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I made a joke earlier to Paul Sweeney, how are you getting home on Tuesday? How do you get picked at work? And I got silence from Paul. You don't really know right now?
I don't In New Jersey, Transit will wait on them, but I suspect I'll be spending another evening in the metropolis.
We will get an update now from a gentleman with experiences. This a legit major storm experience. General Lieber joins us now with the MTA Jenna. What's your biggest headache right now?
Listen? We got service running. You know, the challenges are are well known. We got to keep our snow fighting equipment. We got jet engines, snowblowers operating on the subways, literally on clearing the tracks, especially in the outdoor areas. The challenge of you know, buses moving around is the same as any vehicle. But we are meeting the challenge, Tom, Paul. We are. We're running subway service, albeit on a little you know, reduced frequencies. We got buses out there. Metro
North is operating on a reduced schedule. The one piece of our system that is on suspension is the Long Island Railroad. It's no secret that Long Island's getting hammered, and that wasn't the same place to operate. But otherwise subways, buses, commuter rail operating, how does.
The wind play into it? I mean, I'm calling it a snow it cane. I get the temperature, snow is snow. But like the wind on the various trunks that you have, I mean underground, it doesn't affect it. But how do you adapt to the wind?
Generallyver the issue with wind mostly is actually the impact it has undrifting. What you know when you have for example, we have some areas in the subway system that are what we call an open cut that's like a little valley, a depressed area below grade, but it's still open to the sky, and snow tends to accumulate, and the wind pushes the snow into those areas. The drift on the commuter railroads sometimes we'll cover the third rail our source
of power. So that is and obviously for people who are driving buses and even trains, the visibility issues associated with wind. That wind is the dominant factor in determining when we can bring back Long Island railroad service at the east end of our system.
So what is the latest thinking, John about the Long Island Railroad here, because, again, as you've mentioned, and we've heard from the weather folks, that's really bearing the brunt of the storm.
Yeah. Well, we did an orderly shut down last night at about one am. The goal is always to get everybody home. We did that last night with some extra service late late, and now we're going to be focused on orderly resumption of service, hopefully in time to operate tomorrow, when you know, the world will will be getting a little bit back to normal. So that's the approach that we take, say fifty first, you know, and taking account of where the snow accumulations and the drifting may have
impacted on service. You know, one thing to bear in mind is in our big train yards, that's where we tend to get you know, the biggest drifting issues, and you know sometimes that inhibits your ability to put cars into the system into service. So we'll be digging out from in the yards and making sure that again the third rail and the tracks themselves are clear of snow.
We continue with General liber MTA share quality time from his crisis center, Paul Sweeney, General liber Jenna.
So all your personnel, the critical personnel of the MTA, how do you manage getting those folks to where they need to be, because, boy, they have to get there just like the rest of us.
It's part of the deal when you sign up to work for the MTA that you may have to come in under extreme circumstances. When the rest of the world is being told to stay home, our workers are being told to come in, and they do. They they worked through the night, They worked heavily. Yesterday we got seventy thousand employees at the MTA. Thousands of them have been out.
Many of them have slept in you know, in bus garages or in rail the rail control center where our head of Subways spent the night at the bus command center. It's part of the deal working for the NTA. And you know, I talked to Governor Hokel in the last you know, in the last hour or two and uh and and she's really focused on on you know, a tip of the hat to the to the workforce.
A General Lever. I love artificial intelligence. It can ruin your day. General, you gotta help me here with the one point eight million dollars per inch? Myth Now, this is a department of sanitation. Did every inch of snow costs one million dollars? What's your every inch of blizzard that costs the MTA? Do you have a number? Even if you don't tell me, do you have a number in your head?
I'll tell you the absolute truth. I have no idea whatsoever. It's that you've given me new metric. We use analytics here like crazy to evaluate how well we're doing, hopefully to operate more efficiently every day. You know revenue you know costs per car mile, cost per revenue mile for its subway and bus and commuter rail. You've given me a new metric to study. But right now I have no idea what to say to you.
John Old. This is the second big, big winter storm of the season. It's arguably one of the biggest storms we've had in decades in this area. How's your system kind of holding up? Is there a cumulative effect where boy, we can't We really don't want to have a third or a fourth storm this season.
Honestly, the challenge is is you know the same every time, which is you have to get the snow off, You have to make sure you have enough people to operate fully. You have to chain all the buses, you have to move car you know, subway cars around and put them in the tunnel, store them in the tunnels. You know, it's not that we we we every storm makes it harder.
To the contrary, you know, for better where we're getting better at preparing for these because we've had repetitive storms and we're going to continue to try to get better. In the air of climate change, we're dealing with all kinds of extreme weather events. You know, right now we're forgetting about torrential rainfall and and uh and rising sea levels, but those are issues for the MTA as well.
What does the morning look like, let's say four or five a m. Tuesday morning. Mister Lieber, can you say back to normal?
I don't know about normal, but listen, our friends in at the Department of Sanitation are clearing not just the streets but the bus stops. That's really important, something that I know the Mayor wants to do better at compared to the first time around, so that our bus people who depend on buses will be able to get on and off them without having to climb climb over a four foot mind of snow. Who shot that's an important issue.
That's brilliant. Who actually picks up, shovel and shovels a bus stop? Who is that person?
Well, it's a lot of it's it's folks who work for the Department of Sanitation. They're supplemented. This is City of New York as opposed to MTR but they're supplemented by Parks Department workers. And they're actually hiring folks off the street for extra shovelers this time around. So I'm very hopeful that that particular challenge will be addressed, and we're we're gonna be clearing not just the tracks, but also our yards as I mentioned, which is where trains
tend to get stuck. Uh And and there are you know a lot of complex switches that can inhibit things if they're not properly in order.
One more question, Paul, you were you were impressed by the buses.
Yeah, just walking to work this morning, I saw some of the buses here. Talk to us about the buses because boy, there, I haven't seen too many snowplows out yet because the storm is still raging here. How do the buses adapt here?
It's it's old fashioned stuff, Paul. It's we put chains on every on the tires of every bus, and that that that gets done in the days leading up to the storm, when we know it's coming. You know, forecasting is getting better and better, we chain the entire fleet, and we take all the articulated buses, which are you know, tend to move around a little more in slippery conditions. We take them out of service, and we make plans accordingly.
General, thank you so much for taking precious time this morning. This is the MTA of New York City as they deal with the storm, as I'm sure we're seeing in Philadelphia and Boston.