NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: LIRR Workers Weigh Strike, NY Council Targets Vacant Supportive Housing, and Man Builds Scale Model of NYC

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

The MTA is bracing for a possible Long Island Rail Road strike next week as five unions representing nearly half the workforce vote on whether to walk out. Meanwhile, the City Council has passed legislation requiring the city to track and report thousands of supportive housing units that remain vacant despite record demand in shelters. Also, Clifton Park resident Joseph Macken has gone viral after completing a 20-year project: a 50-by-30-foot scale model of New York City built from balsa wood and Styrofoam. Plus, in this week’s transportation segment, we break down what’s at stake in the LIRR contract talks and the state comptroller’s new audit of subway service.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Friday, September 12th. Here's your morning headlines from Michael Hill. The MTA is preparing for a potential strike of Long Island Railroad workers as soon as next Thursday. Contract negotiations have stalled and workers at five unions representing nearly half the workforce are now voting on whether to authorize a strike. MTA chief customer officer Shanefa Riera says if there are no trains, the MTA will provide shuttle bus service every 10 minutes for the morning and evening commutes. The buses will pick up riders from Belmore, Ronancockama, and Hicksville and take them to subway stations in Queens. We are trying our best to accommodate those essential workers in an effort to not leave anyone stranded.

Riera is urging people to work from home if they can. She says will offer pro-rated refunds to any monthly ticket holders if there is a strike. In other news this morning, New York City shelters are packed each night, but thousands of permanent apartments reserved for homeless residents are still sitting empty. A new measure could help change that by requiring the city to track each of the empty units and report reasons for the vacancies. The City Council approved the legislation. A spokesperson for the City's Social Services Agency says it will help identify

apartments in need of renovation. City officials say around 5,000 supportive housing apartments were empty as recently as June. The units come with social services and the city funds them and the state agencies do too. An upstate New York resident has become an online sensation in recent months for a scale model of New York City, he says, took him two decades to build. Since 2004, Joseph Macon has been recreating the five barrels and the surroundings out of balsa wood, styrofoam, and Elmer's glue. This April, the 63-year-old finished his 50-by-30-foot mini-city in his Clifton Park basement. I jumped out of my chair, and I cheered.

I was very happy that I finally finished my last board, and I actually started a new city right after that. I didn't even think about displaying it until my kids said, why don't you get it displayed? Macken began post-Sigmatic creation online, has gotten millions of views. It's been on display at the Cobbleskill Fairgrounds and could soon come to the five boroughs. We're in the mid-60s now with clear skies, going up to a high near 80, right at 78, sunny today with a light wind, cool again tonight in the 60s, and then no rain for the weekend. It's Friday. That means it's time for a weekly segment of On the Way, covering all things transportation. That's after the break. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's time for On the Way.

Our weekly segment on all things considered breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us, WNYC's transportation reporters, Stephen Nesson and Ramsey Califé and editor Clayton Gousa. All right, some big news to talk about up top here. There's a very real possibility that Long Island Railroad workers could go on strike as soon as next Thursday. That would leave something like 300,000 L-I-R commuters scrambling to find a new way to commute. Steven, break it down for us. What's going on? So there's been ongoing contract negotiations with five of the Long Island Railroad's unions. They represent about half of their workforce. Those folks have been working with outer raise

since 2022. The unions won a 16% raise for its workers. They say this keeps up with the cost of inflation and is comparable to what the NJ transit workers, who just came to an agreement with their new contract, got a reminder after they went on strike for three days. Yeah, I covered that one. And also, Similarly, they were asking for quite a significant pay bump. Anti-transit in the weeks leading up to it said that the union was going to be fiscally responsible if they keep with these demands. And they said that they were asking for a salary that was higher than other comparable railroad companies in the region. That ultimately led to the strike in three days of negotiations after that they settled.

We don't actually know the specific details, but what has been shared by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Training, that's the union, they said that the agreement was seven years long. includes a pay increase that raised hourly wages to over $50 an hour, and they also got retroactive pay and a signing bonus. The MTA says the Long Island Railroad unions are asking for more than what their colleagues across the river got, and they're warning that there's a chance that all of our fares could be impacted if they agree to those high salaries. It could throw the MTA's financial planning out of whack.

Instead of that 4% biannual fare increase we see now, could be as much as 5% or 6%. But really, the reason the rubber is hitting the road right now, what's recently changed, is these parties have been negotiating for a while. There was federal mediation until August when the federal mediator basically said these two sides are at an impasse. They cannot come to any agreement. We're done with this. So right now, the unions are voting on whether to go on strike. We'll know more about that on Monday. And if enough members approve it, by Thursday, train service on the Long Island Railroad could be halted.

Clayton, help us understand here, because I thought in New York State certain public workers just aren't allowed to go on strike, right? This is the Taylor law. Does that not apply to L.A.W.R. workers? Right. Let's just give some background in the Taylor law. And it's why you don't see teacher strikes or New York City subway strikes in New York. And it's not because we have not weak unions. Because in the 60s, they passed this law named after George Taylor, this labor researcher. It was so unpopular and politically toxic that no governor wanted to put their name on it.

Wow. But it essentially says public sector unions can't go on strike, but they get to preserve the terms of their contract after it expires until they come to a new one. Okay. So it's why, you know, subway strikes are technically illegal. Why in 2005, when Roger Tucson, who was the head of the transit workers union, he went to jail for leading a strike. That doesn't apply to the L.I.R and Metro North because they're regulated under the Federal Railway Act, which supersedes it, right? So they kind of play by a different set of rules, which is really their bargaining chip, their leverage here. And the last time LI.R. had a significant. Significant strike was back in 87, shut down service for 11 days. Then President Reagan had to come in, kind of bring in an emergency board and defuse the whole situation. It's unclear if Trump would do the same thing this time around. Yeah. All right, Stephen, I'm really curious to hear what regular folks are saying about these. He spoke to some riders, right? What are they saying about it? Yeah, I was out earlier this week.

At that point, a lot of folks hadn't really heard about the strike, maybe some rumblings. Several people said they would just work from home. They hoped to be resolved quickly like the NJ Transit Strike was. But not everyone can work from home. I met Sharon Hirsch. She owns a shop called Balloon Saloon. Okay. You can guess what she sells.

And she says there's just no way she can afford to drive in and park the extra time that comes with that. Here's what she said about a potential strike. And a warning, she uses an expletive to express herself. I would not come into the city because I'm not going to sit in traffic for three hours and then pay $100 to park my car or get $100 ticket on the street. So basically you could bleak me out. We're fucked. I mean, you know, she says she doesn't know who's going to run the balloon shop if there are no trains.

Right, right, right. And the balloon saloon, not only a really valued Manhattan business. Sure. Great name. Yeah. Great name balloon saloon. Yeah, right. And I think it's safe to say if the L.A.

On strike, that business, a lot of others can be deflated. But jokes aside, though, commuting is really going to be a real challenge. And that's because it's so different from the New Jersey transit strikes. Those commuters could at least take the path train, take a cab or ferry. If they want to spend some more money, they could even take the Amtrak trains. Here's L.I.R. President, Rob Free, pointing to working from home as maybe one of the main options for riders affected from this potential strike. People have other options. We don't want to explore those options.

we don't want to strike. They have to realize they need to come to the table and make concessions. So now we have to wait and see if the two parties will actually come back to the negotiation table and maybe prevent this from happening altogether. Okay. Next up here, I'm really curious about this one just based on previous conversations we've had it on the way. The state controller released a report earlier this week that audited the MTA subway service over the last year. What are the biggest takeaways?

They took a look at the data and found, you know, from 2024 to the first half of this year. Similar to a common threat on reporting that there's aging infrastructure, old train cars, signal systems and tracks, it's really worsening service for riders. So if you just look at delays caused by infrastructure and equipment failures, they're contributing now to a greater percentage of total delays. Then there are major incidents. That's an incident that causes 50 or more delays. Those have spikes so far this year as, quote, subway car problems continue to plague the system.

So what that means is if you look at the data, there were 27 major incidents due to old subway car. in the first half of 2024. In the first half of this year, major incidents from busted cars have actually tripled, or at least nearly tripled. So the state comptroller, Tom Stinappley, is saying that the MTA must address signal issues and those subway cars to really minimize delays

and improve the experience for riders. I think a couple points to make here. It's not just subway cars. It's infrastructure and equipment writ large. It's causing a lot of problems with the MTA lately, and it's a lot of the aging infrastructure that they're trying to fix. You know, last week we were first to report on MTA data

that showed June and July, the subways had the worst June in July this year that they've had since 2018 when service was really bad. You might not have noticed it as much in terms of big crowds and photos because we have more than a million and a half fewer riders per day. But anyone who took the system, especially the letter lines, saw and experience regular delays. We had those big outages in July around West 4th that kind of trickled throughout the system. But the data really shows signals, car breakdowns, electrical problems, continued and repeatedly affected riders and commutes across June and July. And the MTA has really pushed back against that reporting, saying, hey, we really improve things in August. But this data really just

put some numbers behind what riders already know, like, hey, we're seeing some concerning problems. Now, in the other side of that, the MTA had just passed this five-year capital plan this year to really invest in all these underlying systems that you can't see. We've covered it extensively at this newsroom. But a part of that, to Ramsey's point, part of this capital plan is replacing old subway cars. A third of the subway cars in the city are more than 40 years old. They're jalopies, they're clunkers, they're beaters. You imagine driving around.

You drive a motorcycle? That thing's not 40 years old. Forget about it. Yeah, no. It wouldn't work for something. Yeah, exactly. Wouldn't work. Vintage is cool, though.

The Comptroller is warning, though, that, okay, there's all these new investments, but they have to do it on time and on budget. Earlier this year, there was an audit that found another audit that basically the current modernization signal projects, those are behind schedule. You can't have that. So the longer that goes, the long of the long time. longer riders will have to experience some pain commuting around the city. Okay, we're going to switch some gears here.

East Harlem residents are calling for an abandoned station dating back to the 19th century to be integrated into a new station as part of the Second Avenue subway extension project. Ramsey, what's going on? Yeah, basically in the basement of the lobby of the Metro North Station in Harlem, 125th Street, there's this abandoned old station that dates back to the late 19th century. That's before there was the elevated Park Avenue viaduct, and when they closed it up, it became this basement that nobody ever touched. So now local leaders and advocates want to use it for the new Second Avenue subway extension project.

At the same intersection, there will be a new Q-line subway station. They're saying, why not make this Grand Central Station uptown that houses all the train services under one roof? You can really connect from one to the other without having to leave the station. The MTA has looked at the design proposal and said it isn't feasible, so I guess we have to wait and see. Yeah. And they do point out they're using some other abandoned underground infrastructure, particularly an old tunnel abandoned in the 70s. are going to repurpose that to build a second avenue subway, so it's kind of a mixed bag and antiquated tunnels. Vintage tunnels.

Well, thanks to WNIC's Ramsey-Kleaf and Steven Nesson and editor Clayton Goose. You can stay in the know in all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for a weekly newsletter at gotamist.com slash on the way. My friends, as always, it's been fun. Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day for your top news headlines and occasional

deep dives and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. More soon.