Taken for a Ride
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It costs $91 an hour to run a public bus in New York City, but only $59 an hour in Suffolk County, Long Island, and $57 an hour for the competitively contracted routes operated by New Jersey Transit.
The reason it’s cheaper outside the city has little to do with traffic and much to do with management, as E.S. Savas and E.J. McMahon explain in a report out yesterday from the Manhattan Institute. The lower hourly rates are achieved by letting private companies compete to win a contract to provide bus service. In New York City, the job isn’t bid out but is done by the same old government monopoly. The average New York City bus driver earns $54,277 a year, the report says, and ones with seniority and plum assignments can earn almost $87,000 a year, according to Mr. Savas and Mr. McMahon.
Now, we’re all for paying bus drivers a living wage. But the politicians — starting with Mayor Bloomberg and City Council speaker Gifford Miller — are insisting that the city’s $6 billion budget gap can’t be closed by spending cuts alone. So they want to raise taxes on people who work in the city but live outside it — people who can’t vote them out of office. And they want to raise taxes on property owners. Why should commuters and property owners in a city that already has some of the nation’s highest taxes be forced to pay more so that bus drivers can be paid princely sums?
The Manhattan Institute study has a rundown of savings by other cities that bid out their bus service. London cut its costs 51%. Stockholm slashed expenses 20%. Los Angeles’s savings were between 24% and 43%. San Diego saved between 30% and 37%. Denver saved 46%.
These changes take some time to implement, but with the city in a fiscal crisis, the time to start is now. It costs about $1.3 billion a year to run the city’s buses, the study says. Savings on the order of those achieved in other cities would cut expenses by about a third — or $433 million. Assuming those savings were split equally between the city and the state, the city’s share would be about $217 million. Combined with yesterday’s savings of $26 million from selling Gracie Mansion, that brings The New York Sun’s cuts up to $243 million. Stay tuned, and feel free to send in your own budget-cutting suggestions to budget@nysun.com. Leaving these savings unrealized and raising taxes instead would be taking the taxpayers for a ride.
