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I find tax policy to be endlessly complicated, so I'm still not sure how MTA's budget went from "ok" to "holy crap" in a matter of a few months. Can't you forecast this stuff?
That was the ornate setting on Wednesday for board members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It was the Bronx leg of their road tour to hear what New Yorkers think of plans to slash train and bus service to plug an enormous hole in their budget. Everyone knew going in what the several hundred people who showed up would think. They hated everything.They hated the idea of eliminating bus routes. They hated shriveled train runs. They hated threats to the Access-a-Ride program. They really hated a plan to eliminate free MetroCards for students.
Some people relied on sarcasm. John Rozankowski took the board members to task for, in his view, valuing "high-tech gimmicks" over basic services. He drew laughs from the crowd as he slipped into alliterative high gear and rolled his R's to denounce the authority's "myriad menagerie of mechanical marvels."
There are several problems here together in terms of forcasting problems -- like the funding problems in general -- come from Albany. They didn't pass the plan to add congestion pricing and tolls to the East River bridges -- because they said we didn't need to, no they had a better plan! Turns out their plan didn't crunch the numbers correctly.
Couple that with general lack of funding for things like student MetroCards as well as the slow drain the city has put the MTA through (they fund less of the budget than they did 20 years ago). And you've got a whole host of simultaneously problems.
Unfortunately for these meetings, the protestors are protesting the wrong people -- egged on by political leaders who want to deflect blame. And why wouldn't they? The blame is on them. Just more NY politics as usual.