Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News joining us now.
We mentioned the wonderful snow removal above ground, there is beneath the ground as well on the bus as well. JOHNA. Lieber joined us now MTA chare and CEO here in New York City. John, I remember years ago in Boston the snow, the salt, the slush drifted down and basically shut down the large system of Kenmore Square. Are you and your team worried about major breakdowns just because of the harshness of this or is it just an emergency as usual?
You know, Tom, It's an interesting point. Rob was talking about the advances in forecasting. The advantage of that is that allows us to do a ton of preparation, and fifteen thousand MTA workers labored over the weekend and into
today to make sure we could put on service. And we were able to maintain bus and subway and Metro North and Long Island Roilroad commuter service right through the storm, with delays, with imperfections, but we were able to operate, which is not always the case in the past, and that's because of preparation. And our concern now is we're operating a full Monday morning commute, which is amazing. But you know, the obviously with a risk of thaw and icing,
that presents new problems. So we're moving on and how we manage the impacts of the storm. Just as you suggest, Jeneral, give us the status of the subway and the bus system as it is right now and kind of how do you think it might play out over the next twenty four hours. Well, here, the bottom line is we're operating service on all subway lines, on all bus lines.
There are some delays because partly because we have crews that live in New Jersey and they're not able to get in because New Jersey Transit is out of business for today.
Shame there in New Jersey a little bit.
Now, listen, everybody's different. We were able to survive this storm with it, I guess I said, fifteen thousand people doing a ton of work. But the bottom line is we're running. We're running every line. Metro North is running, you know, five hundred and fifty trains today, Long Island Road running seven hundred and fifty trains, both of them
on kind of robust holiday schedules or weekend schedules. Check your if you're listening, MTA commuter check your train time app or your MTA website MTA dot info for specifics. But we're running service uh and we're ready to We're ready to keep that going as we go forward in the week.
General persistent cold is in the forecast here heard from Rob Carolyn. Maybe for the week, maybe two weeks of well below average temperatures. How does that impact your system?
Listen, you know when you're ice is a is the enemy of good service on rail, right, So you have to have run your de icing trains constantly, make sure that the switches don't actually freeze up, and we have maintainers literally standing by our major switches, our major interlockings to constantly de ice. But we got all the snow by running service yesterday right through the system. We got
the snow off of the third rail. We've been maximizing our use of diesel engines on the commuter rails which don't depend on the third rail, and we're going to keep at it. So those are their new challenges brought on by icing, especially for the bus system, which is one hundred percent chain that all the wheels are chained. But we're going to keep managing through.
Can I ask one non storm question?
Sure?
Yeah. What is so fascinating is you've been very vocal in your support of our new mayor, and you've also said that we need a lot of study of free buses. Give us an update on how close we are to free bus service of the MT You.
Know today is today's really about the muscling through the storm, honestly, Sean. But but you know, I'll just say this is that the mayor, the new Mayor Mamdani, is very pro transit, and I welcome that. I've also made clear that, uh, you know, if we're going to talk about something as radical and as as impactful as making a whole section of our system free, we need to do a ton of study and it's not a flip the switch type thing.
So well, I'm sure that you know the governor who is leading, uh you know, the with her state of the state message, making a lot of investments, but also mindful of the we've brought the MT eight back to financial stability under Hocal's leadership, and we don't want to mess with that. So we'll be moving methodically under Governor Hockel on addressing this idea.
Amid this storm. Thank you, for the conversation for General Leebert is with an MTA chair and CEO as well