MTA may have inflated number of subway power delays

The emails reportedly showed that transit officials broadened the definition of power-related delays to include circuit failures and other incidents, like when a person was on the track and the power was intentionally shut off. The New York Times has not seen the emails, but transit officials have not disputed their authenticity.

Under the broader definition, Cuomo, during the Association for a Better New York breakfast on July 27, was able to say there had been 32,000 power-related delays in the previous 12 months. The actual number was closer to 8,000, The Daily News reported.

“The MTA doesn’t control the power, Con Edison does,” Cuomo said at the breakfast. “Con Edison has a duty to safely, prudently and effectively provide electricity that powers the subway system.”

When asked Sunday about the transportation authority’s categorization of outages, Cuomo said that he did not know “what the difference between power issues and power-related issues” was, and said that the authority had produced those numbers.

“The MTA says they’re accurate, I believe the MTA,” he said.

In the emails, Kyle Kirschling, a senior subway performance analyst, said the number of power-related delays was 8,000, including 3,422 caused directly by Con Edison power outages, The Daily News reported.

Naomi Renek, chief of staff of the transit agency, wrote in an email two days before the breakfast that she was “looking for a higher delay number for power,” The Daily News reported. Her requests continued until the figure was expanded a day later.

Andy Byford, the new president of New York City Transit, the division of the transportation authority that runs the city’s buses and subways, was not made available for comment Sunday.

The Transit Workers Union did not respond to requests for comment.

But Reinvent Albany, a watchdog group, said it would call for an investigation by the state into whether the governor pressured transit officials to generate higher numbers.

“It raises issues about accountability and it raises questions as to whether this is happening in other areas of subway performance,” said John Kaehny, the group’s executive director. “How far does this go?”

Kaehny said the figures likely contributed to a decision by the Public Service Commission to order Con Edison to get directly involved in helping to fix the subway system.

But Jon Weinstein, a transportation authority spokesman, said the utility company had not disputed its role in the subways’ woes. “Con Ed has accepted responsibility for power-related delays, which everyone agrees is a driver of subway performance problems, and debating the underlying numbers only trivializes the need to get this critical work done,” he said.

Joseph J. Lhota, chairman of the transportation authority, said there was no “push” to misrepresent the numbers.

“What we did — and presented from the beginning — was to sum up all power-related delays,” he said. “We have lots of data, all of which is granular, and we requested that all power-related delays be added together into one number for a news conference. There was absolutely no push to do anything untoward.

“All we did was add power-related delays together — an exercise in grammar school arithmetic.”

Allan Drury, a spokesman for Con Edison, said the figures were not shared with the utility company before Cuomo’s public statement in July.

“We said at the time that we didn’t know where that number came from,” Drury said. Still, he said, “Our focus is on working with the MTA on solutions that will help improve subway service, which is vital to New Yorkers’ way of life and the region’s economy.”

Given a year by Cuomo to repair the problems, Con Edison and the transportation authority began inspecting hundreds of street-level manholes, boxes and power substations. Underground, workers continue to examine energy distribution rooms, signal relay rooms, interlockings, switch machines and thousands of track circuits, signals, insulated joints and trip stops.

Transit advocates said the emails further eroded the trust of an already skeptical public.

“Here, the definition is very unclear,” said Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign. “All of these numbers could be subject to manipulation.”

Russianoff said it was important for Cuomo, who is pushing for a congestion pricing plan, to make sure data used in public statements is concise.

“The numbers today could come back to hurt him, which is all the more reason to do them correctly,” he said.

Cuomo, speaking at an unrelated news conference Sunday, said no one from his office requested the higher number of power-related delays. But, according to the emails in The Daily News report, Cuomo’s deputy press secretary, Maxwell Morgan, inquired about the data in an email sent to Renek.

This is not the first time the transit agency’s definition of key issues has been challenged.

In a September letter, the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, asked Lhota for a definition of “overcrowding.”

“In light of the substantial increase in the delays attributed to overcrowding, we requested a definition of the conditions that result in the use of this code,” DiNapoli wrote. “However, Transit could not clearly articulate what conditions resulted in a categorization of overcrowding; rather, it appeared that this category was a catchall when another category could not be specifically identified.”

The New York Times

MTA may have inflated number of subway power delays

The inflated numbers were reported in The Daily News, which obtained internal emails between Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials and Cuomo’s press office from July 25 to Aug. 9.

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