MTA falls short of climate change plan goals, audit says

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority hasn’t fully implemented a plan for hardening the subway system against climate change, according to an audit by New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

The 18-page report faults New York City Transit for green-lighting capital projects without making sure they were resistant to flooding, inconsistently activating extreme weather plans and not sufficiently checking equipment to make sure it can withstand severe weather.

“Friday’s extreme weather shows how serious and immediate the challenges are for our transit system,” DiNapoli said in a statement.

He said NYCT “has made significant improvements since Hurricane Sandy hit, but that more can be done, starting with the release of their climate change adaptation master plan.”

In response, the MTA pointed to last week’s storm as proof that it enhanced the subway’s infrastructure against increasingly more extreme storms.

“Crews were able to resume full service while the storm continued to drench the area,” spokesperson Michael Cortez wrote in a statement.

In 2009, the MTA issued the Blue Ribbon Commission’s Report on Sustainability which made nearly 100 capital project recommendations. In a sample review of those projects, the comptroller found they were often incomplete. In one example, NYCT completed just two out of six flood resistant projects, the report said.

Transit advocates said the task of keeping the subways running during storms shouldn’t fall just on the MTA.

“The subway is all too often acting as a second sewer system,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy director at Riders Alliance. “That is minimized when the city is more absorbent and so less water ends up in the subway to begin with. So there's less water to be pumped out.”

Pearstein said the city needs to invest in less pavement and also pavement that can absorb water.

In an interview with Fox 5, MTA CEO Jano Lieber said the MTA did work with the city to clear catch basins so water didn’t enter subway stations. However, city officials said the sewer system was designed to handle less water per hour than what is now common.

The comptroller’s audit cites NYCT for not fully documenting inspection checks on equipment writing, “we were able to determine that 51 of 72 pieces of equipment in our sample were not inspected.”

Alon Levy, a transit researcher at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, said docking the MTA for not checking every single piece of equipment is counterproductive and mostly an opportunity to publicly chastise the agency.

“It's going to make it harder for the subway to provide an alternative to driving,” Levy said in an interview.

Giving transit workers another box to check only delays improvements to the system, Levy said.

“I would argue that requiring new projects to be flood-proof makes climate change worse. They make it harder to build subways. They make it harder to run the subway. This is what's important – improving service so that more people ride and fewer people will drive.”