Broke MTA defends $100K report on coronavirus safety measures
The cash-strapped MTA on Monday defended blowing up to $100,000 for consultants to write a report on coronavirus safety measures at other transit agencies — while admitting it had already implemented many of them.
Chairman Pat Foye on Monday insisted the report by engineering firm WSP and Johns Hopkins public health professor Aisha Rivera Margarin — released Monday — “provides significant value to us as an agency and to [MTA] customers.”
But Foye would not say whether the MTA plans to move ahead with any of the ideas in the report that the agency wasn’t already using — which include thermal temperature checks at station entrances, sophisticated air circulation tech and cleaning robots.
“The report lists a number of things that we’re already doing, some things that are being done at other transit agencies,” Foye told reporters.
“Everything is on the table in terms of minimizing public health risk to our customers and employees.”
Foye has publicly mulled one key recommendation — restricting ridership through capacity limits or a Ticketmaster-style reservation system — for months.
Other steps — including a customer and employee mask requirement, space between bus drivers and passengers and “far ultraviolet” lamps to kill germs — were implemented in the spring.
The MTA “is essentially, in many ways, a best practice itself,” said Lisa Daglian of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee advocacy group.
Of the report’s 172 citations, all but 13 are from publicly-available websites, many drawing from news articles. The rest came from real-time interviews.
Still, Daglian defended the agency for going outside of its 70,000-person workforce for answers.
“The MTA has very talented and smart people working for it who are very familiar with the MTA, but not necessarily familiar with systems in Saigon or Singapore or other parts of the world,” she said.
“[Global best practices] are good to know and good to have should there be a spike and the city and region need to go into more stringent lockdown.”
The MTA faces a deficit of more than $10 billion in lost fare, toll and tax revenue over the next two years thanks to the coronavirus, according to transit officials.
The agency’s contract with WSP is for “up to $100,000,” and has not been exhausted, MTA rep Abbey Collins said.
“There are tons of interesting suggestions and ideas [in the report],” Collins told The Post.
“We’ve got a long way to go and we are going to take every innovation and every approach under consideration.”