Audit Report on Metropolitan Transportation Authority New York City Transit Subway Service Diversions for Maintenance and Capital Projects
Audit Report In Brief
Audit Objectives
Our audit objectives were to determine (1) whether subway service diversions are effectively managed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) – New York City Transit (Transit) and (2) whether the riding public is adequately informed of service diversions.
Audit Results – Summary
A “service diversion” takes place when Transit must close all or a part of a subway line for capital projects or maintenance. For the period January 1, 2009, through July 14, 2010, Transit records show 3,332 service diversions were underway in various phases. Service diversions, while necessary, can be an inconvenience to riders and can have an adverse economic impact on businesses. Moreover, the frequency and duration of Transit’s service diversions are increasing due to projects necessary to restore and modernize an aging subway system. Between 2008 and 2010 the number of weekend diversions rose from 47 to 74, and the number of diversions lasting for at least one month increased from 7 to 57. For example, independent reports show that the Number 7 subway line connecting Manhattan with many neighborhoods between Flushing and Long Island City had extended weekend service diversions almost every year since 2003, including nine consecutive weekend diversions between January and March 2010. We found that Transit has a number of policies and procedures for managing and controlling subway diversions. However, we also found that more needs to be done. In particular, diversion costs were not adequately monitored, daily work on diversions often started late and ended early, and the public was not adequately informed about diversions. These conditions add substantially to project cost, further inconvenience riders, and cause economic hardship to affected businesses. Most notably, we found that: Transit does not always prepare adequate supporting documentation to evidence that it is monitoring diversion costs on an ongoing basis. As a result, it could not justify why diversion costs exceed budgets. We noted that four contracts had related diversion costs budgeted at a combined $56.5 million. However, as of January 4, 2011, the diversion costs for these contracts were estimated to cost $83.1 million and, therefore, were already $26.6 million over budget.
Executive Summary
Work on service diversions often starts late and ends early. For example, a service diversion may be scheduled to start at 12:01 a.m. on a Saturday and to end at 5:00 a.m. on a Monday, while work actually commenced at 1:22 a.m. on Saturday and ended at 2:30 a.m. on Monday. We examined General Order Worksheets for 29 diversions and noted that work started late for 28 and ended early for 21. The unproductive time associated with this ranged from 10 to 27 percent of scheduled time for each diversion. Assuming that the lower range of 10 percent unproductive time was associated with all of the 3,332 diversions underway between January 1, 2009, and July 14, 2010, and assuming this inefficiency was eliminated, we estimate that $10.5 million of unproductive cost would have been avoided. Transit officials informed us that newspaper ads had been created for only 2 of 50 diversions that we sampled, and neither of these 2 pertained to high-ridership areas. Also, contrary to federal regulations, we did not see any signs posted in a language other than English when we visited 39 subway stations with diversion projects underway. (See Exhibit A.) While Transit has a subway ridership of about 2.3 billion annually, its budget for diversion advertisements was only about $228,000. We questioned whether this was an adequate budget amount to effectively communicate about the volume of diversions managed by Transit. Our report contains five recommendations for improving the management of diversions. MTA and Transit officials stated that they have taken steps to implement necessary changes.