NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: Lawmakers Propose City Council Mayoral Removal Powers, DOT Celebrates Bike Month, Knicks Advance in NBA Playoffs, and Amtrak Tunnel Repairs

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

State lawmakers are proposing a bill that would allow the New York City Council to remove a sitting mayor with a three-fourths vote after a public hearing. Meanwhile, the city’s Department of Transportation is kicking off National Bike Month with events across the five boroughs. Also, the Knicks clinch a spot in the second round of the NBA playoffs after edging out Detroit. Plus, on this week’s transportation segment: Amtrak tunnel repairs, a looming NJ Transit strike, and the MTA begins testing new subway fare gate designs to fight evasion.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Friday, May 2nd. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. Some state lawmakers want to give the New York City Council the ability to remove a sitting mayor. The new plan would require the council to give the mayor a chance to be heard before deciding the mayor's fate and would require a three-fourth voter for the removal to take effect. Brooklyn Assembly member Robert Carroll says that's better than the current system where the governor can unilaterally remove a mayor.

I think it's much more transparent. It's much more small D Democratic to allow the 51 duly elected members of the council to make this choice. Now, the governor would still have removal power under the plan, but generations of governors have been reluctant to use it. That includes Governor Hockel who declined this year to remove Mayor Adams. Did you know May is National Bike Month? New York City's Department of Transportation is marking it with a series of events and other programming. WNMIC's Sean Carlson has more. There will be helmet and equipment giveaways and fittings throughout the month of May across the city. The DOT will also be holding delivery worker outreach events to provide information and safety vests. And on May 18th, the department and council member Gail Brewer will host a bike bonanza at Tacomza playground on the Upper West Side,

featuring Learn to Ride classes and a kid's bike swap. Bike Month comes as the Transportation Department touts new biker-friendly additions to the cityscape, including traffic signals geared towards cyclists along Manhattan's 3rd Avenue. The DOT also unveiled a new online bike counter, which brings together biking data into an interactive platform. Now, that's more like it, Nix fans.

Yeah, they did it last night. The New York NICS are moving on to the second round of the NBA playoffs. It was another squeaker, dogfighter. last night in a series full of them. The Knicks barely won. They edged out Detroit Pistons on the road in Motor City, 116 to 113, and won the series. Nick's captain Jalen Brunson led up the scores for the Knicks. He hit a three-pointer with four and a half seconds to go to give the Knicks the lead.

Next up, the defending champions, NBA champions, Boston Celtics. Watch out. Game one is Monday in Boston. 57 and partly, sunny right now, going up to 83 with shower and storm chances. Stay close. There's more after the break. NYC. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. 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's transportation reporter, Stephen Nesson and Ramsey Caliphay and editor Clayton Goosa. We often focus on the subway system in the segment,

but today we're going to spend some time talking about the region's commuter rail lines. Now, there's trouble brewing for virtually all of them. Let's start with Amtrak's plans to repair its East River tunnels between Manhattan and Queens, which were damaged way back in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy. Stephen, how is that going to affect riders? Well, let's start by giving everyone the lay of the land. Amtrak owns four East River tunnels. They were flooded in Sandy.

Two still need repairs. Those tunnels are primarily used by Long Island Railroad trains moving between Queens and Penn Station. They're also used by Amtrak's northeast corridor. and a lot of people don't know this, but New Jersey Transit uses them as well. Excuse me. They store their trains out in Queens during off-peak hours before sending them back to Jersey.

These tunnels are 115 years old. They were damaged by Sandy. Amtrak says they need to fix two of them, two of the four, right? And they're going to close those two tunnels one at a time completely. So it's going to reduce the number of tubes in the East River available for all those trains

that Stevens laying out. And the MTA right now is sounding the alarm saying, hey, okay. If anything goes wrong, we don't have any way to divert service or to kind of correct for problems. And that could cause big issues for riders. And this work is expected to take three years. In fact, this week, the MTA board has so little faith in Amtrak. They passed a resolution condemning their plan.

They say, here's MTA chair, Janilever. I ain't given up these hard-worn gains for on-time performance for Long Islanders because Amtrak is too. hidebound to consider a different way of performing work. I'm not going to, we're not going to have, we're not going to sit idly by while our riders suffer because Amtrak just wants to do things the way they always been done. Whoa. So Lieber is pretty proud about how punctual Long Island Railroad Service is right now. Trains are on time about 95% of the time.

And so one of the other big reasons he's sounding the alarm is that Amtrak was supposed to start this work on Monday, but it didn't. Okay. MTA officials say they never heard from Amtrak. They have no clue why the work didn't even start. What? So they just keep running regular service. And beyond the existing service, the MTA has a big reason, a big need to get this tunnel work done soon.

Metro North is going to start running trains or plans to start running trains at a Penn Station for the first time ever in the next few years for Penn Access. It's going to add four new stations in the Bronx, kind of be a big boost of service. But for that to exist, for that service to run, they need. need all of these East River tunnels to be up and running. So they're really tightening the screws on Amtrak saying, hey, don't mess up our plans. Yeah. Well, what does the MTA want Amtrak to do? Well, basically, they want them to reconsider shutting down the tunnel entirely and doing repairs on nights and weekends instead. Stop me if this sounds familiar. You may recall former Governor Cuomo swooping in at the MTA just before the L train was going to shut down for over a year of repairs.

He brought in outside experts who determined that it could be done on nights and weeks. if you hang cables on the wall and cover the broken bench wall to make it more sturdy rather than replacing it entirely. But Amtrak's tunnels are different in a few key ways. They have higher voltage cables, so you can't just hang them on the wall. They have overhead catenary power. And Amtrak wants to replace the way the tracks are connected to the ground. So it's complicated work that they say just can't be done on nights and weekends. They also took a little dig at the MTA's L-Train repairs and said,

we're designing it to last for a hundred years or more, implying that that's not how the MTA did it when they replaced the L train tunnel. Let's also remember this, the Gateway Program, right, that big effort to, you know, dig a new Hudson River Tunnel and then repair the old ones, which were also damaged by Sandy. Amtrak says they cannot fix the existing Sandy damaged Hudson River tunnels on nights and weekends. So if Amtrak came and said that that's a whole justification for building a whole new with a huge federal grant. Right.

If Amtrak comes and says, okay, MTA, we'll fix the East River Tunnel, very similar tunnel, on nights and weekends, then everyone's going to come back and say, why can't you do that in the Hudson? Why did the feds just give you the largest grant in history for a mass transit project? There's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on right now with all this work. But what's really important to remember is that, you know, the commutes of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of riders. are at stake. Yeah. Interesting stuff.

All right, let's turn our attention to the West here. Ramsey, you reported this week that NJ Transit workers are potentially preparing to go on strike. What's the latest on that? How would that impact riders? Yes, so like you said, New Jersey Transit is now warning of a potential strike with the locomotive engineers union. So these are the people who drive all of the agency's commuter trains. New Jersey Transit President Chris Clorri is now telling Garden State commuters that on May 16th there's a risk of a shutdown to the commuter rail service, and they've created a contingency plan.

So that would enhance existing bus service. It would add more bus options at four different commuter rail stations. But New Jersey transit buses, Amtrak trains, path trains, those will still be running. Those will still be available. It's just the commuter rail service. So they're going to be limited seats on all those other transit services. So what jumped out to me that Kaluri said is he's actually telling commuters, if you can work from home, stay at home.

Wow. So the disagreement with the union is, of course, over pay. raises. The union is called the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and they say they've been working under an expired contract since 2019. So that's six years without an increase to their pay. So the last time that union went on strike was in 1983, again, over dispute on wages. The strike lasted a bit over a month, and it completely halted service. So what we know now is the union leaders in New Jersey Transit are meeting again at the bargaining table next week. And there's still time to resolve this before that May 16th deadline. Okay. I'm curious to hear about this one.

I'm kind of excited about this one. The MCA is moving forward on a pilot program to test out four designs for subway fare gates. It's the agency's latest step to crack down on fare evasion. When is that starting and what do they look like? Yeah, so they're fair gates, not turnstiles. So this is what the new designs will include. So instead of those horizontal bars that are easy to jump over, the designs will now feature glass sliding doors that officials say are very difficult to force open.

And obviously they're all going to use the Omni Tap to Pay since we're phasing out the Metro cards. So what's going to happen is four companies will compete in a pilot program to test out their designs at 20 different subway stations in the city starting this fall. While they're still in the process of selecting all those stations, they've named a few, namely Union Square and the Atlantic Terminal. The MTA will later pick whichever design is the most effective and install that at 150 stations across the entire city over the next five years. The transition to new fair gates aligns with the agency's continued fight, obviously against fair evasion. Right. And, you know, it's the first fundamental redesign of turnstiles, basically in close to a century. The MTA year after year, I mean, Stephen and I have been at the archives, found reports from the 80s that really resemble modern MTA reports where they decry the losses to fair evasion.

And year after year, MTA chair after MTA chair says we got to do something about this, but no one has come up with a genius idea of saying, why don't we change the fair gates so that you can't just jump over the turnstiles? So this is kind of their first step to really address that from an infrastructure point of view rather than kind of society or policing point of view. And it is in the capital plan, which was fully funded this week, thanks to the state budget. So there is $1.1 billion to get these new fair gates going. But, you know, it's not like the MTAs just sat around watching fare evasion happen. They have taken steps over the last couple, over the last year or so, really. you know, we talked about the back-cocking. They sort of disabled that ability on the turnstiles.

They hired those private security guards you see standing in front of exigates, and they've put that 15-second timer on some of the exit gates, which apparently has had some impact. Recent data shows there's only 10% fare evasion on the subways. That's compared to a recent high last year of 14% of riders. So they're making a dent. Right. And over a billion dollars is a lot, but in the MTA, the MTA would say, hey, we're losing 300, 400 plus million a year to fair evasion if we can get that number down this kind of expenditure pays for itself.

Well, I guess to your point, I'm going to believe it when I see it with these new fair gates. And New Yorkers are very clever, too. Yeah, yeah, they'll find a way around it. We'll leave it there for today. Thanks also to WNYC transportation reporters Ramsey, Khalifa, and Stephen Nesson, and editor Clayton Goosey. You can stay in no and all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter at Guy. Gothamist.com slash on the way. Another wild week.

Thanks so much, guys. Thank you. Go, Nick. 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. Also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.