Monday the MTA announced it is "postponing" $30 Million in service enhancements it pledged in December. Not surprisingly the chatter around websites yesterday was deeply cynical: phrases like "so not shocked", "another lie from them", "they wonder why people hate them" dominated comment threads. To be sure, postponement here means canceled. The service enhancements were dangled in front of the public in the days before approving a 4% fare increase in December, and that promise was affirmed by the MTA CEO in a State of the MTA speech just 3 weeks ago. Clearly yesterday's announcement has struck many a New Yorker as just another failed promise from the MTA, and has many pointing back to the December announcement of these enhancements as just a political ploy to temper opposition to the fare increase. The MTA said yesterday it was postponing the enhancements due to budget shortfalls. Where the truth lays is probably somewhere in between. However for the MTA, this postponement was ill timed and does serious harm not just to its own crediibility, but to the push for congestion pricing and transit advocacy in general.

The MTA's credibility problem and ours: not only does the MTA's December announcement and SOTMTA now seem darkly calculating. but the MTA gives credence to Congestion Pricing opponents whose statements are otherwise dismissed as political hyperbole, sycophants like Assemblyman Richard Brodsky and Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner and others have argued that funding for the MTA will be cut if it receives funding from Congestion Pricing (CP), or that the MTA will squander the money. These arguments have little credibility, but things like yesterday's decision gives the public pause and it gives the ridiculous arguments of CP opponents a second life. And here in lies the real issue, the MTA's credibility problem is no longer just their own, no longer is MTA bungling just grist for snarky blog posts; their credibility problem has the potential to really get in the way of making serious and important changes to how transportation is managed in NYC. Correcting this problem is serious challenge for advocates.

One thing that strikes me is advocates need to find a way to help the public take greater ownership of the MTA. I'm not sure what that would look like, doubtless it is a huge challenge; if I had a good idea how to go about it then that would be the title of this story. Perhaps it lays in encouraging people to call their representatives with more frequency; perhaps it means leaders of important groups like Transportation Alternatives and Straphangers, et. al. fully repudiating the leadership of the MTA.

Transit Advocates might also do well to call out the MTA on very ill conceived ideas. This will run counter to their instincts, but advocates may need to be the sober drivers and less the cheerleaders. The 2nd avenue subway plan and the 7 line extension strike me as colossal wastes of money. While we all prefer Subways, the are incredibly expensive to build, particularly in Manhattan. The services they provide could be achieved at far lower costs using light rail and express bus services - so long as DOT and the NYPD would play ball and actually enforce dedicated transit lanes. Likewise big glamorous stations like the aimless plan for Fulton Street should be looked on with great suspicion. The MTA can restore credibility by focusing on practical fiscally achievable goals. CEO Elliot Sander's State of the MTA speech earlier this month should have be resolutely rejected as unrealistic and unfocused. Transit Advocates need to be there to keep the MTA's feet on the ground when it roles out these pie in the sky ideas, not hold them up as utopian dreams.

As for the MTA the path to improving its credibility internally is easier. First off would be to stop waging political games with fare hikes and false promises, and issuing excuses that don't pass the smell test with the public. When the MTA raises fares it should accept that it will be hated. This is a fact of life and goes with the business; the MTA can take comfort in that it will be hated less than if it over promises and then backs out later.

The MTA should have considered roling out a protion of the enhancements it promised. The MTA says it is postponing the service enhancements because it has only taken in $306M from a variety of taxes on real estate sales and mortgages, which is $21M below forecasts. That's roughly a 6.5% drop from expectations of $327M. And this revenue is only %15 of total revenue, so by that measure they have only suffered a dip of about 1% in their expected revenue this quarter. One can imagine that going forward into the rest of the year further shortfalls are expected, never the less, the question remains why not implement, say, a half or a quarter of the proposed new services?

MTA CEO Elliot Sander needs to reign in the dreams and set reasonable expectations. Much to do about new services was made by the MTA on Dec 17, 2007, which is only 3 months ago, at a time the MTA was having trouble politically selling a fare increase. One question that comes out of this is, how long does it take the MTA to assess if it will have the budget for such services? Right now the "postponement" allows for a reassessment in June. Which is also three months away. An MTA spokesperson told me it takes a fiscal quarter to make such assessments. So then why was the MTA making promises in December it could not reasonably make? It shouldn't. While the MTA did make its promise in December with a caveat that it would have to review its finances, its reputation non-the-less proceeds itself and it is compounding its image problem by not being prudent.

Furthermore Elliot Sander had no business reenforcing that promise only three weeks ago in his March 3rd State of the MTA speech:



The MTA says, "The February numbers were not particularly good. The March numbers were dramatically lower than expectations." Sander's presumably reviewed February. Did he not extrapolate forward from those into the future also?

Further more Sander packing his State of the MTA speech with dozens of transit ideas that are nowhere near attainable right now or in the foreseeable future. It would have not been so bad if Sander had been honest then about short term moderation the agency requires. But Sander gave the SOTMTA shortly after the fare hike went into effect and again claimed the service enhancements would take effect; again the point of the speech seemed aimed at tempering public disgruntlement. This has backfired.

The excuses need to stop. The MTA probably needs an integrity panel of editors in its public relations office. That's not a joke or snark. That the MTA is seemingly surprised by the downturn in tax revenues the past three months defies common sense. Looking back to December, the housing market was already in steep decline, and Wall Street has been in turmoil since the Summer of 2007 when Bear first bailed out two of its giant hedge funds. In light of this can the MTA credibly claim it was making resonable forecasts in December if it was not projecting a slump in real estate tax revenues? That Sander affirmed the soundness of those projects only 20 days ago just to repudiate them now seems incredulous.

The MTA is right when it says congestion pricing is an important revenue source for capital improvements and that there is high demand for transit service, and that they need adequate funding. All the more reason the MTA and transit advocates together need to work much harder at restoring its credibility with the public.