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| January 1995... Why MTA NYC Bus service suck so BAD!; + Orion & TMC fail to deliver buses (285042) | |||
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January 1995... Why MTA NYC Bus service suck so BAD!; + Orion & TMC fail to deliver buses |
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Posted by Gold_12th on Tue Oct 1 14:56:22 2013 January 9, 1995A Fleet in Decay: A special report.; New York's Bus Service Worsens With Little Help on the Horizon After 20 years of losing riders, New York City's bus system has sharply deteriorated in quality because the fleet has aged, buses are wearing out and the two manufacturers under contract to provide new machines have failed to deliver, transit officials say. More than 45 percent of the 3,600 buses in the fleet have now outlived their useful life and should be replaced, officials say. Chronic parts shortages keep buses sidelined for weeks. At the same time, labor strife and sabotage have risen in depots as managers have pressed mechanics to work faster to keep the fleet running. On some lines, particularly in Manhattan and the Bronx, there are not enough buses in good working order to handle the morning rush hour. For riders, these problems have caused longer waits between buses on some lines or occasional disruptions in service. In interviews, several riders also complained that the buses that do run are often bunched up together, leading to 15-minute gaps in service. "There seems to be fewer buses every week, every month," said Verna Sabelle, as she shivered against the 26-degree weather last week waiting for the M1 bus on Fifth Avenue. "There are not as many buses as there were a few years ago. And they aren't programmed properly. I see no reason for four or five buses coming at once." The Transit Authority says the depots still put 98 percent of the required buses on the street most mornings. Once on the road, however, more buses are breaking down. The average distance buses travel between breakdowns has fallen 9 percent in the last year. A review of logs from a typical week in early December shows that about 8 percent of buses that left depots in Manhattan and 7 percent of Bronx buses experienced mechanical problems once on the road. Those numbers were in sharp contrast to Brooklyn, where about 4 percent broke down, or Queens, where only 1.3 percent had trouble. The result is fewer buses on the streets. A recent Transit Authority survey of 40 heavily traveled lines suggested that on some lines in Manhattan and the Bronx as many as 1 out of 10 buses did not arrive. The problem worsened during the evening. "The general view is that the bus service stinks," said Gene Russianoff, a lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a mass transit advocacy group. "The subways are improving and the buses are on a downward spiral." With service declining, the Transit Authority president, Alan F. Kiepper, has shaken up the management of the bus department. The vice president for buses, Velva Edwards, resigned under pressure two weeks ago. Ms. Edward's resignation came just 18 months after Mr. Kiepper brought in two operational experts from the subway system, Charles Monheim and Lars Updale, to whip the management of the depots into shape. Since then, three of the five borough managers have been replaced along with several of the 19 depot managers. Mr. Monheim now has been named the acting vice president in charge of buses. "It's clear the department of buses is not performing at the level that we want it to," Mr. Kiepper said. "We've had significant problems in maintenance. There are management problems as well. I'm not laying it all at the feet of the union." Labor and management have blamed each other for the slide in service. Managers complain that the union exerts too much control over work in some shops through its control of overtime and by enforcing work rules, and say efficient workers are harassed. Managers also charge that repairs take too long. For instance, a transmission change takes about 42 hours in most city bus depots, compared with 22 hours in private companies. This is especially true, transit officials say, in Manhattan and Bronx depots that used to belong to private bus lines before the authority took them over in 1962. The division of the Transport Workers Union that controls those shops has different work rules than Queens and Brooklyn mechanics follow. "We have capable mechanics," Mr. Monheim said. "The issue is whether they are motivated to give their best effort or whether they feel compelled to operate at half speed or less." Union leaders, on the other hand, blame management for failing to replenish the fleet with new buses. They also say they lack the proper tools and parts to maintain the older buses and complain that many depots are in abysmal condition. Even two newly constructed depots have design flaws that have made them almost unbearable on hot days. To union leaders, the recent management efforts to crack down on mechanics has only hurt morale, resulting in lower productivity. "They are just trying to mandate the times on the jobs without negotiating and that's causing a lot of animosity," said James Hood, vice president of the Transit Workers Union for the Manhattan and Bronx bus services. "They purposely brought in certain types of managers with the idea of breaking the union. Once they did that, the union members got their backs up." Troubled Contractors A Failure To Deliver Labor disputes aside, the major reason bus riders are waiting longer at stops is that transit officials made a serious miscalculation when they went to buy new buses in 1989, 1992 and 1993. The two manufacturers under contract with the Transit Authority to build buses -- the Transportation Manufacturing Corporation of Roswell, N.M., and Bus Industries of America of Oriskany, N.Y. -- are both in financial trouble and have failed to deliver on contracts, transit officials said. Most of the fleet was built by T.M.C. in the early 1980's, back when it was a General Motors subsidiary. Since then, the company has shown steady losses and has been sold three times. In 1989, T.M.C. was the only company whose products had passed a rigorous 10-month road test, qualifying the company to make buses for New York, transit officials said. But in 1992 and 1993, the authority decided to give most of the new orders to Bus Industries of America, a New York State subsidiary of Ontario Bus Industries in Canada. The company makes Orion buses, which also passed the test. Although the decision seemed good for the state economy, Bus Industries of America took a financial nose dive in 1993 and the company is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. As a result, about 367 new buses that were supposed to arrive in the fall of 1993 were six months late, and another 334 buses that were to be delivered this year have not arrived. To make matters worse, the buses that have been delivered have developed mechanical problems. The wheelchair lifts on 167 T.M.C. buses bought in 1992 were defective, and have had to be sent back for repairs. The rear-door switches on about 70 of the Orion buses were also faulty. Transit officials say they had no choice but to contract with T.M.C. and Bus Industries of America because they were the only two companies who had agreed to its road test. Indeed, few companies want to jump through New York's hoops at a time when the entire industry is in turmoil. Many are unwilling to build buses tough enough to last 12 years on the city's cratered streets. "If you do business with New York, you go broke," said Dennis Howard, the president of the Gillig Corporation in Lafayette, Calif., a bus maker that has stayed out of the city's market. Because of the trouble with the contracts, officials said the authority will not require a road test this year. Indeed, transit officials intend to buy about 50 buses from the Flxible Corporation, of Delaware, Ohio, which used to be owned by the Grumman Corporation -- a company essentially frozen out of the New York City market in the early 1980's after a shipment of their buses turned out to be poorly designed. Meanwhile, the old T.M.C. buses are breaking down more often. More and more buses need new frames, engines, transmissions and differential gears, managers and mechanics said. There are 260 buses waiting for major repairs and at least 80 of those will require structural work. "The reality is that we have a fleet that should have been replaced and has not been," said Theodore Basta, the Manhattan general manager of the Transit Authority. With no new bus suppliers in sight, the authority plans to spend $11.4 million this year to rebuild 410 T.M.C. buses that were scheduled to be retired, Mr. Updale said. Labor Relations Charges And Reprisals The union's resistance to work-rule changes has exacerbated the service problems, transit officials say. Labor tensions rose last year after Mr. Monheim took over and began trying to change some longstanding work practices. To begin with, Mr. Monheim ended the practice in which depots with bad records fixing buses were able to cover their deficiencies by borrowing buses from better-performing depots. Mr. Monheim insisted each depot rise or fall on its own. "The policy was we were not going to throw overtime at depots that aren't doing the work," Mr. Monheim said. Under the previous system, most mechanics expected to receive at least three eight-hour overtime shifts a week, which were doled out by the union leader in the shop, several managers said. "The union to a great extent ran these shops," said Sonia Maisonet, the Bronx general manager. "If the overtime was not there, they would create the overtime through vandalism, low productivity and high absenteeism." Union leaders say management's attempts to speed work are laughable since there are still constant shortages of parts and tools. At the Hudson Pier Depot, in Chelsea, for example, 30 mechanics share three air-driven wrenches. And a check of last month's supplies reveals that the Coliseum Depot, in the Bronx, was completely out of 383 different parts. "If they want to talk industrial standards, they better come up with better conditions," said James Whelan, a union official. Labor relations in many depots have deteriorated into a game of charge and countercharge. The union has responded to attempts to increase productivity by accusing management of putting unsafe buses on the road and endangering riders to improve performance statistics. Management has accused the union of sabotaging buses and slowing down work to get more overtime. Saboteurs have struck several times in the last year. In April last year, someone stuffed paper debris in the gas tanks of 28 buses at the 100th Street Depot in Harlem. On Oct. 20, an assistant shop steward was crushed to death at the Fresh Ponds Depot in Queens while trying to slash the air bags in the suspension system of a bus, the transit police said. The union vice chairman in the shop had been suspended two days earlier after fighting with a manager over work rules. A few days later, someone shorted out the entire electrical systems of three buses in the Amsterdam Depot in Harlem. In early November, at least three buses had their fuel lines punctured at the Hudson Pier Depot a day after a manager had forced mechanics to pick up garbage around a trash compactor, and, on Thanksgiving evening, someone put glue in the fare boxes of about 18 buses at the 100th Street Depot, crippling morning service. The tensions reached an apex at the Coliseum Depot last summer. A new manager who tried to change the overtime system met with stiff resistance. His office was broken into and a bullet was left on his seat. Later, a union official dismantled a surveillance camera installed after the incident and was suspended for 60 days. Union officials deny the members are responsible for the sabotage and suggest managers may be doing it to build support for union busting. But managers scoff at that theory, and charge union members are to blame. "Here are demonstrable instances of either extreme actions of God or somebody did something," Mr. Basta said. So far the vandalism has only disrupted service temporarily on isolated days. As a practical matter, however, the threat of sabotage intimidates managers from pushing the union too hard. Without labor peace, depot managers acknowledge it is impossible for them to get enough buses on the street. Edward Matalevich, the manager of the Manhattanville Depot in Harlem, summed up his delicate relationship with the union this way: "Technically, the union has no control over the shop. But realistically, they do. They can always get the flu. If you come off full force, like dynamite, as strong as you are, they will throw up a resistance." http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/09/nyregion/fleet-decay-special-report-new-york-s-bus-service-worsens-with-little-help.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm |
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