As news broke on Thursday that New York City Transit President Andy Byford had resigned for good, politicians and policy makers expressed shock and sadness. “DEVASTATED,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson tweeted. “Jesus Christ” one MTA staffer muttered, while the agency’s scheduled board meeting ground on in a state of bureaucratic obliviousness. "It's unbelievable," said the MTA’s head of buses, Craig Ciprano. "This changes everything."
Does it? How much influence could one individual have over the MTA, a sprawling state agency with an operating budget of $16 billion that serves eight million subway and bus riders each day? As it turns out: quite a lot.
Below, we’ve tried to distill Byford’s biggest achievements in his brief, two-year tenure—areas that his successor (who has yet to be named) should expand and improve upon when Train Daddy steps down on February 21st, if New Yorkers want to see subway and bus service get better, not worse.
He Made The Trains Run Faster
Under Byford, subway delays fell 25 percent, and the MTA recently celebrated its highest on time rate for weekday trains in half a dozen years. And while major rush hour meltdowns are still a semi-regular fact of commuting, we've come a long way from the dark, hands-prying-at-steamy-windows nadir of 2017.
Much of the credit for that improvement rests with Byford's "Save Safe Seconds" initiative, which focused on speeding up service by recalibrating signal timers, decreasing dwell times, and in some cases, literally increasing train speeds.
"He did that internally, got people together and started fixing the signal timers and getting the trains running faster, without getting any money," said Rachael Fauss, a senior research analyst at the good government group Reinvent Albany.
As the campaign yielded immediate results, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his own “Train Speed and Safety Task Force," seen by many as an undue interference into the transit president's successful work. It would not be the last Byford effort stymied by the man who controls the subways
"It is sort of emblematic of the problem," said Fauss. "The governor creating distance from the agency by constantly undermining it and saying it’s not good enough so we need these boards, we need these commissions, we need these task forces. It’s not the same thing as owning it, warts and all."
The Buck Stopped With Byford
Owning bus and subway service "warts and all" was perhaps what Andy Byford did best. During 2017's Summer of Hell, when delays and malfunctions shocked the entire system on a near-daily basis, Governor Andrew Cuomo pretended as if he hadn't overseen the MTA for six years (a game the governor still occasionally plays). "The simple fact is if no one has the responsibility and the authority, fundamental, rapid change of any culture or system is impossible," Cuomo said at the time. Many NYC residents wrongly believe that the city controls the subway system (and there are some powerful people waiting in the wings who believe it should) and Cuomo exploited this confusion to gain more power. Not Andy Byford.
“Ultimately who is accountable? I am,” Byford said when revealing that a massive subway meltdown this past summer was caused by a delayed software update. “Regardless of the key players involved, the bottom line is we didn’t get people from A to B, and that’s not right.”
Byford made himself available to riders, workers, and journalists in ways other MTA chiefs have not. He said things like, "You have my commitment in a public forum on that." He instilled a sense among the riding public that someone was advocating on their behalf. The governor apparently mistook this sense of ownership as one-upsmanship. When Byford promised the public he would "not be steamrolled" on the matter of giving the governor's L train rehabilitation project an independent review, it was a promise he couldn't ultimately keep.
"It’s gonna be incredibly important to let that person do their job without political interference," Fauss said of Byford's replacement. "It’s gonna be really important that day-to-day work isn’t hijacked by politics. Whoever is gonna be in that role is gonna have to make tough calls and decisions and react to things and we want to see somebody who’s free from politics but we also want to see someone who’s got that level of honesty and accountability and takes responsibility. Giving that person more free rein and allowing them to be honest with the public is going to be incredibly important."
The Unfinished Work Of Accessibility
Byford came to the system with a solid track record on improving accessibility, and wasted no time championing the cause of long-neglected disabled riders. After touring the system with wheelchair-users, he created a position within the agency to advocate for accessibility, dedicated a quarter of his Fast Forward plan to expediting the system's transformation to accessibility. The centerpiece of that proposal calls for adding enough elevators over the next five years to ensure that no rider is ever more than two stops away from an accessible station—a highly ambitious goal in a system where less than a quarter of stations currently have elevators.
But despite Byford's lofty promises, some have questioned the MTA's actual commitment to expanding access. The agency has refused to sign a court enforceable agreement showing how many elevators they plan to construct over a specific period of time, and they continue to appeal judicial rulings that would force them to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"We were glad to have someone finally address the issue, but what we need is a real settlement that's going to hold the MTA’s feet to the fire, not just window dressing or PR campaigns," said Michelle Caiola, head of litigation at Disability Rights Advocates, who's currently leading several lawsuits against the MTA's ADA violations.
As for whether Byford's departure will inhibit efforts to improve accessibility at the MTA, Caiola is not overly concerned. "The genie is out of the bottle," she told Gothamist. "We’re going down a path toward accessibility, finally. I don't think they can really turn back the clock."
A 'Radical' Approach To City Buses
On his first day in office, Byford declared that speeding up the MTA's sluggish buses would be among his top priorities. Since then, the agency has been meting out plans to redesign the entire network borough-by-borough—first in the Bronx and Staten Island, and most recently in Queens. Though the sweeping changes have generated some consternation among bus riders, along with questions about why the agency isn't investing more money in the "revenue-neutral" project, transit advocates say the new redesigns are long-overdue.
"Before Byford, it wasn’t anyone’s job to look at the entire network and see if routes make sense, which is how we ended up with this spoke and hub model where you see two bus stops on the same street," said Jaqi Cohen, the campaign coordinator for the Straphangers Campaign. "I don’t know that anyone had really taken such a radical approach to reforming bus service in the way that he had."
Not all of Byford's priorities have come to fruition. Though he initially promised the expansion of all-door boarding to city buses 2020, that deadline has since been pushed back until "sometime in 2021."
And his resignation means that, as the MTA takes its future redesign plans to muggy basements across the city, it's not clear who will be tasked with reassuring skeptical riders. Indeed, news of his sudden departure raised fears that recent momentum could stall, and suffering bus riders could once again fall to the bottom of MTA priorities.
"We’re concerned that whomever steps into this role will not have the same level of commitment to turning around bus service," said Cohen.
Harnessing the Culture
Byford got his start as a station foreman on the London Underground, and even after assuming the job of NYC Transit president, he could often be found pacing, or scrubbing, the subway platform. That ubiquitous presence endeared him, in particular, to transit workers, who he praised in a short goodbye speech as the "diamonds" of the system.
“He called us his colleagues, you know? Basically we all work for the same place, so he was no different than us, even though he was the president and we were just hourlies," said Chris Starks, who's worked as an MTA train operator for 32 years. "He rode my train and he talked to me like I’ve known this man for 20 years, even though I had just met him for the first time.”
Byford frequently centered transit employees in his service improvement efforts, vowing early on to "harness the pride" of 50,000 MTA workers to ensure the system runs smoothly. According to one MTA manager, that approach proved highly effective at motivating workers.
"He made us feel good about coming to work and reminded us how special what it is that we do is,” said the employee, who asked that we not use their name. “No matter who you were, from station cleaner to the most senior manager, he made you feel empowered about your role in working here."
The manager added that they were "devastated and in shock" by news of the resignation. "The political wheel has once again gone around and this time it’s cost us a great leader.”
Listen to reporters Shumita Basu and Stephen Nessen's story on WNYC:
Additional reporting by Shumita Basu and Stephen Nessen.
