Transportation Report Reflects Work of MPA-ESP Students

A set of recommendations for reinventing New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority should be quite familiar to MPA-ESP students who studied the same issues in a Spring 2014 workshop advised by Professor Rohit T. Aggarwala.

Aggarwala is a member of the MTA’s Reinventing Transportation Commission, a group of international experts convened at the request of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Chaired by former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the commission released a report last week calling for better management at the MTA, a commitment to the highest standards of service, and additional revenue for transit.

A professor of professional practice at SIPA, Aggarwala joined the SIPA faculty last fall, teaching a course on Urban Sustainability in the MPA-ESP program and then advising an ESP workshop that studied the MTA and Port Authority last spring. The workshop’s client was the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit research and advocacy group that works on land use, transportation, and other issues relating to the built environment and planning. The RPA had asked SIPA to look into how New York’s two major infrastructure entities—the MTA and the Port Authority—compare to peers elsewhere in the US and around the world.

By coincidence, just as the workshop was wrapping up, the governor asked the MTA to appoint a commission to look into the same questions as they related to the MTA. Aggarwala was appointed to the commission in June. Another Columbia professor—Kate Ascher, a professor of urban development at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation—and the RPA’s president, Bob Yaro, also were members of the commission.

“While it was totally a coincidence that my students had been working on the same topic, it wasn’t a coincidence that SIPA students were working on an issue of current debate.” One of the great things about teaching at SIPA, he said, was engaging students on a topic “that within a couple of months was getting directly connected to policy makers.”

In a conversation with SIPA News, Aggarwala talked bringing student findings to the commission, of which he is a member. “Part of my contribution to the commission was based on the work my students did and the findings we reached together in class.”

The commission, Aggarwala said, was charged with taking “a hard, serious look at the future of the MTA.” Comparisons to global peers in places like Hong Kong and London, he said, were not favorable.

The main findings:

The system needs more money. “This is one of the clearest findings of the commission: without significantly increased funding, there is no way New York will ever have a world-class transit system,” Aggarwala said. “There’s no silver bullet, but we need to look at congestion pricing, tolls, and transit fares.

“There are different ways to pay, but we are completely underfunding a system that is critical to the economic health of the city and region.”

The MTA has to execute projects more efficiently. Repeated delays in capital projects are “embarrassing and outrageous,” Aggarwala said, and create skepticism among the public that they’ll ever get value for paying more money.

“If you don’t trust an organization to use money well, you don’t want to give it more money,” he added. “The MTA has to deliver service in way that gives the public confidence that it’s spent wisely.”

The level of user experience should match the standards we take for granted elsewhere. That means countdown clocks in every station, air-conditioning on platforms, and wireless access throughout the system.

“One of the things my students learned by comparing the MTA and Port Authority to their global peers is that [agencies elsewhere] have found ways to address this,” Aggarwala explained. “Seoul retrofitted an old system with station doors that enabled A/C and increased safety.”

“A transit system’s job is to get people from A to B, but to be world-class it also has to be pleasant and productive and efficient,” he said. “You want the transit system to be the mode of choice” not only in Manhattan but throughout the city.

In many ways, Aggarwala said, the report reflects a consensus that existed before the commission was formed in June. But the commission still serves a valuable function.

“It’s easy for commissioners who are academics or advocates or trade association leaders to say whatever we want,” he said. “Many people on the commission have been in government and know how difficult it can be for an elected leader to start a conversation. The commission can’t provide the political will, but we can help articulate the problem.

“I hope that’s what we accomplished. We’ll see what the elected officials do with it.”

This semester, Aggarwala is teaching another MPA-ESP workshop. In the spring he’ll teach his course on urban sustainability and also advise an capstone project related to the the transit system for USP concentrators.