York loves this. They have been pushing for this for years. And by the way, another small metric, leasing in Manhattan is up 61% in the first two months of the year, the kind of thing that Donald Trump should pay attention to and we hope he will.
Chris Hayes: I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but the approval you got in December from the feds was it an environmental process? Was it NEPA?
Janno Lieber: Yeah. NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, which is the whole federal regulatory framework for major actions like this. We got a finding of no significant impact like a year and a half ago. The final approval was because we had to pick specific tolling numbers and regimes and discounts and exemptions and all that stuff. The final approval came in December which was based on the finding of no significant impact that came in in 2023.
Chris Hayes: So I just want to be clear because it’s worth sort of pressing on this. Sean Duffy and the Trump administration are saying there’s going to be bad environmental impact to your congestion pricing, but they won’t specify.
Janno Lieber: Yeah, so far. I mean, the legal process will require them to put on the table the grounds that they’re purporting to rescind the approval. But as I said, all of the jurisprudence in this area says you can’t just rescind a federal approval —
Chris Hayes: Without reasons.
Janno Lieber: — unilaterally. And the recipient to the approval needs to agree to it in this program. Mind you, Chris, this program that we are approved under is the one that allows Texas and Florida have toll roads in many cases. So one of the downsides for the Trump administration thinking business-like would be you’re upsetting the whole bonding regime —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Janno Lieber: — for which whole roads in Texas and Florida because the bond holders are going to say, wait a second, you can rescind the approval anytime? That is bad for business, and they should think about it in those terms.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, they toll the hell out of the roads down in Texas and then they like have these weird private contractors that deal with the money. So, let’s talk a little dollars and cents here, because one of the critiques that I’ve read of the London congestion pricing goes this way. In the beginning, people are very price sensitive. And so you get twin benefits of congestion pricing. It’s producing revenue, because there are some people that are still coming through and that revenue can be devoted to capital improvement in the transit system, which is the structure that’s set up here.
And you’re also reducing congestion and all the things you talked about, less honking, less pedestrian accidents. What happens over time is that the price shock wears off and people are like, eh, it’s only nine bucks, I kind of want to drive to the city. And congestion starts to creep back up. And the equilibrium you hit is that there’s not a huge reduction in congestion, but you have just built basically a steady revenue stream that that’s part of what’s happened in London. Your understanding, is that a thing you guys are tracking and what knobs do you (inaudible) with to try to continue to fine tune it?
Janno Lieber: Well, the big picture of what I think is the best indicator of London’s success is that since they instituted congestion pricing was 20 years ago, they’re getting a lot more people into the central business district with a lot fewer cars. That’s the goal.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Janno Lieber: Because you have a dynamic, economically powerful business district, but you don’t have to have the crushing impacts of traffic. We just don’t have enough room on the roads. It’s not that complicated —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I know.
Janno Lieber: — for every car that wants to make use of the free roads. And our emergency vehicles, this has been overlooked, Chris. If the ambulances can’t get to hospitals, you got to do something. You don’t have a choice. And that was where we are.
Chris Hayes: I mean, let me just say, it’s a truly dystopian situation that every New Yorker, and I think probably big city residents, particularly New York, of being in a Manhattan street that’s just, there’s no space. It’s completely not moving. And there’s an ambulance just wailing away in the middle of that street stuck. And no one can pull over to go on it like it’s really nightmarish, and that would happen often.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. And, so I think what London has taught us is you’re going to have to watch, as you say, watch the progress. Now, there is a plan that was adopted by us with Governor Hochul. I mean, Governor Hochul un-paused congestion pricing, which is it’s going to go up a couple bucks in a few years. So we’re planning to address that dynamic somewhat. But the advantage that London has that we have to get better at New York, is that the same entity that controls the mass transit also controls the streets and they have the ability to make adjustments.
We need to tighten up our collaboration and generally our management of the streets. There are too many things, even in the congestion pricing era, where we got too many things that are competing for space on the streets, whether they’re Amazon deliveries, other kinds of commercial vehicles, taxis and FHV, Ubers and Lyfts, the emergency vehicles. We have the dining sheds, some of which are still left over, and buses, which are a priority. Obviously for us, we’re going to have to get better in New York over time and managing what street space we have that is still a work in progress.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, this is the thing what I said at the top, this sort of zero sumness that I experience a lot, which is New York is dense, and I love it because it’s dense and I choose to live here for a bunch of reasons, but that’s one of the big reasons. I like to walk places. But the cost you pay for that is that like, you’re just constantly bumping into people and things. The funny thing about the politics of this is that the ideal situation in all of them is that no one is on the road except for you, right? That’s always what you want. Like from the first person perspective, it’s like that would happen sometimes during like COVID commutes. Driving into the city, this is amazing. I’m in the city in 20 minutes, I’m taking my car. But of course, you can’t create the conditions in which no one’s on the road except for you in the aggregate. That doesn’t exist.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But that’s what everyone wants. So then the question becomes, how do you share that space? That zero sum space. And I feel like New York is not doing an amazing job of that, if I have to be honest. Particularly compared to a place like Copenhagen, which I went to a few years ago where you have three levels physically of the streets. There’s a physical level for this road, slightly higher upper bikes, slightly higher pedestrians. We’re just constantly knocking into each other here and it really does feel dangerous and a little disordered. What do you think?
Janno Lieber: I’m not in charge of the streets, I’m in charge of mass transits. But I’d have to say, bingo, yes, or something to that effect. I mean, listen, we got a long way to go. Listen, the good news is that New York has taken account to the fact that it’s not just about automobiles. It’s about bikes —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: — and pedestrians as well. We have made progress, but we got a long way to go. And prioritizing those different competing uses is something that we haven’t done in an organized way. And I come back to the dining sheds for the post COVID years. We let those hang around. This is just my personal opinion. And I have no role in this. But we let those hang around when we’re giving away free space to restaurants that is desperately needed in a world where Amazon delivers everything and they can’t go on the subway, right? We have to figure out how to prioritize buses and trucks and bicyclists and other uses so that we have a more orderly space. Public space. Copenhagen is a dream. I’ve been there, but I’m not expecting New York to turn into that overnight.
Chris Hayes: No, I mean, I think I’m a little more pro (inaudible) than you are and we can just bracket that. But let’s talk about the other side of this equation, right? So the congestion pricing is to produce money for a capital fund, which are capital expenditures to improve the system or expand the system. What are those expenditures? What does that look? Where’s the money going? This was the big question, right? In the moral panic, you’re going to waste it all.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. Well, we had an answer for that. Although, the panickers wouldn’t take account of it. We’re going to buy new subway cars. You ride from what, the slope? You’re on the F train. We got way too old subway cars.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. No, to be on the Q or the B.
Janno Lieber: Okay. I’m a Q guy too. So, the point is those cars, the R 46 is then lovely orange and yellows from the 1970s, got to get rid of those, get some new subway cars, because they break down a lot more frequently and that is bad for riders. We’re going to re-signal the subway signal system to a great extent, is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt times. I know you’re a fan of history, but that does not work if you’re trying to run a modern subway system.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: We are making the entire subway system ADA accessible. The elevators, all of the technology, it’s incredibly complicated to punch elevators into this hundred plus year old structure. It would cost of fortune. We’re doing it because, frankly, it’s not just for people with disabilities. We need people with kids and strollers and seniors who just lost their ability to get up and down the stairs to be able to use it.
So those are some of the priorities that we are putting this money into, but the capital program, like here’s the bottom line is. We have not done enough investment in basic stuff like the power system, which is the land that time forgot. Structures, if you subject concrete and steel to chemicals and water and salt for a hundred years, stuff happens and you got to invest in that stuff where it ain’t going to be there. That’s where the money’s going.
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Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about cost here. You referenced Ezra Klein’s book, which is excellent. I’m just reading it now. A new book about abundance with Derek Thompson. And one of the things they talk about is how much it costs to build stuff in the U.S., how long it takes and how much it takes. And the MTA built this new miles of track for the first time in a generation on the Second Avenue subway. It came in at a cost that was, I think the most expensive mile of subway track anywhere in the world. I forget what it was. $2 billion for the mile, maybe something like that. There’s a real problem like our cost to build a mile of subway in New York City is 10X or 20X or 5X. What it is in other dense Metro areas around the world with high labor standards. What’s your short version of why that’s the case?
Janno Lieber: Okay. It’s hard to do the short version, but I came in to the MTA —
Chris Hayes: Do the long version. We’re here. We don’t have anywhere to be.
Janno Lieber: I came into the MTA as the guy to run the construction development operation, which right on the heels of the opening of that first phase of Second Avenue subway that you and I ride.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Janno Lieber: And there were so many things that were wrong with that project. I mean, just as an example, they didn’t do enough below ground geotechnical investigation that they didn’t end up having to freeze the ground so they could tunnel it. There were major mistakes made about they didn’t know where all the utilities are. That’s always a problem in New York because a lot of the utilities were built a million years ago. But the way the contracts were structured was frankly from my standpoint, all wrong. They had the systems and the stations contracts constantly running into each other. We changed all the terms of the contracts so the contractors wouldn’t charge us for extra risk that the MTA should solve.
There’s a ton of stuff that needed to be solved and we’ve done it. And actually on the second phase of Second Avenue subway, which we have started, we’ve done all of those things differently, every single one of them. I’m pretty sure confident we saved a couple billion dollars in the process, but there’s a lot more to be done. And —
Chris Hayes: So wait, let’s just stay there for a second because that’s important.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: First of all, it’s funny. I’m laughing because you sound like every tradesman or a contractor you’re bringing to your house who’s like looks at what the last guy did. And they’re like, well this is a disaster. This last guy really screwed it up. Like I don’t know who put this in.
Janno Lieber: Hey, guilty as charged. But in this case, the transmit is a mega project managers, which I did for 14 years at the World Trade Center. So, all that stuff —
Chris Hayes: But what you’re saying that’s important, but I just want to stick with this.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: What you’re saying is important and this is something that Jigar Shah said when I talked to him in the Department of Energy about like nuclear stuff. That first mile was really expensive and that it’s come down, it’s been bent. Like the cost is coming down as you keep doing it.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. But this is truthfully, we have to change how we do projects in a million ways to realize some of the efficiencies that I’m talking about. It gets a little technical, but here’s the bottom line is, in the last couple of years, since this MTA has been in charge of mega projects, everyone wants to talk about that Second Avenue subway job. But we did a 10-mile long multi-billion-dollar project on Long Island, a $100 million under budget. Remember your friend, the L-train project? We got that done a $100 million under project, six months early. We have turned the corner on this issue.
And Chris, every time somebody says expensive, most expensive per mile. I say to them, wait a second. Stop comparing us to projects that don’t have to be designed to carry a thousand people per train because we got to put in a ton more escalators, a ton more ventilation. Because we run 24/7, we have to have two of everything because we can’t turn the system off. New York is going to be expensive. Let’s go toe to toe on cost per passenger and New York wins on cheapest cost per passenger, different metric.
Chris Hayes: So what I’m hearing from you though, that I think is interesting and important is there’s a vision that the reason for these cost problems is accrued legislative bureaucracy, environmental clearances, community input, all this stuff that’s been built up over time, particularly in blue cities, and it’s kind of like liberalism run amok. That’s one theory. And then the other theory is like there’s actually a bunch of technical things having to do with project management, contract structure, things like that. And I’m hearing more the latter from you because if what you’re saying is you can bring these costs down and you’re delivering on time under budget, it’s not like the laws have changed. There’s something happening in the project management part of it.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. I mean, listen, I want a more rational environmental review process, so I didn’t have to do. We did 4,000 pages and four years of environmental review for congestion pricing that as (inaudible) and others have written, seems like a little off the charts for a pro-environment initiative.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Janno Lieber: But —
Chris Hayes: You weren’t planning the mass leaking of mercury into the five boroughs.
Janno Lieber: Yes. Yeah. And then the same thing exists for subway projects and so on. But I’m not claiming that we don’t have to deal with community issues. There are ways to do it right on that third track project. I just referenced, we incentivize the contractors by actually getting the community to grade their performance and they got bonuses based on it and we did well.
So there are ways to handle all that stuff. Fundamentally, I believe New York is going to be expensive, but it is great value on what we’re delivering for mass transit, for the number of people we cover and the environmental harms that we avoid.
You said the subway is gross. But New York is the greenest city in America by a lot because of mass transit.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Oh, yeah. No question
Janno Lieber: Let’s make these projects as cheap as they can be. They’re going to be expensive, but we can do better and we’re doing better.
Chris Hayes: The other big issue and you said you talked about this a little bit when we talked about the kind of panic that was whipped up about congestion pricing is about the subway occupying a kind of symbolic role in a certain, frankly, national narrative about the deprivations of liberal cities and how it’s a horror show. And again, not only do I ride the subway every day, but my kid rides this away every day, like this is real, real close to me, okay. Janno Lieber: So important.
Chris Hayes: I have real skin in this game. This is not something I’m opining about like remotely. People being pushed in front of the tracks is like genuinely one of the most nightmarish things in the world. It’s something I’m sort of neurotic about. I always tell my kids to stand with your back against the wall. That said, it’s also the case that like, I ride the subway every day and it was real, real, real gnarly during COVID. I mean, it was like really a wild experience. I mean, I had people like smoking cigarettes next to me on cars all the time. I mean, just absolute insanity, unlike anything I’d seen in probably since like 1980s. It’s improved so much, it’s so much more close to normal. There’s such to me a mismatch between the way it’s being portrayed and what it’s actually like now.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I wonder how you think about this sort of this question.
Janno Lieber: You’re hitting all of the key issues. Number one is the stats, the reality that everybody tries to get people hyped about. We have four to six crimes, serious crimes per day on the New York City subway system and we carry four to four and a half million riders on average, right. That’s the subway system. We have more people riding the subway than the city of L.A. What would they give for four to six serious crimes that day?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That’s what I said.
Janno Lieber: So the numbers are good.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: But what you also talked about, which is the fact that these high profile crimes are so upsetting and they go to New York phobias, like the tracks, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: That people feel alarmed. And when you’re in an underground place or you’re in a subway car and people are breaking the rules, someone was smoking next to you in a no smoking area above grade, you wouldn’t probably get hyped. But in the subway, you sort of wonder what else might that guy do.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Janno Lieber: Look, I don’t want to be like Mr. Crackdown, but having everybody recognize the importance that this has to feel like a safe and orderly place because you want your kids to be comfortable. You want to feel like you can send them off to school that way. You want to feel like your grandmother can get on the subway because that’s the way old people get around especially in New York. It has to be a place where we do prioritize safety, rule compliance and not put up with other stuff. And sometimes I get accused of not being a civil libertarian because of that, but I don’t care because this is a sacred place. This is what makes it possible for New York to function. Everybody’s got to feel comfortable and safe.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. You’re coming at this from a different perspective than I have, and I think if I had your job, I would probably sound largely that way. I mean, to me it’s a real conundrum, something I’ve written about. The person smoking on the subway it’s like, I don’t want them to smoke. I don’t want it to be like, oh, that’s okay. I also don’t want them to be arrested. Like I just don’t want the cops really involved. Now that’s me with my own bleeding heart, sympathies, whatever. Other people will feel differently about it. One of the things that I really saw up close was the classic kind of Jane Jacob’s eyes on the streets phenomenon, which is that when ridership plummeted, it got pretty grizzly underneath there because you had just fewer eyes on the street. Now that rider shifts back, these sort of norms are much more just collectively enforced. There’s less of that kind of real aggressive disorder.
Janno Lieber: I think you’re right. I mean the numbers bear you out in the first two months of this year, having to coincide with congestion. Pricing is advent. Our felony crimes in the subway system were 45% below the same months right before COVID in 2020, so.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Janno Lieber: On the stats, we’ve made real progress. It’s no secret. We are struggling with the perception issues that we’re talking about as well.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about fare beating. Again, eyeball test, and I think the numbers bear this out seems much higher to me. It seems like it’s really been normalized in a way. And again, this is one of these things I’ll get enough arguments with people online about and I seem like some uptight, bougie liberal who’s like, I don’t think you should not pay the fare if you can afford it. And people are like, you’re a cop. But that’s my view. I mean, again, there’s people who don’t have the money too and that’s sort of a separate thing, but I see lots of people jumping over the turnstile and it’s like, I could tell based on that watch that they’ve got the three bucks for it.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Is that right that’s increased?
Janno Lieber: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And what do you do about that?
Janno Lieber: Yes. No. Okay. So, I’m a bit of a bear on this. It’s not only a financial issue, but it’s a sense of New York morale. If you feel like that the public space people are like taking advantage, they’re not playing by the same rules, the place feels less safe, it feels disorderly. And honestly, the subway is one of the things that makes New York affordable. If we don’t collect the fare from everybody, the fare is going to have to go up and the people of limited income gets screwed the most. So, I do think that it has grown. Part of it was on buses, which is the bigger fare revision problem in New York.
Chris Hayes: Huh?
Janno Lieber: During COVID, we told everybody because of safety reasons, we roped off the front to protect the bus driver and told everybody to get on the back and don’t pay and we’ve never put that two space back in the tube. On subways, I started talking about the fare revision problem a few months into, when I got this job. And people poo-pooed it, but it was definitely growing very quickly. But in the last six months we knocked it down by 25% with simple physical interventions that make it harder to jump over, to open the gate, all that stuff that you see Chris.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it does seem to me like this really is one of those places where design has a lot to do with it. Like I’ve been in other systems and in other systems you can’t jump it. It’s actually not a physical option. Whereas in New York it definitely is a physical option.
Janno Lieber: Listen, we got great athletes in New York and many of them are showing it in that way. But listen, the bottom line is you’re right. And if you go to Stockholm, if you go to other places, and even in Washington, D.C. now, which has much bigger problems in their subway economically, you see these modern fare gates that are much more preventative than ours.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: The old turnstiles don’t cut it anymore. We got a billion dollars in our new capital program that I’m waiting for the legislature and the governor to agree on for replacing the turnstiles in 70% of the system. So you’re right, we got to do it. But just to be clear for the affordability standpoint, we have been the biggest proponents since somewhat successfully of what we call fair fares, which is a 50% discount on the subway and bus fare for people of low income. And that is proof that we never want fare revision to be a crime of poverty.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: But if people who have the dough and if I see one more lady on the Upper East Side, on the other end of the Q train scooting through the gate with her $8 latte —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Janno Lieber: — I’m going to go crazy.
Chris Hayes: I’ve seen the same and it gives me exactly the same feeling inside. I’m going to be totally honest. Let end on a sort of forward looking note. I mean, these, these systems we have are amazing inheritances of this kind of insane past. I mean, when you read about what it took to build the subway system, dozens and dozens of people died making this thing. I mean, it was unbelievably dangerous work. People worked 16-hour days. It was brutal. They gave their lives in many ways. And through the years, this system has been built to make New York what it can be. And it’s true for any dense metro area that the transit system is what enables it.
And so as we look forward to the future, like, can you imagine a kind of world in which we can build more in which we could create new systems in which we can run new lines through different parts of the bureau. Is that a vision that you have and is it a plausible vision?
Janno Lieber: Yeah. And number one, we’re doing it because it’s not just the Second Avenue subway extension taking it from the rather wealthy precincts of the Upper East Side up to Harlem, which has been promised for 75 years —
Chris Hayes: Seventy-five years.
Janno Lieber: — if we’re going to do it. But we’re talking about taking a sort of quasi abandoned freight rail line that goes from Brooklyn to Queens, the two most populous counties in the city of New York and turning it into a light rail line. There is finally with the switch on and the recognition of the need for housing production, a recognition that we must grow or we, or we risk our future. And people recognize that transit has to be part of it. If you want to build the housing, if you want us continue to grow and accommodate new people, you’re going to have to have transit.
So we’re always looking for opportunities, but part of it is we got to have our suburbs willing to build more housing and we’ve got great —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Janno Lieber: — mass transit to Long Island and Metro-North service up to the Hudson Valley, Westchester and the Hudson Valley. It’s operating at like 99% on time performance. It’s fantastic. It has capacity. We need more housing production. That’s part of the story here. The decision makers got to focus on that.
Chris Hayes: Well, I’ll end on a story which is that my father, I lived in the Bronx in a neighborhood called Norwood. My father worked in Lower Manhattan, the financial district. And I remember him coming home on summer days. This is before the system was air conditioned. And he would come in, he’d come all the way up through Manhattan on the subway into the Northwest Bronx. And he would come in the door, and it looked like someone had poured a bucket over him. I mean, it was a comical image. I could see him standing there just from this hour, 20 minutes on a packed rush hour. And then we moved later in life and we moved to Riverdale in the Bronx by the (inaudible) Metro-North.
Janno Lieber: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And he started taking that Metro-North into Grand Central 18 minutes air conditioned. The improvement in the man’s life. I mean, really, I cannot tell you between these two commutes.
Janno Lieber: That was what the D train in Norwood?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. It was the D to Norwood, exactly.
Janno Lieber: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: D all the way up. And it was a true life change for him. Then he started working for the public health department in East Harlem. Then he only take it to 125th. It’s like 12 minutes. Anyway, this is neither here nor there, but it can really make your life different. I mean, what you’re enduring during your commute is a huge part of your day and it’s a lot of your life that you’re going to spend doing that.
Janno Lieber: Yeah. And listen, people in New York are hip to the fact that we are equipping all the tunnels now with cellular connectivity. You can actually do work on a lot of our system more and more. We’re going to do it. You can keep doing it every time we go into a tunnel. We’re going to wire it. And you can read a book. You see people reading books. You see people doing their homework.
Chris Hayes: Physical books, yeah.
Janno Lieber: It could be actually better than sitting there in traffic —
Chris Hayes: Oh.
Janno Lieber: — even if you can read, you can listen to your own music with your earbuds. You don’t have to need the radio in the car. This can be a better part of life than sitting in traffic. Americans, I mean, maybe they love their cars, but New Yorkers, we get that this could be a preference.
Chris Hayes: Janno Lieber is the Chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the tolls, roads, bridges, and Metro rapid and surface transit here in the greater Metro area. It’s a very, very important job. That was such a fun conversation. Thank you.
Janno Lieber: Thank you.
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Chris Hayes: One’s again, great thanks to Janno Lieber, Chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. You know, granted I’m a transit nerd, but God, I love that conversation. So curious if it made compelling listening for those outside the New York Metro area. So send us an e-mail, withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. Follow us on TikTok by searching for #withpod. You could follow me on Threads or Bluesky or the app formally known as Twitter @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News. Produced by Donie Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
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