NYC NOW - May 3, 2024: Morning Headlines

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Get up and get informed! Here's all the local news you need to start your day: The Manhattan District Attorney’s office reports an NYPD officer discharged a firearm inside a Columbia University building while clearing out protesters, contradicting Mayor Eric Adams' description of the operation as well-executed to restore calm. In other news, the number of homeless New Yorkers transitioning from shelters to public housing is expected to hit new lows. Plus, NYC Public Schools Chancellor David Banks is preparing to testify before a Congressional committee on anti-semitism next week. Finally, on this week's segment of 'On The Way,' Stephen Nessen and Clayton Guse discuss congestion pricing updates, MTA efforts to unblock bus lanes, and answer a listener's question.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, May 3rd. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office says an NYPD officer fired a gun this week inside a Columbia University building where police were cleaning out protesters, contesting Mayor Adams' description of a well-executed operation that sought to restore a calm. officers, some of them in riot gear, storm the campus on Tuesday to clear the occupied Hamilton Hall

and intent encampment amid a standoff with demonstrators who were protesting Israel's military actions in Gaza. The city news outlet first reported the shooting, and the Manhattan DA's office confirms it and says it's investigating. City Hall has not immediately responded to a request for comment. The number of homeless New Yorkers moving out of shelters and into city public housing is on pace to plunge. to new lows. WNMIC's Karen Ye reports on data she's been analyzing. By June, the city is projected to have moved fewer than 500 homeless families out of shelters and into a NACHA apartment. That would be the lowest number in a decade, despite the exponential rise in vacant units. There are about 5,000 empty NICHA apartments. Allison Wilkie is with

the coalition for the homeless. She says Nica is taking too long to fix up apartments to fill them with new tenants. Think of how many families. we could move out of shelter and into permanent affordable housing. While the city overall has moved more homeless people into housing using rental vouchers, that hasn't kept pace with the growing shelter population. New York City's public schools chancellor David Bang says he's preparing to testify next week before a congressional committee examining anti-Semitism. Banks will speak before the same House of Representatives Committee

at's grilled Ivy League University presidents in recent months. Banks says there had been a few concerning incidents at city schools, but he says he believes the Education Department has handled them well. Banks also expressed skepticism about the hearings themselves. I fundamentally believe that if we truly care about solving for anti-Semitism, you don't do it through cheap political theater. Banks will appear alongside school leaders from Montgomery County, Maryland, and Berkeley, California. 56 and partly sunny now, partly sunny today and 67 for a high. Up next, our weekly transportation segment on the way, covering transportation news

with reporter Stephen Nesson and editor Clayton Goussa. That's after the break. On WNYC, I'm David First. We finally have a start date for congestion pricing, Stephen. When will these tolls go online? The MTA is aiming for June 30th. That's when drivers may finally have to. to pay $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Trucks, as we know, will be charged a hefty fee,

which drivers and companies say they will pass on to consumers. And the MTA, for its part, has begun an education campaign. They have a map you can see online, a section of frequently asked questions on their website. But most importantly, for people that qualify for specific discounts or exemptions, the application process for those is now open. Right. And it's important to remember that congestion pricing is the stick. to address traffic congestion in Manhattan. But there's also carrots, right? Traffic could, one of them is traffic could reduce by around 15 percent, the busiest parts of the city. And they expect a lot of people to move on to mass transit to avoid paying the toll. So this week, they announced a new

discount the MTA did to kind of get people onto trains. They announced a 10 percent discount on monthly Long Island Railroad and Metro North tickets on trips that are just within the city. It's not huge. It saves people about 20 bucks a month, kind of peanuts compared to the $15 daily toll, but it's something. State lawmakers also last month approved a bunch of new money, $12 million, to improve bus service and 18 routes, another way to try and get people off of the cars and onto mass transit. And it's also really important to remember that these tolls, the money from these tolls, is going into the transit network. It's $15 billion from these tolls that's going to go to paying for big MTA construction projects for things like new subway signals to speed

service. Second Avenue subway, the expansion in East Harlem will benefit from that. Elevators to make some more stations accessible will benefit from that. So there's a lot at play here. Extending any of those carrots to New Jersey riders of New Jersey Transit? Probably not. Yeah, they carve, well, they carved out a little bit. They're required by law to carve out a little bit for that. Well, it's another week. So there's another lawsuit filed against the MTA and the federal government over congestion pricing. Long Island's getting involved this time, right? It's, yeah, that's right. It's the town of Hempstead, they are looking to halt the program now. They call congestion pricing in illegal tax. They say it should have required congressional approval and because it charges

different types of vehicles, different rates, that somehow this violates the rights of drivers. Yeah, and kind of like you pointed out everyone and their mother seems to be suing over congestion pricing. There's a medley in New York City, a lot of groups, the Teachers Union, the NWACP, Staten Island politicians, this is Long Island now getting into the mix, but these aren't all going to be different cases. They're kind of umbrellaing them under the same proceedings in the Southern District and Manhattan Federal Court. So they'll go along. It's not like a new lawsuit and new lawsuit. They're kind of combining the process and the interest of not making the judge here the same thing over and over again.

And there's another interesting party that is part of all these lawsuits. It's residents of Battery Park City led by a mom who says she's concerned about ambulance response times going up when congestion pricing goes into effect. And there are actually oral arguments very soon on May 17th for all the New York cases. Again, though, like we mentioned, this is painfully close to the date when the MTA wants to begin tolling, which is June 30th. Any one of these lawsuits could derail congestion pricing, just to mix metaphors there. Not to forget, there's also, you know, like you mentioned, there's the lawsuits in New Jersey that are still pending. They had the hearing on that. The judge said he'll rule. But again, this is coming. out of the wire. Can they launch the tolls? Will a judge stop them? We're going to see.

Absolutely. We'll hear much more about that in the weeks ahead. Stephen, you also reported this week that the MTA is making a big push to stop cars from blocking buses. What's the latest there? So right now, there are actually these high-tech cameras on about 600 buses that are already ticketing vehicles that block bus lanes. So how it works is they issue a ticket to a vehicle if it's in a bus lane and two buses pass it, and there's been more than five minutes that have elapsed. This has been going on since 2019. Last year, the state budget allowed the MTA to expand the program,

and this week they finally announced the details. And part of the expansion is it will allow the buses to ticket cars and trucks that are illegally double-parked or parked at a bus stop, and these cameras won't just be an effect on routes that have bus lanes. it'll also be on all kinds of bus routes, other bus routes. Right. And this is the MTA really taking bus enforcement seriously and people getting in the way of their routes.

Not only do they see this as a benefit to riders, but faster, more efficient bus service can reduce their labor costs. And they have issued a $141 million contract this week for all these new cameras. It's a big, big, big spend. They plan to put them on 2,000 buses, about a third of the entire fleet over the next three years. And, you know, they've had this pilot program going on, like Stephen said, for five years now. But it's been on a really limited number of routes. Its effect was kind of questionable. A lot of bus lanes are only able to, you're only able to enforce them for certain hours of the day.

And speeds in the city have still remained pretty low for bus riders. You know, the city does argue, and the MTA argues, though, that bus lanes and busways do speed up buses. And these cameras also add, like, another layer to that. They say, you know, speeds increased by an average of 5% where they do have the cameras. Of course, you know, for context, right, the average bus speed in Manhattan is about six miles per hour. So it's not that impressive. All right. Well, every week in Gothamists on the way newsletter, we answer a question from a curious commuter.

And this one is from Andy in Brooklyn, who asks, will the MTA ever bring back cash transactions to the booths in subway stations? The metro card vending machines are highly unreliable and often do not take care. cash when they break down. Yeah, I'm really in love with the history of token booths in the city and just what they used to be, because they used to be mini banks, you know, with thousands of tokens, thousands and thousands of dollars used to get robbed all the time. That's why they're bulletproof, you know. But Andy's getting back to Andy's complaint, it's really valid. Cash is no longer king in the New York City subway, at least not in the booths. You used to be able to go and buy a metric card from an attendant in cash. You used to be able to take two metric cards, have their

balances combined magically. You weren't able to do that at the machines. But that stopped in the pandemic. The MTA kind of made an order to say, hey, we don't want hand-to-hand transactions with the attendance out of risk of spreading COVID. You know, the pandemic came and went, and all the restrictions that came with the pandemic came and went. But the cash hand-to-hand transactions never returned. Now, the MTA is saying, hey, we want our booth attendants to get out of the booth. We want them to get something to do, survey the platforms, be more of a presence. And they're also saying, of course, the Omni system, that Tap to Pay system, they're rolling out,

will bring in new vending machines, it'll change the systems. It'll make those kind of hand-to-hand transactions obsolete, completely irrelevant. Of course, the Omni rollout, as we've reported, has been anything less than smooth, right? I mean, the MTA itself has even called it somewhat of a disaster. It didn't help that, you know, the Omni Rollout came in the middle of the pandemic. It suffered from a lot of mismanagement. the whole Omni project was moved from one whole department at the MTA to another to its construction department and they had to revamp everything and re sort of rejigger the timelines.

You know, another huge problem with Omni was the software had bugs. That took months to resolve. And, you know, even still, amongst all this, the MTA no longer has a firm date for when the Metro card is going to be phased out. So like those, you know, token booth folks, they actually can't help, but they do have these customer service centers that do help people. And the MTA wants folks to use those instead. Okay, transportation reporter Stephen Nesson and WNYC editor Clayton Gooser. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, David. Thank you.

And you can stay in the know on all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gothamist.com slash on the way. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. 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.