Union sues to stop MTA reduced service on C and F subway lines
By CLAYTON GUSE | New York Daily News March 18, 2021 9:57 p.m. Sam Constanza. New York Daily News The city’s largest transit workers union on Thursday sued the MTA to prevent continued reduced service on a pair of subway lines. The cuts have eliminated dozens of daily trips, causing rush-hour wait times on the C line to jump from eight minutes to 12. On the F line, rush-hour headways increased from four minutes to eight minutes, with midday waits increasing from six or seven minutes to eight. The changes have also taken work away from Transport Workers Union Local 100, which hopes its suit will stop them from becoming permanent. The union, which represents much of the MTA’s 70,000-strong workforce, argues transit officials are violating state law requiring the mayor and City Council be notified 30 days before any nonemergency service cuts. The planned cuts should require public hearings, the suit says. The union also argues cutting service during the pandemic “presents an ongoing health hazard” that violates the MTA’s legal requirement to promote the “the safety and convenience of the public.” Officials have run reduced service on the C and F lines since March 2020, when thousands of transit workers went into coronavirus quarantine, leaving too few crews to run the subway’s schedules. Transit officials temporarily cut service across the board by roughly 25%, and C service was cut entirely. But as crews returned and regular service resumed on most lines, C and F trains ran at reduced frequencies. Some of the cuts date back to January 2020 , when the MTA reshuffled trains after its newest subway cars were pulled over a safety issue . Now Metropolitan Transportation Authority honchos want to lock in the cuts for the next round of worker schedules, set to go into effect Sunday. “The authority has said we are not cutting any service,” said Arthur Schwartz, an attorney for Local 100. “They got all the money they wanted from the stimulus package, but they’re cutting service in hope that nobody would know about it.” Schwartz said the case is similar to a suit Local 100 won in January over the MTA’s plan to cut some jobs at subway token booths that would have left them empty during workers’ lunch breaks. The judge ruled the job changes amounted to a service cut, and said the MTA had to hold public hearings before implementing them. Union officials also feared C and F trains would become too close for comfort during the pandemic as New Yorkers start riding again. “With the ridership creeping back — we’re scraping two million people a day — and with billions in the MTA’s coffers from the federal stimulus, now is a better time than any to put normal service back on the C and the F line,” said Eric Loegel, vice president of rapid transit operations for Local 100. Interim NYC Transit president Sarah Feinberg said during a board meeting Wednesday it makes sense to run fewer trains because subway ridership is down 70% compared to before the pandemic. “Those are the two lines that we did not bring back to completely full service,” said Feinberg. “I think ultimately we need to see where service is going to land over the next several months as the city comes back, as the economy comes back.” https://www.nydailynews.com/2021/03/18/union-sues-to-stop-mta-reduced-service-on-c-and-f-subway-lines/