Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared on NY1's Mornings on 1 to discuss the first day of the and  lines swap, record subway ridership, and other transportation-related topics. 

A transcript of the interview appears below.

Pat Kiernan: This is the day the becomes the , and the becomes the , the two trains swapping routes. The will come into Manhattan along 63rd Street, and the will move to the 53rd Street Tunnel. So, the now makes the stops at Queensbridge-21st, at Roosevelt Island, and at 63rd and Lex. The train is the one that will stop at Queens Plaza, Court Square, and 53rd Street. The goal is to reduce the delays that come on the Queens side when the trains all have to cross paths. Here with us to talk about the train swap, among other things, is MTA Chair Janno Lieber, thank you for coming in this morning.

Janno Lieber: Good to be with you, Pat.

Kiernan: I liken this to drivers at a four-way stop, when somebody's got to wait for somebody else to go, and then they can go in the other direction. Obviously, it's more organized than that with your signaling systems, but there's a lot going on underground around Queens.

Lieber: You're doing a better job than I could in explaining this. Here's the bottom line. We have a pretty old train system. At some point they started having the train, when the 63rd Street tunnel opened, having it cross over all the other lines at Queens Plaza, and the result is, and then they have the train going the other direction. The result is that it limits the throughput, it limits the capacity and creates delays. Time to put an end to that. And the other benefit is for folks who are Roosevelt Island and 23rd street line, which is where the Queensbridge Houses are, a big NYCHA development, they will be getting trains that aren't full when they pull into the station. And when you're at Roosevelt Island, sometimes you got to wait for an train to pass because they're so full. Now they'll be getting M trains with a lot more room. Hopefully they get a seat.

Kiernan: So, some people, if they have to get to one of the stops that is swapped will have to make an extra transfer. But for others, it will be the opposite, that they'll get direct service.

Lieber: Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is, yes, there are some people whose commutes will be changed a little bit, but the bottom line is, if we improve the throughput and the service and eliminate delays on the Queens Boulevard line, which carries over a million people every day, that's good for everybody. That's good for the system. That's why we're doing it.

Kiernan: I think this is something that every institution deals with right there. There's something that historically was done for one reason, and you have to decide is the benefit from making the change in excess of the pain and making the change? Is this something that's been sitting out there for a long time?

Lieber: Of course, yeah, people have been talking about. We got a great operations planning team in New York City Transit. They've been looking at this for a while. Like a lot of things in, frankly, the era of this MTA, we are ready to do stuff that's a little hard because I think that we have shown with the investments that we're making with the improvements of ridership. Last week, we had two days in a row with record ridership. Service has improved. It ain't perfect, especially this morning, but crime is way, way down. We have a lot of things that we're getting accomplished. I think we're getting rider confidence back. Riders are telling us they are 14 percentage points more likely to say, I feel safe in the subway system. So, we're doing a lot of stuff, including congestion pricing, that other versions of the MTA said it's too hard, it's too controversial.

Kiernan: Okay, I got one more question on the F and the M swap, which is at 9:30 at night, just when you've gotten used to it in the daytime, now you're saying that now the F is back to the other route at night.

Lieber: Yeah. I mean, listen, New Yorkers know that there are some trains that run only during the day, from the morning rush through the evening rush, and then they're not available in the overnight because we're doing work, because we need to cover the roughly the same territory with a different mix of service. I take the B train home from Manhattan to Brooklyn all the time, and that goes out at nine o'clock. My friends know, if I'm at dinner at their house in Manhattan, I may run out at 9:15 to get the last B train. New Yorkers know this stuff, and I think that we're going to get people adjusted well.

Kiernan: Well, any other route switcheroos that you're contemplating?

Lieber: Yeah, listen, we're always looking at service. What we love is adding more service. And I'm going to say the obvious thing, which is, people ask me, what do you think of the new mayor-elect? And I say, you know what? I like any politician, any elected official, who says I like transit. I want more transit. I want to push it. That's how we've gotten New Yorkers, you know, rebuilt the city since the pandemic, is getting people to come back to work, and that involves more service. Governor Hochul supported that. The rest of the country, transit is raising fares dramatically and cutting service because they're in financial crisis. In New York, we're increasing service, and we've kept the fare increases low, 2% a year. We love that.

Kiernan: I wasn't going to go into the politics till the second half of our interview. You've jumped ahead and anticipated some of my questions. We're going to take a break. We'll come back with more with Janno Lieber in just a couple of minutes.

Commercial break

Kiernan: Just before the break, we're talking with MTA Chair, Janno Lieber, about the F and M changes and about some of the politics of transit over the last few months. I want to continue with that. Zohran Mamdani has made it very clear that he wants to see free bus fares. You and others have suggested that another possibility for helping out people who can't afford would be an expansion of the Fair Fares program. Have you seen any indication since Mamdani was elected that people are just helping themselves to bus rides because the mayor said the buses are free?

Lieber: I honestly, no, listen, we've made a lot of progress on fare evasion on the subways, 35% down in the last about year, year and a quarter since we really started doing all the things we're doing, both the physical turnstile, the gates, gate guards, a ton of other stuff. The buses are still a problem, and that's why, last week, I talked a little more about the, where we're headed, where we're going to have fare inspectors with hand-held devices that can check fares on everybody and everybody on a bus. I haven't seen the phenomenon of people taking more, doing more, fare evasion on buses yet, but it's pretty high, and we have to deal with it. Just for New York City morale purposes, not just a money issue. It's a fairness issue.

Kiernan: The idea with the bus enforcement is that once you phase out the MetroCard, and once you phase out cash payment, everybody on a bus, regardless of where it is along the route, should have a card that they can retap to prove that they have a valid ID.

Lieber: They do this all over the rest of the world. This is not a novelty. You know, if you're in Paris, they come up to you and say, show me your ticket, show me your card. And we're going to…

Kiernan: I had that happen once, and I bought the wrong ticket and they're...

Lieber: And, you know what? They offer you the opportunity to pay the fine right on the spot.

Kiernan: Yeah, yeah, right, and you can leave.

Lieber: Right, yeah, so we think that's a system that we'd like to implement, but it's obviously after we have the final switch away from coin on bus, which is the one thing that, you know, the validators can't deal with.

Kiernan: And the MetroCard sales end on the 31st of December.

Lieber: Yeah.

Kiernan: Yeah, but you'll still be able to use it for a little while.

Lieber: Yeah, you're going to be able to use them at least for the first six months. We haven't set the final, final date. We'll see how it unfolds. But in the meantime, everybody who has a MetroCard, or, you know, a stack of them in their sock drawer, ought to go to one of our 30 customer service centers and trade them in for value on whatever OMNY device you're using.

Kiernan: I think I recognized you or the back of your head walking through one of those turnstiles, the new fare gates last week. You were at the photo op that we had?

Lieber: I don't know, but you're right. What you're talking about is super important, which is that we are starting to test out. There are four companies that are competing for the contract to install new turnstiles in our system. They won't be turnstiles. They'll be modern fare gates that have much more, that do much more, to prevent people from going over or under, sideways, or whatever.

Kiernan: What are you looking for? Just reliability and maintenance?

Lieber: Basic stuff, you know, the basic stuff that they're, you know, they're tougher to penetrate, they're easier to, easy to maintain, and that they don't break down. And there's a lot, we're going to see four different companies that are not all going to get installations done this year, but we're going to get a lot of them done this year, and in the first quarter of next year, and then we're going to have some time to see which ones work best.

Kiernan: These are all actively in service and other transit systems elsewhere in the world?

Lieber: Yeah, I'm pretty sure, at least three of them. Three out of the four have installations elsewhere in the world.

Kiernan: January 4th is the day for fare and toll increases. We go from $2.90 to $3.00, you have the base fare on subways and buses, up 25 cents on the express buses. If you don't have E-ZPass, you're talking $12.00 each way for the major bridges and tunnels. There's some of the highlights on the screen there. As always, Mr. Lieber, what are you doing with the money?

Lieber: Yeah, what we do with the money is run service. So, 70% of our operating budget is paying people wages, and benefits and pensions, and that's and having enough people to run extra service is what we are doing. Now. MTA budget, since COVID, has actually, in real terms, gone down, in large part because we have cut $500 million a year out of our budget just by squeezing things that didn't need to be as expensive as they are. We've gotten rid of software licenses that people aren't using. We've taken away a lot of cell phones that people weren't using. We looked at the data to adjust our maintenance schedules, so that we weren't, you know, spending a lot of time on stuff that didn't need, didn't have benefit. We've actually saved $500 million a year. We're going to save you another 250 a year. This is a much more efficient operation than it used to be.

Kiernan: Do you think you have been able to put enough into new service to make up for the inconvenience of congestion pricing? 'Cause that was the promise, right? We're going to get people off the subway or off the roads, put them on the subways and buses and they'll get better service.

Lieber: You know, honestly, I just, I always remind people there are only 140,000 people. We carry, what, four and a half plus million people a day on the subway, six and a half million people on all of our transit in New York. There are only 140,000 people who are commuting daily in automobiles to the Central Business District. It has a huge impact on traffic, and since congestion pricing, there are fewer of them. So yeah, we have more than enough room for everybody, and service has improved. And most important, we're making the investments in the long run is going to make this a more modern and reliable system.

Kiernan: But the dream for the transit rider, whether you're a new transit rider pulled out of your car, or whether you're a veteran, is that you're not waiting more than three or four minutes for a train.

Lieber: Yeah, that's not a dream that happens every morning on the train that you ride.

Kiernan: I am very blessed that I ride the L train.

Lieber: The L train and the 7 train and on the Queens Boulevard line, and it's not a coincidence, those are the lines that have the modern signals, and that allows you to run more trains safely, closer together, because the technology tells you exactly how close trains are and how fast they're going, and can control the speed. The old system of signaling, you basically have a general idea where the trains are, but not more than that, and so you have to space them much more, much further apart. That's why we're investing so much in modern signals. Better service, more reliable service.

Kiernan: Thanks for coming in this morning.

Lieber: You bet.