TRANSCRIPT: MTA Chair and CEO Lieber Appears Live on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared live on MSNBC's Morning Joe with Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Mike Barnicle, and Donny Deutsch to discuss congestion relief and other transit-related issues.

A transcript of the interview appears below.

[Video clip plays of Congestion Relief Zone sign being revealed on Saturday, Jan. 4.]

Mika Brzezinski: That was Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman and CEO, Janno Lieber, unveiling the new signage in Manhattan notifying drivers of New York City's new congestion pricing plan that is now in effect, and Janno joins us now. How did it go, the first day? Well, first of all, there are those who are complaining about this, very concerned about this, calling it a scam. We'll get to that. You're not the guy to blame, per se, but you're here today.

Donny Deutsch: No, let's blame him.

Brzezinski: All right let's blame him.

Deutsch: It's on you.

Janno Lieber, MTA Chair and CEO: Deutsch to the rescue.

Brzezinski: This was a collective decision. Having said that, how did the first day go? Did you see a difference?

Lieber: It's too early to get into draw any, you know, long term conclusions. But yesterday was a light day. Everybody was noticing the traffic was light. There was also the day after the holiday season, and there was snow forecast, so we're not drawing any premature conclusions. But the bigger picture is New York has a problem. It's called congestion. It's, you know, it's killing our economy. The business community is hugely in support of this, because spending so much time in traffic for trucks and plumbers and service professionals, is literally killing our economy, billions a year. And ambulances can't get to hospitals. And as a society, we decided to do something about it. That's what congestion pricing is meant to do.

Willie Geist: So how do you explain this to someone? I agree with you, having lived in New York for 20 years, the car is the last resort. It's the worst way to get around New York City. Get on a subway, walk if you can. But there are people who don't always have that luxury. If you're commuting in from New Jersey for work or something like that, they say, "I'm already paying, what, 16 bucks at the tunnel or the bridge. And now you're gonna hit me with this again." What do you say to those commuters?

Lieber: What I say to them is, your time is worth a lot. If we can make traffic better, so that you spend less time wasting in traffic, that's better for you, that has real value. And we're seeing it again and again, in the coverage just yesterday, people coming off the bridges and tunnels saying, hey, if traffic's always this good, this is worth it. We'll have to see whether we're as successful as we want to be. But the other thing I would say is this is historic. We're the first city in the country to deal with this. I'm getting calls from people all over the country. There's gridlock in all kinds of American cities. We have the great mass transit system that 90% of our commuters take. So, we have an option, and using the proceeds from this to invest in even better mass transit makes perfect sense. That's why we're doing it.

Mike Barnicle: So, to that point that you just raised, what do you say to people who you've indicated, a lot of this money, $9 a whack, whatever it is, back and forth. All the money that you raise from this, you claim that it's going to go to improve the transportation system, basically the subway system in New York City, all of its boroughs. And people say: What improvements? When are they gonna occur? What do these improvements costs?

Lieber: We have a system. Remember, we have 75,000 employees. We carry between six and seven million people a day. You know, we have on the subways alone, four and a half million people a day, more than the population of the city of Los Angeles. Yeah, it costs a lot to run it. But the investments that are being made in new train cars, in electric buses, so we have cleaner air, in making all of the whole old subway system truly ADA accessible, so parents with strollers can use it, so people with disabilities or just older people who have difficulty getting up and down stairs can use it. Those are investments that are underway, and we're able to accelerate them even more with congestion pricing proceeds.

Brzezinski: So Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York had some pretty harsh words for the congestion pricing and especially your leadership on it. He was on Morning Joe yesterday, so we want to play a little bit of what he had to say.

Lieber: Oh, goody.

Brzezinski: So you can respond. Here it is--

[Video clip plays from Jan. 6 Morning Joe interview with Rep. Mike Lawler who appeared remotely]

Brzezinski: All right. A lot there. Your response there. He also called the congestion pricing a scam on New Yorkers.

Lieber: Listen, you know, this is grievance politics, not substance politics. I would say, you know, 80% of Lawler's constituents actually ride mass transit to get- one percent of his constituents actually commute to the Central Business District and pay the toll. This is a great grievance politics issue. But if he were interested in substance -I went to that guy, and I said, "Can you help us? You're in the majority, sir. Can you help us get more money out of Congress?" All his words about- New York is 45% of the mass transit riders in the United States, we get 17% of the federal money. I said, "Congressman, you're in the majority. Can you help us?" Never heard from him again. Historically, this - I mean, and this table reflects it - historically, centrists in New York went to work in Washington, Democrat or Republican, and fought for mass transit to get, to improve that payback that New York gets shorted on. Al D'Amato was the head of the committee that oversaw Senate, the Senate committee, that oversaw money for mass transit, and he fought for the MTA. The guys who went to Washington in the majority the last time around actually have done nothing.

That is like, you know, Joe, Joe was a congressman from Florida, that would be like a congressman from Florida not doing anything to get hurricane relief, or a congressman from Iowa not doing anything for corn. Okay, that's what we got from the guy you just showed all that stuff about. Now, on the MTA, we, as part of the budget that Governor Hochul who actually has been helpful to the MTA, set up a couple years ago to make sure after COVID, when the rest of the country's mass transit systems were going down the tubes and cutting service, she solved the problem. And as part of that solution, we found $500 million of savings without cutting service and without firing anybody. Okay, so this is an agency that actually is 3% lower budget than it was pre-COVID. Very few other government agencies can show that record of getting more efficient. And we're getting projects done, hundreds of millions of dollars under budget.

That guy is selling an outdated cartoon. Everybody loves to talk about the MTA, because it's a very personal experience in New York, but that guy is selling an outdated cartoon. And I wish we had the old New York GOP that went to Washington and worked for New Yorkers, who they actually represent.

Geist: But to Congressman Lawler's point, it's not just his point, is the MTA has an operating budget of what, 19--

Lieber: $20 billion.

Geist: $20 billion. An organization that has a budget of $20 billion already should have been able to take care of the subways. They shouldn't look the way they look, most of these subway stations. It shouldn't operate the way it operates. Most of these trains. You shouldn't have to then slap a $9 tax on a commuter to pour more money into a system that doesn't appear to be working for New Yorkers.

Lieber: Yeah, I respectfully disagree. I think that, you know, I grew up in a New York, I grew up not far from where we are right now. I grew up in a New York where the subways broke down every 5,000 miles, and now they break down every 200,000 miles. We have made enormous strides in terms of the reliability and the operation of the system. We grew ridership hugely. We have actually grown the system. We put in a new subway, Second Avenue subway, that was promised to people in that neighborhood 70 years ago. Nobody ever got to it. We've got all brand-new cars. Yeah, we have a long way to go, and it needs to feel safer. Part of what is, you know, everybody's experiencing New York is this loss of the sense of safety in the public space that we must address. It's post-COVID, it, obviously, it's impacting on people's psychology. But it's just not fair to say. The subway has gotten dramatically better than when I was a kid, when you didn't even take a chance to change because you didn't know if another train was coming. This is a much better system than we've had in a long time, and I'm proud that we continue to make it better.

Deutsch: So, as a branding guy, a year from now, what's a win? How are you gonna go forward and say, Oh, guess what? Yes, this nine bucks did hurt, but here's the win?

Lieber: Yeah, no, that's a really good point, Donny. I want people to recognize that we've made progress on traffic because that is about personal experience. It's about economy. Remember, what we're trying to do is to make the traffic better, even for the people who have to drive. It's not only to invest in folks who are using mass transit. So, we really do want to see that. We want to see the indicia, the indicators of success with respect to the economy, that, you know, that trucks and service professionals are spending less time stuck in traffic. We want to see cleaner air. We want to see less road rage, so the pedestrians and cyclists get killed because people walking their kids to school around the Lincoln Tunnel are scared, cause there's so much road rage. So, you got to calm the traffic. You've got to have better flowing traffic, and we have to make the investments in mass transit. I think that's what's gonna make people feel that this was, in the end, a good investment. Like many things, it's hard to do good policy, sometimes, when you're surrounded by grievance politics. We're going to get through.

Geist: Finally, before we let you go, you're on the front page of The New York Post this morning for some comments you made about crime in the subways that, yes, felonies are down, but assaults are up, murders are up since 2019, which is a good measuring stick, pre-COVID. And you said, because of these truly horrific incidents that we continue to see, and especially in the last couple of weeks, that you say those incidents, quote, are all in our heads. That that gets into people's heads. Would you like to clarify what you said?

Lieber: Yeah, I mean, listen, what my point and what folks, of course, at that newspaper omit is, I said that the psychology is important because people have to feel safe in the public space. At our density, twice Boston or Chicago, nine times Phoenix or Houston. We have to be able to be feel comfortable in the public space because we're all together. The subway is like our public square. We're experiencing government, we're experiencing each other every day. You got to feel safe. So, I am pushing for the criminal justice system to do more to keep the small number of people who tend to be recidivists out of the public space. Whether it's been the mental health system or putting them indoors otherwise, I don't think that people who keep breaking the rules in the public space and making people feel unsafe ought to be at large. And that's why I become, you know, an advocate for a little pushback on the criminal justice system. We can't just let people come in and out.

Brzezinski: All right, Chairman and CEO of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority-

Deutsch: And brave man.

Brzezinski: --Janno Lieber. Thank you so much-

Lieber: Thank you.

Brzezinski: -for coming on this morning. We appreciate it.