🚌 News from the MTA and DOT on Options for the Bus Stop

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello to the 125 members of the Better Block Project 👋 You may have heard, but the new Mamdani Administration is hosting rental ripoff hearings to allow New Yorkers to share their housing experiences directly with the city. We might attend to discuss vacant buildings, but I encourage folks to go regardless. At a minimum it is sure to be entertaining, and I appreciate the city’s willingness to host an open forum. With that, here is the TLDR for this week’s update:

• The MTA shared they need to discuss with DOT before they can move forward on any bus layout changes, and lighting was in DOT’s jurisdiction

• At our DOT meeting, they shared adding a streetlight was under MTA’s jurisdiction, and it might take 7-10 years to get approved

• We’re working with the City Council to get a meeting between the MTA and the DOT on the books to get DOT approval to add the lighting. We’re also working with the DOT to get a faster timeline for the streetlight

• Both meetings echo the need for more city agencies to say “Yes” to meet resident demands, and shift away from the culture of saying “No” and deflecting blame

📣 News from the MTA and DOT on Options for the Bus Stop

This past week, the City Council finally had their meeting with the MTA to discuss the asks from our letter to improve the bus stop. In addition to this, Andre (from Lefferts Place Block Association) and I had the chance to meet with Leroy Branch, Deputy Borough Commissioner for DOT for Brooklyn, and his team to discuss the bus stop improvements.

MTA wants to talk to DOT 👉️ , DOT needs to talk to MTA 👈️ 

I shared the famous Spiderman meme a while back in an update, highlighting how NYPD, DSNY, DSS, MTA and DOT were all playing hot potato with what to do about the bus stop on Franklin and Fulton. This week, I was lucky enough to enter directly into the Spiderman universe, as we heard news back from both the MTA and the DOT about the future of the bus stop. What happened is exactly what you thought was going to happen.

First, on Wednesday we heard back from the City Council’s office on how the February 10th meeting with the MTA went. Here is what they shared:

“We met with the MTA yesterday, and they shared that they are open to exploring alternative bus layover designs. However, before moving forward, a meeting with DOT will be necessary to confirm whether they are also open to these ideas; they stated that lighting falls under DOT’s jurisdiction as well.“

Up until this point, it was our understanding that the bus shelter was fully under MTA’s jurisdiction, but based on this meeting that doesn’t seem to be the case. If MTA wants to make a change, it seems they need to have approval from DOT. Note, this is also contrary to what we heard from Anthony Drummond.

Next, Andre and I had a meeting with DOT to discuss the future of the bus stop, and specifically focused on opportunities to improve lighting. The DOT opened the meeting with: the reason there is no lighting at the bus stop is because it is MTA’s jurisdiction. So, if we want to add lighting, we have to talk to the MTA!

😵‍💫 So WTF is happening?

Good question! After diving in a bit more with Leroy Branch at DOT, we learned the subtle nuance. DOT has to be the one to add the streetlight, but the property in front of the bus stop is technically MTA jurisdiction. So, in order for a new streetlight to be added, MTA has to approve and then DOT can add it in. We picked a real easy problem to solve 🙃.

In our meeting with Leroy, we also learned more about timing and approval process for adding the streetlight:

• A historical streetlight could take up to 7-10 years. This is because any streetlight needs to come as a part of a capital project, which is a longer approval process. As a reminder, it took ~1 year to build the Empire State Building

• If we wanted a generic streetlight, this could be done in 3 years, as they are a part of a standard install. We communicated we didn’t want this, as it would not fit with the rest of the block

• Streetlights are estimated to cost $75,000. Note, I pushed on this estimate as we’ve heard from another project that it actually only costs $25,000. After some pushing, it does seem like $25,000 is possible

• A lighting study will still need to be done to assess if a streetlight is needed. Note, we already have this approved

The 7-10 year timeframe is simply not acceptable, and I asked Leroy at DOT to see what’s possible to speed this up. There must be at least 1 streetlight hanging around a warehouse somewhere!

🤝 We Need Another Meeting

As next step, the City Council’s office is working to arrange a meeting between DOT and MTA to hash this out. It’s our hope to ensure Leroy and the lighting department at DOT is there so all the right stakeholders are around the table. Our goals for this meeting are to get approval on the lighting, and to discuss bus layout design in more detail to see if there are some options there to add a new bus stop.

City Council expects to get back to us with a date next week.

My impressions from this week

My takeaway from this week’s meeting is New York City needs more government officials who say “yes”. In our meeting with DOT, in responses to our requests the answer was so often here is why this will take a long time or why this isn’t our agency’s responsibility. The sentiment from the meeting with the MTA was similar. It also rhymes with feedback I hear from many officials when presented with resident asks, where the common refrain is “Why is your ask so important? What about other people’s asks?”

I listened to this really insightful podcast last week, from Vlad Tenev, the CEO of the financial technology company Robin Hood. In the podcast, Vlad talks about breaking the “or” tradeoff. Conventional wisdom says you can either have things quickly or have them at higher quality, but you can’t have both. Vlad challenges that and says the best engineers he works with often ship things faster with fewer bugs.

I believe New York City government needs to break this same tradeoff. We need more people in the city who will say yes, and just figure out how to get it done. We can build an efficient government that provides really high quality services and doesn’t raise your taxes. We can solve issues like the bus stop quickly, and solve other problems in other neighborhoods as well. We need more people saying yes and getting things done, and less people saying no.

That’s all for this week’s update! As usual, if you like what we’re doing at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone you know that is looking to get more engaged in the neighborhood.

See you next week,

David