NYC NOW - March 29, 2024: Morning Headlines

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Get up and get informed! Here’s all the local news you need to start your day: The Adams Administration has made boosting literacy its top educational priority. However, new data obtained by WNYC show that reading proficiency remains low, as reported by Jessica Gould. Meanwhile, city officials plan to expand curfews in April at three migrant shelters for single adults located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens—one in each borough. Plus, New York City will welcome more than a hundred electric vehicle fast chargers by 2026, part of the state’s $1 billion investment in electrifying transportation to meet its climate act goals. Finally, in this week’s segment of On The Way, transportation reporter Stephen Nessen and editor Clayton Guse discuss the MTA’s final approval of congestion pricing and Mayor Eric Adams’ Thursday announcement of new metal detectors in subway stations.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, March 29th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. The Adams administration has made boosting literacy its top educational priority, but new data obtained by WNIC show reading proficiency remains low. Jessica Gould reports. The internal data comes from assessment.

given to kids several times a year, and it says this fall only a third of students reached proficiency targets, up very slightly from two years ago. Proficiency rates dipped slightly this winter. Education Department officials say it's wrong to draw any conclusions from the data. They say it's useful for educators in classrooms to help their students not to evaluate the entire system. They say they're still figuring out good data for that. Plus they say it's going to take a long time for the literacy overhaul to get results. It took more than five years for reading scores in Mississippi to go from among the worst in the country to among the best, and New York City Public Schools has twice as many students. City officials say they plan to expand curfews next month at three migrant shelters for single adults in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The Adams administration began

imposing curfews at men's migrant shelters after several violent incidents, including a deadly stabbing last year or this year. The curfew rules say all migrants must return to the shelter by 11 at night and stay until 6 in the morning. Advocates say the restrictions hurt migrants who work late hours, but city officials say migrants may apply for work, school, and medical exemptions. They also say the curfews will help the city manage bed capacity. New York City will get more than 100 electric vehicle fast chargers by 2026. Governor Kathy Hokel says this is part of the state's $1 billion investment in electrifying its transportation to achieve its Climate Act goals. This includes 12 charges at LaGuardia Airport construction begins next year.

Fast charges can charge an electric vehicle in 20 minutes. Other charges can take a few hours. The New York Yankees are off to a good start. They came from behind in the final innings to win their season opener against the Astros last night in Houston, five to four. The Yangs played their first home game next Friday. Rain postponed opening day at City Field yesterday, so the Mets will start this season at 1.40 this afternoon against the Milwaukee Brewers. Mostly clear and 43 now, cloudy, turning sunny and 56, breezy and gusty on this good Friday. And then tomorrow's slim chance of rain clouds in a high near 60.

Starting today, every Friday morning will feature a weekly installment of On the Way. A segment on WMYC covering transportation news with reporter Stephen Nesson and editor, Clayton Goosa. That's after the break. On WNMIC, I'm Sean Carlson. It is time for On the Way our weekly segment unpacking all things transit in New York City. Joining us as always is WDMIC Transportation Reporter, Stephen Essen, along with editor Clayton Goosa. And it's been a big week in transit news.

Also, historic one. The MTA board gave its final approval for congestion pricing, a topic we talk about literally every week in this segment. That's the program to toll drivers who go south of 60th Street in Manhattan and use that money for mass transit improvements. Stephen, again, we've talked about it literally nearly every single episode of this show for months now, but one more time. How much will drivers have to pay? Just a reminder.

It's a $15 fee for passenger vehicles between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. We can start at 9 a.m. So you can get to church earlier, I suppose. There's a 75% discount during the overnight hours that would put the total. hole at 375. Small trucks pay $24, large trucks $36. Yellow and green taxis have a $1.25 surcharge for each ride. Four higher vehicles like Uber and Lyft will pay a $2.50 surcharge for each passenger.

And, you know, there are some exemptions that have recently been added, emergency vehicles. That was part of it before. But New York City municipal vehicles that have to cart around heavy equipment and certain special jobs, they'll get exempt, school buses. and commuter buses with regular schedules, like think of Greyhound, Megabus, even the Hampton Jitney, will be exempt from the toll. And just a reminder, you know, the FDR drive and the Westside Highway are going to be exempt.

So people can ring the city without entering the congestion zone, which is just inside of that, but below 60th Street. Now, there are pending lawsuits in federal court that aim to stop congestion pricing, but if it launches, it'll be years and years in the making. Clayton, walk us through the history of the initiative. Yeah, it's not just years and years. It's decades and decades and decades. The thought of and the goal of reducing congestion in Manhattan is nothing new.

This has been a problem that's been identified for a long time, but it hasn't really been fixed in any significant way. You go back to the 1970s. Let's start there. John Lindsay, 1971 says, hey, the subway. fare is going to go up, we have these free East River bridges. You know, that's essentially what congestion pricing does in a census, makes the East River bridges that are free, puts a toll on him. He says, let's put a toll on those, and we'll use that to subsidize the subway so that we don't have to, so that the MTA doesn't have to raise the fare. Well, that failed. Cut to 1973. You've got

then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Now this is in the years after the Clean Air Act was passed federally, every state had to come up with their own plan to implement it because pollution is bad, comes from cars, makes people unhealthy. He says, okay, we will toll the East River bridges to reduce the amount of people taking cars into Manhattan as a way to clean up the air. It didn't work. 1977, Congress makes some amendments to the Clean Air Act and New York's plan to implement it, says, you don't need the tolling plan.

And it wasn't just Congress, people from out of state in Jersey. call came from inside the house, New York reps, who were concerned about all kinds of things, including lines of cars lining up at toll boosts on these bridges that would be backing up into Brooklyn and into Queens. You go to the 80s. The city keeps getting more polluted. Late 80s, Ed Koch says that he supports a program that's probably very familiar to what we're talking about today. He says a $10 a day fee on cars entering Manhattan below 59th Street. The cordon right now is at 60th Street.

it's effectively of the same. That two failed. Decades go by. A lot of people remember Michael Bloomberg when he was trying to pass a congestion pricing program. He brings it to Albany signs a home room message, says, please pass this. It was a very similar version, almost identical to what was passed later and what we're implementing today. And he brings it to the legislature in 2008. Sheldon Silver doesn't approve it, doesn't bring it to a floor for a vote. He was the famous assembly speaker power broker. That failed. It took until 2019 when the state legislature comes together after the subway was falling into disrepair in dire need of money for repairs, for Cuoma to back it, for lawmakers to back it, de Blasio would eventually back it. They pass it. It took five years of

environmental review, a load of federal approval and public hearings to get where we are today to the final, final MTA approval, and it still might be stopped. There is always the case that, like you mentioned, these lawsuits in New York and New Jersey that could stop it. And like we've seen in decades past, Congress could always come through and say, hey, hey, hey, hold your horses. The abridged saga of congestion pricing right there. You heard it first from Clayton Goosa. Stephen, you've been on the streets talking to people as they've been stuck in gridlock downtown. What's the feeling? I mean, the first guy I walked up to literally, I didn't even need to ask a question, unprovoked, unprompted. He said, I object to congestion pricing. You know, the number one

phrase I hear from drivers over and over again is that this is a cash grab from the MTA, you know. But on the one hand, on the most literal sense, yes, it is a new toll on drivers. Here's Lower Manhattan resident 42-year-old Melissa Carasquillo speaking to me from the comfort of her gray BMW. And she kind of sums up why congestion pricing is needed and the reactions to it. I think it's terrible for people that live in the city to charge us for being in the same borough that we live in. Some of us, yeah, we take mass transit.

but some of us do own cars, it's becoming unbearable. Can I ask why do you drive? I have an apartment that I had for a really long time, and fortunately we have garage parking. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be driving. So, yeah, drivers feel like they're already charged too much. The cost of owning a car is high, but it is a choice. And driving in New York is already so heavily subsidized,

from the amount of road space given to cars, the thousands of free curb parking spots the drivers use, and even the tax credits that people get for buying electric cars. you don't get a tax credit for buying a bike or taking the subway. You know, and there's the environmental toll on all of us from the pollution. So on the one hand, you know, if the city and state make owning a car a little less convenient, it may make a dent in the number of vehicles on streets, like Clayton was saying, reducing pollution.

And, you know, some drivers are for it, of course, because the idea is that it will reduce the number of cars on the streets, and there's thousands of hours of productivity lost with people stuck in traffic. And of course, like Clayton was also saying, it's a clever way to fund subway upgrades, which in an ideal world would make taking transit more attractive. But these days, as we've heard, it is kind of a hard sell for New Yorkers with the spate of grisly subway crimes, shootings, and shovings. It's not helping the MTA make the case for taking transit. Yeah, you know, that's a good segue, too, to more major news that happened this week, transit-wise. Subway safety

made big headlines this week. A man was fatally shoved in front of a subway train Monday evening. That was at the 125th Street and Lex Avenue Station. It's the fourth murder. in the transit system already this year. There were just five for the entire last year. What's with that? Yeah. So we've seen a lot of kind of concern and a lot of push this year. Hockel deployed 750 National Guard, soldiers on the subway police earlier this week launched an initiative where they said 800 uniformed and plainclothes officers are going to crack down on fare evasion. Kind of in the aftermath of this, there's a lot of talk about the statistics of safety and the perception of safety. But what was really interesting that happened was that MTA leaders and Mayor

Adams come together and they announce some interesting new technology that they want to roll out into the subway. They're essentially metal detectors, but souped up metal detectors. The ones that they demonstrated have artificial intelligence technology. So this metal detector, this metal detector company evolves, bills itself as one that can not only track metal, but discern when it's a weapon or a gun, which, you know, if a police officer is looking at a screen, they can, you know, zero in on someone in a crowd that potentially has a metal object. Now, there is a lot of controversy around the claims that evolve this company is making, right? They are being investigated by the Security and Exchange Commission. Their stockholders or shareholders are suing

them because there's worries that they may have overstated the capabilities of their technology, But people might already be used to seeing this somewhere. They're in places at places like City Field where these are the metal textures you can walk through without emptying your pockets. If you go to a baseball game, that's kind of nice to not have to do that. But, you know, so we'll see when and if they roll these out. There's a 90-day review period before they can even test them. They might use these kind of detectors from another company. So we'll kind of, it's kind of wait and see what, where, what scope.

But it's a big technology push in response to some of these crime concerns. Yeah, so to that end, Stephen, how widely are these things going to be used? And what effect can they really have? Well, Mayor Adams said they're going to be portable and they would go to places where there's no and gun problems. But other than that, he really wasn't that specific. And there is this 90-day waiting period. So it may not even go into effect. You can keep up on the latest in New York City Transportation News by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gotthmus.com slash on the way. You can even send in a question about getting around New York City. Maybe Stephen and Clayton will answer it on the air. And thanks, Debo. Thanks, Sean. 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.