The MTA board gave final approval Wednesday to a sweeping package of bus and subway service cuts that will mean longer waits and more crowded slower trips for millions of straphangers.
The service cuts – set to begin this summer – include eliminating 33 local and express bus routes, halting overnight service on another 15 routes and ending weekend service on 16 routes.
Two subway lines will disappear from the map, and waits for many off-peak subway trains will increase by two minutes, officials said.
The vote came after riders, transit advocates, union officials and a few politicians urged the MTA to find some way to maintain current levels of service.
“Today is truly a sad and disappointing day for the straphangers of New York City,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said.
But some blasted city and state officials for not adequately funding mass transit. “The decisions that were made that led us to this point were made in City Hall and Albany,” William Henderson, executive director of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Council.
“We all need to demand our elected officials give public transit the attention it deserves.”
Transit officials said the MTA lost approximately $750 million in expected revenues because of state funding cuts and declining tax revenues.
“This is really going to change the New York way of life, and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty,” said Andrew Albert, a non-voting rider representative to the board.
Albert commended the MTA for trying to minimize the pain by revising an earlier draft of its plans. But, Albert said, “you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig.”
Andrew Saul, board vice chairman, said there’s no hope of a financial rescue in the continued recession.
“There will be no outside help, from the city, the state or from the counties,” Saul said.
Other cost-reducing moves that didn’t require a vote include laying off up to 600 token booth clerks and 450 administrative workers in the coming weeks. Hundreds of bus drivers also are set to get pink slips later this year.
Even after the service cuts, the MTA will still have a budget gap of nearly $400 million, officials said.
Some transit advocates and elected officials had asked the MTA board to divert 10% of its federal stimulus money maintain service.
But transit officials have said the agency’s construction and maintenance budget has an even bigger budget gap and the MTA can’t afford to shift stimulus money to day-to-day expenses such as wages.
