NYC NOW - August 30, 2024: Morning Headlines

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Get up and get informed! Here's all the local news you need to start your day: New York State is launching a pilot program to invest healthcare dollars in things like housing, food, and transportation for low-income residents. WNYC's Caroline Lewis reports. Meanwhile, former NYPD officer Linpeng Gao is suing the department, claiming he was fired after issuing a parking ticket to a city employee. Plus, five sea turtles trapped in a fire at New Jersey's Turtle Back Zoo are recovering at a Long Island facility. WNYC's Charles Lane has more. Finally, on this week's segment of On The Way, WNYC transportation reporters Stephen Nessen, Ramsay Khalifeh, and editor Clayton Guse give updates on the MTA's crackdown on bus fare evasion, lawmakers taking credit for Governor Kathy Hochul’s pause on congestion pricing, and the likelihood of upgrades to N train subway cars.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, August 30th. Here's the morning headlines from David First. New York State is rolling out a new pilot program to invest health care dollars in things like housing, food, and transportation for low-income residents. WNYC's Caroline Lewis reports. Factors like housing and nutrition can make a big difference. in people's health. But Medicaid coverage for these types of non-clinical services is typically

limited. With permission from the Biden administration, New York is now in the process of expanding the types of services that the public insurance program covers on a trial basis. To start, the state is creating nine social care networks, regional hubs that link health care providers with community-based organizations. The networks will refer patients to social services and track their outcomes. The hubs are expected to launch in the coming months. A former NYPD officer is suing the department, alleging he was fired after he wrote a parking ticket to a city employee parked illegally. Lin-Peng Gao filed the suit in Manhattan Supreme Court this week. He says he and his partner were on patrol in May when they saw an illegally parked car.

Gao says he noticed the city employee's ID card inside as they wrote up the ticket. According to the suit, a woman then approached and yelled to the suit. A woman then approached and yelled at him that he was going to lose his job, and three days later, Gao was fired. The NYPD denies he was fired for the ticket. Gow's attorney declined to comment. Five sea turtles that were trapped in a fire at New Jersey's Turtleback Zoo are recovering at a facility on Long Island. WNYC's Charles Lane reports. Employees of the Sea Turtle Recovery, a rescue group at the zoo, received a phone call that the hospital building was struck by lightning and on fire. They rushed to the zoo and began washing the soot and smoke from the turtles, lubricating their eyes and giving them subcontaneous fluids.

The most affected was a baby turtle, Pickles, a Kemp's Ridley's Sea Turtle. Sea Turtle Recovery co-executive Bill Deere says the baby's heart rate dropped to nine beats per minute, which is low. So, and then in Pickles case, she needed some additional medications to help stimulate her heart. Deer says the hospital's filtration system has to be replaced. Until then, Pickles and the others will remain at a conservation society in Hampton Bayes. 67 degrees, some rain showers this morning, then mostly cloudy and cooler with a high of 73, tonight a low of 67. Tomorrow, partly sunny, a high near 80 degrees, with a slight chance for some showers in the afternoon.

This is WNYC. It's Friday. That means it's time for a weekly segment of On the Way, covering all things transport. That's after the break. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's Friday, which means it is time for On the Way. Our weekly segment on all things considered breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us is WNYC Transportation Reporter Stephen Nesson and Ramsey Caliphay, as well as editor Clayton Goosa.

Okay, the MCA and NYPD are launching an aggressive ticketing blitz on fare evasion across the city's buses. They've done crackdowns in the past. what's different now? Hey Sean, so look, last year the MTA expanded the bus routes where its Eagle team cracked down on fair evasion. Those are transit officers who write tickets to fairbeters. They also, you know, bus people for graffiti as well. Here's what we know about this latest push. That's thanks in part to reporting by our colleague Bihar Ostedon. The MTA and the NYPD met earlier this week to pick out which bus routes were deemed, quote, egregious hotspots for fair evasion. A source familiar with the Blitz actually told me that some of the routes being targeted,

those are where fare evasion is particularly bad. Include one of the Bronx, a couple in southern Brooklyn, and two in Staten Island. This initiative is familiar. Look, unarmed MTA guards are sitting on buses. They're taking note of people who don't pay for the fare. And when they approach certain stations where there's NYPD officers, they'll be escorted off the bus and given a ticket that can cost anywhere between $50 and $100. The idea is they'll do this until the MTA says they'll see more riders paying the fare.

And this is really the MTA and MTA officials making good on a promise to address what they say is a very big problem. At the agency's board meeting last month, they reported nearly half of the city's bus riders don't pay the fare. It's a number that's been growing and growing and growing, especially since the pandemic. And the MTA says, hey, that's costing the agency $300 million or more a year in lost fares. And they're saying, hey, we need that to pay bus mechanics. We need that to pay the operators that run the service in the first place. So last month, Jan O'Leaver, the MTA chairman, says, hey, we're going to be strategic about the enforcement of this. And what you're seeing now is a version of that kind of strategic approach saying, hey, where are the egregious hotspots of fare evasion?

Let's send enforcement officers out there. Now, the big question is a lot of the time people not paying the fare is because they can't afford it. So we're going to, as a newsroom, I think we're going to be looking out to see, is this a tax or is this an enforcement on low-income riders? attacks on poverty in effect. Okay, Stephen, let's get to you. The MTA has four decades and decades complained about high rates of fare evasion, but they normally focus on people who are like jumping turnstiles and stuff, right? So what's changed on the bus lines?

Well, I think really, like Clayton said, you know, the numbers have just creeped up and up and up, and they're really just kind of shocking. It's actually 57% of SBS riders who aren't paying the fare. Half of local bus riders don't pay. I mean, that's much more than the subways. They have a much lower rate of feravation in the 20s or so. But really, the question is why?

Why is there so much feravation on buses? And nobody has a real, like, bull's-eye answer for this one. The MTA blamed this small five-month window in 2020 during the worst days of the pandemic when it made the buses free for riders. They've repeated it many times and say that riders were confused when they had to start paying again after that five-month

window. But remember, you know, I don't think it's the most convincing argument because those workers were the essential workers who had to go out while other people could work from home. And ridership overall was extremely low during that time anyways. But, you know, there was an emptiness everywhere. And certainly if people wanted to hop the turnstile, there was no one to turn them away at that time. But also during that time, the MTA rolled out Omni, the Tap and Fair pavement system on the buses, installing them at the front and rear of the buses. But on low buses, the rear door readers aren't actually turned on. So if the front is crowded and someone boards at the back, they're considered committing fare evasion, even though they can't tap it

because the machines are turned off. But you could also take this back to only in 2008 when a bus driver's name was Edwin Thomas was stabbed and killed for asking a rider to pay the fare. After that, the union really got involved. They wanted the MTA to loosen up the rules requiring drivers to remind riders to pay. So now they don't actually have to enforce the fare. they just make a note of the therapeuters. Now, subway turnstiles are fixed in place, but of course, as we know, buses are constantly moving. Is this enforcement going to have any impact on actual service? Well, I can say just from personal experience riding the bus when an Eagle team jumps on,

it stops the whole bus. It doesn't move. So the majority of the people on the bus who did pay are mad because now I'm going to be late. My kids have to go to school. My kids are late to school because we're waiting for the Eagle team to check everyone's pass to see if they paid. And people who do pay are like, give me a break. The service stinks.

You're slowing me down and I have to pay. So it kind of creates some incentive for people to not want to pay out of frustration. And look, there might be a recognition from the transit agency about this problem. I obtained an internal MTA document this week that shows the agency might be preparing for disruptions because of this program, this most latest blitz.

They're instructing drivers, should there be a disruption, to hand out what they're calling universal transfer tickets to paying customers. So, you know, if a bus is stopped, Eagle Team's going through, NYP is going through, people don't want to get off because they're mad that they got caught for not paying the fare. They'll be given, these are the paying customers, these tickets, it'll be valid for the day to transfer it either to another bus or even the subway. We're going to turn once again to the story of the summer, our favorite topic here on the way.

Congestion pricing. This week, WNYC reported that Democratic and Republican, lawmakers are taking credit for Governor Hockel's indefinite pause on the plans and are campaigning on it as a victory for their party. Clayton, how's that working out? Well, you know, it's working out kind of interestingly, and I don't think to the surprise of anyone who's been following it. Governor Hockel has said her decision in June to pause congestion pricing was not political. She keeps saying that. But as our Albany reporter, John Campbell, has pointed out, it's become entirely political. you kind of look at the background here and Hocles faced a lot of pressure from national Democrats to help suburban house races.

You know, Nancy Pelosi at the DNC the other week, hinted or kind of explicitly, that Hocal was to blame for the Democrats losing some seats in New York back in 2022, giving the Republicans a majority. It really helped them. But now, even after Hockel paused congestion pricing, which is very unpopular given the polls, several Republicans are seizing on the issue. Hudson Valley Republican Mike Lawler's campaign is erring an ad taking credit for stopping congestion pricing. Out on Long Island, Republican Anthony Di Esposito is also campaigned on the issue saying it should be permanently ended. And then you look at DiPosito's Democratic opponent, Laura Gillen, she's also calling for a permanent end to congestion pricing, not just a pause in her campaign. So kind of the background here is, okay, did Hokel get a win? I don't know politically, but at the very least, she's got transit advocacy.

gets on one side, criticizing her for undermining the MTA's budget by pausing the tolls. And she's got all these suburban Republicans and Democrats saying, hey, give it a permanent end. She's kind of stuck in a rock and a hard place through this campaign season on the issue. We're going to sneak in a curious commuter question here in the last minute. Ralph and Queens asks, when will the N-line be getting newer subway cars? I'm sorry to say, Ralph, the MTA says there is no timeline for phasing out the old N-line train cars. But the MTA does have plans to install new subway signals on the line that runs the end of the W trains. And to run new signals, you also need new trains to interact with them.

So it could be coming soon, but with congestion pricing paused, we don't know when those new signals will be installed. Thanks to Ralph and Queens for the question. That's WNYC, Transportation Reporter Steven Nesson and Ramsey Caliphay as well as editor Clayton Goosa. You can stay in the know in all things transit or ask a question over your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gotamist.com slash on the way. Thank you to all three of you.

Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you this afternoon.