Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the accelerated rollout of MTA eTix, a free MTA app that will allow Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad customers to purchase train tickets anytime, anywhere with their mobile devices. The app, which was scheduled for completion by the end of 2016, will now be available to all riders of both railroads by the end of this summer.
To view the app, click here. To learn more about the app, click here. Customers who prefer paper tickets will be unaffected by the new app.
Individuals interested in accessing MTA eTix can do so at the links below:
For iOS Devices
For Android Devices
VIDEO of the Governor’s remarks is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h264, mp4) format here.
AUDIO of the Governor’s remarks is available here.
PHOTOS of the event will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor’s remarks is below:
Thank you very much. Welcome back after a July 4th weekend. I trust and hope everyone had a healthy and a safe one. Mark Heavey, I want to thank him very much for a great presentation. Great job that he just did. Mr. Heavey has many talents. He also happens to be a great fisherman, I want you to know. You would not know that, but I know that because he came up to the Catskill Challenge last week which brought the attention to the Catskills. He caught a really beautiful trout fly-fishing, which is an art form. So the demonstration he did was extraordinary. Frankly, I found it more extraordinary that he caught that over 20-inch trout. So let’s give him a round of applause.
To Chairman Prendergast, who I have said before, has the hardest job of most people – almost any job in public service. He also has a harder job than his predecessors. Why? Because his predecessors’ job was primarily to operate the system. You have an MTA system, 9 million people are walking in the door every day and you have to make 9 million people happy with the way you operate it. That is an impossible job, but it’s not just 9 million people. These are 9 million New Yorkers. So making 9 million New Yorkers happy every morning is really difficult and that’s what most of the predecessors in Tom’s job did. They operated the system. Tom has a broader – and I think a more impactful – challenge. He has to operate the system. He also has to simultaneously build a new system. Not rebuild the existing system, not fix the existing, he has to build anew. Why? Because the MTA system, as we now have it, was built in a different time and in a different place, and it cannot handle the volume and the scale that we are talking about today in New York. You can’t do it with band aids and you can’t stretch it any more than we’ve stretched it. The system is just too small to manage this population. It’s that simple.
Behind me is a board that gives you an example of what the old-time MTA was about, where they would literally write with chalk, what the next train is. They would erase it and then change it with chalk. That was the train system that we developed. And we haven’t really developed a new system going forward. Listen to these numbers: the subway system was built in 1904 for a population of 3.4 million. Today it handles 8.2 million people. Basically, the same system, same tracks, same operating protocol from 3 million to 8 million. The LIRR was built in the year 1840 for a population of 78,000. Today you have 7.6 million people using that system. Metro-North was built in 1850 for a population of 131,000, now 1.4 million. You can’t make a system that was designed and constructed for that scale, work for the current day scale.
Government tried in fits and starts, from using wire and duct tape and bubble gum and all sorts of ways to make it work. It’s not going to work. You have to build a new system. By the way, that is the New York way. New York built a system, and that built system drove the capacity and drove the growth. New York grew because New York could grow. New York grew because we built to grow.
We are now doing the opposite. We are stultifying by keeping the same scale and the same growth. Now, you can argue construction is much harder today than it used to be. When was the last time we built? Really it was during the Robert Moses time, where we built and we built with almost a reckless abandon. Roads, bridges, transportation infrastructure, we are now almost in a reverse Moses period. If we were overly aggressive and overly fast now we are handcuffed when it comes to building. What is the last big thing that we built governmentally and how long did it take and what was the impact? You now have community opposition to any proposal that you come up with and once you have community opposition well then now it is controversial and nobody wants to do it because it is controversial. The competence level of government in many cases has gone down and government does have the same competence that it did. It doesn’t have the same capacity that it did. Our society is now more litigious than ever. You do something that they don’t like, you put a plant in the wrong place, they sue you and I don’t mean a plant facility. I mean a plant, I mean a rose bush. They will sue you. Everybody has a lawyer and they go to court and once they sue you, that is now months and months of delay.
That is the challenge for the MTA. We have to build a new system, build a new system in this environment and, by the way, operate the existing system while you are building the new system which even further compounds the problem. But it is the fundamental obligation of the MTA today, because if we do not build a new MTA system, the vision of the old MTA which was to build a transportation system that would drive growth, the MTA would do the exact opposite. We will constrain growth because you can’t grow the region unless you grow your transportation system.
I had a conversation with a couple of gentlemen last night. They said, “I just can’t drive into the city anymore, I won’t do it any time of day, it is two, three hours to drive into the city.” The city is at it’s max by its transportation system. They are talking about a projected population growth by the year 2040 an additional 3 million people. You want to grow the region? You have to be able to move the people who you are inviting to grow in that region and that is the transportation system. The key of the transportation system, the heart is at the MTA but it is not just the MTA. That is why we want a new LaGuardia airport that is why we want to redo JFK, that is why we need the new Tappan Zee Bridge, that is why we need a new Penn Station and a new Farley, if you don’t build a fundamentally new infrastructure and transportation system for New York, New York will not have the future that it had in the past. Because you literally will not have the capacity to move people and that is why this is so important. The specific today fits in exactly with that.
Part of the new construction is using technology and introducing technology to a bureaucracy is very hard as chairman Prendergast said. Why? Because it is change and change is hard, you know we like to talk about change. "We're going to change this, we're going to change that. Change is good, change is positive." Yeah, but's that's really baloney. We don't like change. The husband and the wife sitting at the breakfast table in the morning, and the husband says to the wife, "Things have to change." And she says, "Oh yeah, things have to change." He means, she has to change, right? He wants to stay just the way things are. He's fine. He's perfect. It's the other person. You try to bring change to a bureaucracy, it is extraordinarily difficult. They say, "No, this is how we do it and I like control and change is uncontrollable, and change is chaos and I don't want to do it." And it is pushing a stone uphill and you have to push that stone every day.
Technology, it's frightening to a bureaucracy, but congratulations Tom Prendergast, he did it. This e-ticket system for the railroads is where the economy is now. You take out your device, you scan it, and you pay for something. That's how it works and that's how it's going to work on the railroads. This is being rolled-out – this is now on the Port Washington branch and the Hudson line. It is not yet on the other lines. It will be by the end of the summer. I was harangued this morning by a person who said, "Well, it's not on her station." It's not on all stations on the railroads until the end of the summer, but this is a new technology. It's bringing the railroads to the same level of technology as most services, which is an extraordinary upgrade in the case of the MTA. And at the time, we're going to be putting out a contract to replace the MetroCard. MetroCard, we're going to say "bye-bye" after 20 years. We want one interoperable technology system, so the system you use on the railroads, is the system that you can use for MetroCard. And just the way that you can scan in a grocery store, you should be able to scan when you get on the subway. That is further down the road, we're just doing the contracting for it now, but that is the vision – to have one interoperable technology system that works with technological devices. And that is part of, not just rebuilding the MTA, building a new MTA as part of a new transportation system.
Expediting construction is an extraordinarily difficult, difficult task and Tom Prendergast and his entire team have been doing a great job. Yes, I have been a provocateur of the progress, a constructive and happy provocateur. Provocateur nonetheless because the resistance to change is unbelievable and I've worked at every level of government. I've worked in the private sector, and it's always the same. You get a bureaucracy as big as the MTA, as entrenched as the MTA, you don't push every day, it's not going to happen, especially with the obstacles we had to begin with. So, it's going great. This is a great step forward and again congratulations to the whole team. Thank you.
