The Battle for Gotham (44 page)

The Westway battle raged during the 1970s and into the 1980s until Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Hugh Carey opted to trade in the federal highway funds in 1985 for a combination of transit and highway investments just as the opportunity for all the states to trade in such funding was about to expire. “There is no question the debate over Westway, in the end, was a plebiscite on mass transit or highways,” says Kent Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society. “It crystallized the issue and strengthened the resolve of transit advocates. The Lower Manhattan Expressway victory was a mere skirmish in comparison; Westway was the Armageddon of highways in the city.” “The real impetus was anticar,” adds Albert Butzel, the lead lawyer in the fight against Westway. “It was an opportunity to get rid of a superhighway and to use the money for mass transit. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was the beginning of the end of the automobile fixation; Westway expanded the debate. People realized that the lifeline of the city was mass transit, not highways.”

TRANSIT REINVESTMENT WAS HUGE

The defeat of Westway resulted in an enormous reinvestment in the city public transit system, the most in decades. Nationally, trading in highway funds for transit investment was rare. A 1974 federal law first permitted this. Portland, Oregon, was the first to take advantage. Boston traded in highway money to reinvest and reopen some closed suburban rail lines. Later, for the Big Dig, House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA) got a special allocation of four billion dollars. Other cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore traded highway for transit funding.

The 1985 trade-in set a pattern for New York trading in highway funds for transit funds that has continued ever since with each five-year Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) capital plan. But it took that significant early trade-in money (only part, but a significant part, of the total funding) to begin to reverse decades of neglect that had accumulated since 1956. In that year, the year of passage of the Federal Highway Act, the building of the Interstate Highway System began, and New York instituted a policy of “deferred maintenance,” as Robert Caro points out in
The Power Broker
. “So superbly engineered and maintained had the system been previously (New York had been enormously proud of its subways) that it took years for this systematic neglect to take its toll.” By the late 1960s, it had almost reached bottom. “When Robert Moses came to power in 1934,” Caro adds, “the city’s mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst.”
⁴

The first reinvestment was critical to the dramatic turnaround and total upgrade of the citywide system. Today, many users take for granted reasonable subway conditions and find plenty of weaknesses to complain about. But in the mid-1970s, conditions were horrific. Train cars regularly broke down and were taken out of service. Graffiti covered every car. Doors didn’t close. The schedule was erratic. The system’s infrastructure, invisible to the public, was in terrible shape. Signals and switches failed. Tracks were unsafe. Garbage overflowed station containers. Subway cars and buses were in use well beyond their replacement time. Most stations were deteriorated.

In 2004 the New York Public Interest Research Group Straphangers Campaign mounted an exhibit at the Municipal Art Society titled “The Riders and the Rebirth of City Transit: 25 Years of Advocacy.” A companion booklet noted, “It may be hard for many of us to imagine now, but our city’s subways and buses were close to collapse in 1979, the year the New York Public Interest Groups founded the Straphangers Campaign. Subway . . . service was so horrendous that a daily commute was enough to make residents question why on earth they chose to live here. The same thoughts occurred to the city’s business leaders, who often cited poor transit as the leading reason for moving out of New York.”

In 1981 frequent track fires and derailments prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to launch an investigation into the safety of the subway system. Ridership fell to the lowest level since 1917. All of that has been substantially reversed. The station upgrades are particularly visible because the “Percent for Art” policy has meant inclusion of artwork in every renovated station. Nearly 200 stations have been upgraded and artwork installed since 1985 in the 722-mile system, the Works Progress Administration all over again. Sadly, some of the first rebuilt stations are beginning to show their age, primarily for lack of regular cleaning and maintenance. Money for capital projects, with contracts available for the well placed, is always more readily available than the operational funds necessary to maintain the facilities, which requires salaried, union labor.

REINVESTMENT PAYS

Since Westway’s demise in 1985, approximately $1.4 billion in Westway trade-in funds have flowed to fix the subways and buses. Additional funds have gone into the regional system. The trade-in for transit funding, what Westway opponents advocated from day one, was the leverage that rebuilt the system. The enormous borrowing the state initiated under MTA chairman Richard Ravitch would not have been possible without it. “It is scary to think what city transit would be like without that support,” says Gene Russianoff, staff attorney of the Straphangers Campaign. “Some people remember Westway as a symbol of what couldn’t get built, a symbol of how David held off Goliath and saved the subways. The $1.4 billion in trade-in funds was a pittance in terms of need,” notes Butzel, “but it came at a critical time at the beginning of the refocusing on transit that that controversy stimulated.” The system was in terrible disrepair, Butzel adds, so the trade-in funds were just the beginning. But the beginning of a real turnaround they were.

Today, trains are nearly twenty times more reliable. Graffiti on subway cars is negligible, and transit crime, fires, and derailments have all been dramatically reduced. Every subway car and bus has been either rehabilitated or replaced. The subway fleet has been expanded by four hundred cars and buses by eight hundred in order to meet growing demands. Miles and miles of tracks and antiquated signals have been replaced. Mayor Giuliani’s administration slowed that reinvestment when it resumed in 1995 the old pattern by cutting the subway rebuilding program by $625 million over the following five years.
⁵
In 2004 annual ridership had reached 1.4 billion, the highest since the subway’s heyday in the 1950s. In September 2005, the number of daily bus and subway riders reached 7.5 million during weekdays, the highest average daily ridership since June 1971.

The transformation is enormous, but, as historian Mike Wallace points out, “the tangibility of the trade-off” remains elusive. People either forget or downplay the impact of the trade-in money on the subways. “If,” Wallace adds, “you could point to a new Second Avenue subway, people would feel differently.” Under Mayor Bloomberg, construction of that desperately needed subway line was resumed.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Mort Downey put it all in perspective probably better than anyone else could. He was with the Federal Department of Transportation from 1977 to 1981, chief financial officer for the MTA from 1981 to 1993, and then back to the federal Department of Transportation as deputy secretary for transportation from 1993 to 2001. Downey remembers this period well, having been in the eye of the storm for more than a decade. “The needs of transit were being debated independent of the Westway issue,” says Downy, but they weren’t making any headway in gaining new funding from either the governor or the legislature. Politically, however, it became clear to Governor Hugh Carey that in order to get Westway approved, he would have to create the illusion that he was also delivering funds for transit. “He announced publicly that he had applied to Washington for $600 million,” remembers Downey. But it was not at all true. When Washington denied that an application had been made, “Carey, then desperate to save face, persuaded [DOT secretary Neil] Goldschmidt to say that ‘it was not beyond the realm of possibility.’ But it was all done within the context of getting Westway through.”

Then Carey appointed Richard Ravitch as chairman of the MTA in 1980, and everything began to change. Ravitch started talking about the real conditions and needs of the MTA to rebuild the city’s transit and the suburban railroads. According to Downey:

He said a basic minimum capital investment of $1.5 billion a year was needed, when the whole capital budget was holding at $200 million a year and some of that money was being used not for capital but to save the fare. Ravitch was told not to talk about this because they had to get Westway approved, but he basically said, “I have to do the job you appointed me to do.”

Ravitch went around the governor, directly to the legislature, to get the first five-year [1982-1986] capital budget of $8 billion, so the time of the trade-in decision [1985] was such that it gave a nice boost to the MTA effort. It was a momentum builder. We would not have gotten the second five-year plan without it. It set the pattern. By 1987, we had the second plan, and by the third, the legislature just knew they had to do it. Ravitch got the debate going, but until he lit the fire under them, they were not supportive of doing both.

By 2007, Downey estimates, $74 billion has been spent rebuilding the system of the subway, buses, and suburban railways.

THE BIG DIG FACTOR

Another significant factor demands consideration. Let’s call it the “Big Dig” factor. One disastrous news story follows the next, it seems, about Boston’s Big Dig, the tunnel highway that connects the city and Logan International Airport. The tunnel is part of the larger central highway system through Boston. Concrete in the walls of the tunnel seems not to be of required quality and may be giving way. Ceiling panels in the tunnel were discovered to be faulty after one fell on a car and crushed a passenger to death. Other construction defects have been exposed over the years. Overruns have kept costs mounting from an original $2.7 billion estimate to what seems to be probably a $15 billion final cost. Started in 1991, the connector tunnel was opened in 2003 and replaced the elevated highway that had divided the city from the waterfront and the North End. Significantly, it does more than replace; it adds capacity.

Does anyone really believe that Westway’s construction would not have gotten the city and state into similar trouble, at least financially? Westway’s budget was expected to grow from $2 billion to $4 billion just because of inflation. Downey figures it might have hit $10 billion before completion, less than the Big Dig because the Big Dig may be more complicated, Downey says. It crosses a river and goes through the heart of downtown Boston. Yet Westway was also largely to be an underwater tunnel.

But the much heralded aspect that Westway would have been funded with 90 percent federal and 10 percent state funds would not have lasted the duration of construction. That commitment expired before Westway would have been finished. “Between 1978 and 1981, the picnic was over,” Downey says of unbuilt segments of the Interstate Highway System like Westway. “The mood in Congress was ‘get it done’ and let’s move on. The first deadline was set in 1978 and changed in 1981 to 1983,
unless
, as in the New York case, there was litigation.” Then it was 1985. The litigation was ongoing. That was the reason Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo finally agreed to the trade-in that year. There was no guarantee of Westway funds, but the trade-in was secure.

Every other state except New York and Massachusetts had finished their interstate highway segments or were in construction. “There was a total of $6.5 billion to cover trade-ins around the country, not enough for both projects, so those two would have been hanging out there looking for money,” Downey explains. New York, like Massachusetts, would be scrambling for money, and mostly it would have to come from the state and city budgets because enough could never again be extracted from Congress that wouldn’t take up the transportation budget for the entire state. In fact, Downey adds, subsequent allocations to Massachusetts included a provision guaranteeing that a certain percentage of the money go to projects other than the Big Dig because “it was sucking up so much of the state allocation.”

STEEL-WHEEL JOBS VERSUS RUBBER-TIRE JOBS

Westway proponents vociferously argued that Westway was important for the creation of jobs at a time when the New York economy was seriously hurting. Union leader Peter Brennan said on CBS’s
Eye On
program in 1976, “Will we build a Westway, and open the doors to jobs, whether it be office buildings or warehouses? . . . Do we talk about getting New York turned around, or do we want to put a China Wall around New York and all die of starvation looking at each other? . . .”

The jobs issue pulls at the heartstrings, but what kind of jobs and for whom were never understood. Jacobs focused on this in our conversation:

The jobs argument breaks down into a few things. The Lower Manhattan Expressway debate was the first time the question was ever raised as to where are these jobs? Outside or in New York? And the ones that are in New York, how temporary are they? How long do they last? The other thing about jobs is that under this kind of scheme, permanent jobs are eliminated for the sake of temporary jobs in construction.

In fact, this is what New York has been doing for years: it’s been cannibalizing itself for the sake of temporary construction jobs. It has lost all kinds of low-cost industrial space. It has driven out—apart from those that want to leave the city for various reasons—businesses and all kinds of jobs, not only for highways but for urban renewal, for public housing, for anything.

It was the expressway that I first saw this issue confronted head-on [at a public hearing], and I had a conversation with Harry Van Arsdale, who was head of the Central Labor Council. In fact, I quoted this somewhere in
Economy of Cities
where a study of how many jobs there were in the SoHo area, before it was SoHo, and how many would be wiped out by the expressway. Van Arsdale was there with a lot of paid construction workers who were given a day’s pay, they told us, to come to City Hall and cheer or boo at the right points. They all left promptly before five o’clock.