Riding the Bus

Happy Holidays from the MTA!!

By Maurice Michaane

So this past Saturday I had dinner with Father Tony and his partner at Vatan Indian restaurant in Gramercy. We set 6:30pm as the meeting time! Low and behold, this high-maintenance queen was waiting, and it wasn’t until 6:55pm that they arrived.

Why where they late? The 1-2-3 (the red line for you out of town folk) was having extreme delays. It’s the holiday season, and the MTA can’t even function the mass-transit efficiently during one of the busiest seasons of the year. As a life long New Yorker, I have wondered for years how the greatest city in the world can have such a dysfunctional and poorly managed mass-transit system. The MTA 2010 budget is upwards of $11billion according to a recent NYTimes article.

Headline after headline, the public is constantly reminded how the MTA spends our money frivolously. According to a recent report by NYS Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, “inefficiencies and redundancies in the process have cost the agency approximately $2.9 billion in unnecessary spending”. Want another example of out of control spending? The TWU (Transit Union) as part of their contract has 100% of the health care costs paid for. Most people in this country are “hire-at-will”, meaning they can be let-go at anytime, and do not have a “union contract”. Furthermore, most people pay a weekly/bi-weekly co-pay of their healthcare premium that their employer provides. Before returning to graduate school, I paid $30 every two weeks for my healthcare as part of my employee benefits. Lastly, after 25 or 30 years in the system, a transit union employee can retire with full benefits and a pension for life. And if it couldn’t get worse, the cash strapped MTA by judicial fiat is now forced to provide the 35,000 transit union workers a series of huge raises, costing somewhere around $100million to the taxpayer.

(Psst: Father Tony here, after the jump and the rest of Maurice's commentary, I've supplied a photo of Maurice at Vatan without his approval. He's so cute!)