I refuse to vote for Lhota. Unfortunately, I'm not crazy about DeBlasio, or any of the other candidates that were running before the primary elections (Liu, Quinn, etc), but
anybody is better than him as far as I'm concerned.
Let's start with that whole incident at the MTA Board meeting, when he told a 77 year-old Holocaust survivor to "be a man". It speaks volumes of his character that he would do such a thing. (Apparently he was mad at him for parking in front of the MTA building, so instead of letting it go, he randomly brought it up even though it had nothing to do with the topic at hand).
But even if the comment was somehow directly related to the topic, it goes to show you what type of person he is. Imagine, a citizen going up to him to file a complaint about something, and he'll tell them to be a man.
And think about it this way: He cut his term early as MTA CEO. The MTA CEO is supposed to stay for something like six years, and he left after around a year and a half IIRC (I don't know what the exact time period is, but he did leave early). Fortunately, his replacement is capable (he was promoted from within), but it shows that he was just looking for a way to pad his resume, and wasn't genuinely interested in improving the MTA.
Now, as an MTA head, he wasn't particularly good, and I'll tell you why. Sure, he got the system up and running quickly after Sandy, which is a good thing, but what I don't like is that the MTA took some new money from some transit bill passed in Albany, and wasted it. He used it to restore service on some routes that were cut in 2010, and expand service in a few select areas.
Now you may be wondering: How is restoring/expanding service bad? Because it wasn't done efficiently. If somebody gives you an infusion of money, you don't go, blow it, and then say you have no more money. You look to see how it can be used efficiently.
There are routes that should've been a top priority to restore, that weren't. For instance, the B71 in Brooklyn saw a 29% growth in ridership in the years before it was cut, and yet it wasn't restored. Instead, they restored weekend service on the B2, which runs parallel to the B100 (a block away). There's a whole list of examples I have, but I don't feel like listing them.
Then they made new routes to serve growing areas like Hunts Point, Spring Creek, and Williamsburg. Except the problem is that those new routes are basically designed to fail and get very few riders. For instance, the Bx46 runs from Hunts Point to the Prospect Avenue subway station, serving the industrial parts of Hunts Point that aren't served by the Bx6. But it's a short little shuttle to nowhere. If it were extended to say, Yankee Stadium, it could serve people who currently take the Bx6 to get from Melrose/Morrisania to Hunts Point, as well as serve Banana Kelly HS students who live in Melrose/Morrisania.
Then there's the B84 from New Lots/Livonia to the Gateway Mall. Again, another little shuttle running every 30 minutes. There's a ton of problems with the route network in the East NY area, and this hardly solves any of them. Not to mention it explicitly avoids the new housing along Vandalia Avenue.
Then there's the B67 extension into the Navy Yard. They're taking a route that's already unreliable, and extending it further, making it more unreliable. Instead of doing that, they should've taken a route that passes through that general area (like the B57/B62), and rerouted that through the Navy Yard, saving money and avoiding making another route more unreliable.
So I figure that since they have money for these extensions/new routes, they have money to fill in some service gaps in my own neighborhood, as well as other Staten Island neighborhoods. (The proposal is over
here. Feel free to sign the petition if you wish to do so). I go over to the MTA Board and ask them to look into this proposal, which would greatly improve the network out here at a minimal cost (I have the stats to prove it), and then suddenly, they have no money. I say "But you have money for the Bx46, and suddenly, you ran out of money?", and they didn't know what to say.
So I had a meeting with them, and they couldn't refute my proposal, except on the basis that it would cost money (it would cost a fraction of what the Bx46 cost them, and would benefit many more people. If you don't want to spend money, why bother having a transit system?) They kept trying to ignore me, but since I was persistant, eventually, they gave me some BS response using stats as to why it wouldn't work (and they still didn't respond to my refutation). And get this: After they said they ran out of money, apparently another $18 million fell out of the sky.
So if he's going to allow his agency to waste money that way, it's one more reason not to vote for him.
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about all the "terrible" things he did.
