TRANSCRIPT: MTA Chair and CEO Lieber Appears on NY1’s Morning on 1

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared on NY1's Mornings on 1 with Pat Kiernan and Jamie Stelter to discuss congestion relief tolling and other transportation issues. 

A transcript of the interview appears below.

Pat Kiernan: Ultimately it's not a big increase, it's $2.90 to $3.00, 10 cents, but every time the MTA raises the fare it renews the debate about the extent to what public Transit should be subsidized in New York, and it also raises the debate about how wisely the MTA is spending the money that it has. Passengers took 1.3 billion subway trips last year. If you add 10 cents to each of those trips, you would come up with 130 million extra dollars. If you look at 440 million bus rides with 10 more cents, that would give you $44 million. I confess to that being very back of the envelope sort of math there. MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber is with us this morning to talk about the many transit things that happen for the New Year. Good morning.

Janno Lieber: Good morning. Happy New Year.

Kiernan: If my numbers are roughly correct, you got $170 million more to spend this year.

Lieber: 70% of the MTA budget goes to pay the workers.

Kiernan: They are negotiated pay raises already.

Lieber: Yeah, we're doing 2% per annum increases every year, steadily.

Kiernan: So, you spent the money already.

Lieber: And they're getting 3 to 3.5% annual increases based on collective bargaining and the realities of inflation. So, we're already behind when you do 2% a year. Here's the bottom line, we have in the last 10 years raised the fare by 9%, the base fare and general inflation has been 31%.

Kiernan: You feel you've done well versus the cost of living.

Lieber: Oh, yeah. And affordability is one of our principal goals, but let me just say clearly, public transit is one of the things that makes New York affordable. It's 15% the cost of owning a car. I believe it's a great bargain compared to what it means to own a vehicle, let alone paying for gas and parking and other things, so.

Kiernan: What about all the social media griping yesterday, "$6 round trip now that's not fair."

Lieber: Listen, anytime there's change, anytime anything goes up in price. But I challenge anyone to go look at what's something in their life cost in the past 10 years, and see we're, we're less than a third of what general inflation is. Everything has gone up in price. I got to pay the workers, and we've made service a lot better. We're rebuilding the system. Thanks to the NYPD it's a much safer system than it was before Covid, 14% crime down. This is a good product, and we're going to continue to make it better. I want to deliver more service, by the way. Pat, we've been delivering more service.

Kiernan: And I think that a lot of people would be happier with that than saving 10 cents on the on the fare if you were able to provide either more reliable or more frequent service.

Lieber: And the other thing I would say is that now, with the transition to full tap and ride, you got the opportunity people don't have to walk up to a MetroCard Vending Machine and calculate in their head, how often am I going to ride? You ride, after your 12th ride within any week, you automatically get a weekly. It's much fairer than forcing people to do all that calculation and only giving the discounts to people who have money in their pocket. So, we're thrilled about where we are in terms of affordability. We're going to keep pushing.

Kiernan: Mamdani Administration now in office. He made it very clear that he wanted a free bus program. You and others said, it's not that simple. Are there conversations underway with the Mamdani team, or is that something more that goes through the governor's office?

Lieber: Yeah, you know, we're going to get to that discussion in due course. Obviously, the legislative session is going to start next week, and I'm sure that issues of transit affordability are going to be on the table. I've made it very clear, I'm interested in transit affordability across all of the modes, not just bus, but subway, railroads and so on. So, we're going to have that discussion. But let me tell you, we were together with the governor and the mayor, yesterday, celebrating the incredible success of congestion pricing on its one-year anniversary. And I said it then, and I'll say it again. It's great to have a truly pro transit mayor in office, and we're going to work with him.

Kiernan: We're taking a break. I want to talk more about the congestion pricing anniversary. It is 7:28, Janno Lieber with us. We'll continue in a couple of minutes.

Commercial break

Kiernan: MTA Chair Janno Lieber back with us for an update on some of the new things in 2026 at the MTA. As you mentioned, it's been one year since congestion pricing took effect. By your account, you are, A), getting the revenue you wanted, and, B), you believe that traffic has improved in Manhattan.

Lieber: Yeah, it's not just us believing it. The New York Times yesterday did a huge spread on all of the statistics related to the congestion pricing program. And I think they said, by all metrics, it is an, is a success. Traffic is down, speeds, especially of buses, are up. People are saving 50% of the time to get through the Lincoln, the Holland Tunnel, 25% time savings in the Lincoln Tunnel. Cross streets, many of the key cross streets are moving much faster, and all of the downside concerns, air quality, you know, air quality, traffic outside the central business district, have proved not to be a problem. It's still a huge success.

Jamie Stelter: We had Susan Lee on the program yesterday, she was still pushing back on the environmental, the pollution part, and she seemed really stuck on -- like she is not going to give up on this going back to court at the end of the month about it.

Lieber: Listen, Jamie, not, no secret, we've been sued in all kinds of courts, and we won every time. I'm confident that it's going to stand up in court. But people are entitled to their own opinions, they're not entitled to their own facts. Look at the Times report from yesterday, which goes through all the data. And the data is, you know, uniformly positive. Step back for a second. We were here a year ago, people were really concerned about all these bad things that was going to kill business. You know, business in the center of Manhattan, but none of that has happened. There are more people in the central business district than there were before. Broadway had its best year. You know, I got to say that I talked before about having a pro-transit mayor. You know who's really pro-transit? Governor Hochul. She stuck it out, and her bet on the congestion pricing program, and making sure that it's a success for New York, and for our business community, and for everybody has proved to be right.

Kiernan: So why are there still those ridiculous moments of traffic in Midtown? Is it the Ubers are driving around in circles looking for their next ride?

Lieber: Listen, this is New York, there's still going to be moments of traffic. Reducing the number of vehicles by, you know, millions over the course of the year doesn't mean there'll never be a traffic moment, especially during the holiday season. But month after month, week after week, we've shown, you know, 11, 12% reduction in traffic, and that has caused speeds to pick up dramatically, especially for people coming into the city. The drivers, who are some of the people with the loudest voices against it before, a lot of them have changed their minds, and they're saying: Hey, I value my time. I'm saving a ton of time. This is valuable.

Kiernan: Okay, I got a whole bunch of other the beginning of the year topics here, one of which is this, this new policy as of this week on Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road that you can't play games with the conductor on whether you have a mobile ticket activated on your app.

Lieber: Pat, you know this. What happened is TrainTime, buying tickets on the mobile app on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North, is a huge success. People love that app on the Google Play Store, I think it gets a 4.9.

Kiernan: It's a two-step process, though, you buy the ticket, and it sits in a wallet, and then you're supposed to activate it, which makes it unusable at some other time.

Lieber: Yeah, and the problem is that people are playing games. They don't activate until the conductor shows up. In many cases, they don't even buy the ticket until the conductor shows up. So, it's slowing the conductors down. It's gaming the system. And if we're going to push to get back against fare evasion in the subway, I fair to say the railroad commuters also have to, there has to be this end to this pattern of gaming the system. Jamie and I were talking a couple minutes ago. You see it all the time, people pretending that they bought a ticket, or, you know: oh, I can't get connectivity.

Stelter: Oh, I just don't have Wi-Fi right now.

Lieber: I don't have Wi-Fi, and the conductors can't get through. So, as of now, buy the ticket just like you did before, but activate it, and if you don't activate it, you get a series of warnings, and potentially you lose access to your train, your mobile ticketing as an option. If you're gaming the system again and again and again. So, we got to do it. The railroad customers look around, and they see people playing games, including people who just run away from the conductor, and they want to know that they're not the suckers because they're paying. We got to make it fair.

Kiernan: Are you sad about the MetroCard?

Lieber: No, I think like all New Yorkers, nostalgia is part of it. We, the MTA, like, put on a lot of celebrations as Shanifah Rieara, our chief customer officer, said: it's time for MetroCard to retire, but we're going to do it with dignity. So, we did a lot of fun stuff, with promotions with Carvel and Zabar's and others. A lot of good stuff because MetroCard has been great, and it's an icon, as my son says. But mobile ticketing, I mean tap to ride, is here. 95% of New Yorkers were already using it before this, this end of year deadline, and, actually, the last couple days, it's 97%. People can still use their leftover MetroCards, we're just not selling them anymore.

Stelter: Well, people are selling them on eBay. We took these out before because I was like: how much can I get for these?

Kiernan: No one's gonna miss the trying to figure out how, if you have 14 cents left, how to get it off.

Lieber: Standing on line. You know, with tap to ride, there's so many fewer people who are standing on line to buy a card or work a vending machine that the whole system, even for those who are going to buy an OMNY card or use that option, as opposed to credit card or Google Play or Apple Pay, it's a better system for everybody.

Kiernan: Okay, I want to go on the record with an idea before we wrap up here.

Lieber: Go for it.

Kiernan: OMNY is a perfectly fine name. I don't mind it. Let's, listen, let the MetroCard fully get phased out, and then, like, a year or two from now, we just call the OMNY the MetroCard? Because I think Metro…

Lieber: You know, you're not the first person who said that to me, including some very senior people at the MTA. I will consider the Pat Kiernan initiative on that.

Kiernan: Those are smart people who work [inaudible]...

Lieber: Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, as you can imagine, there's a lot of investment in the trade press and the design and the OMNY.

Kiernan: Yeah, and you own the MetroCard stuff, too.

Lieber: We're all over it. New York 1 rules.

Kiernan: Okay, thank you, Janno.

Lieber: All right.