The head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was out in the trenches in Queens last week.
Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber on July 16 paid a visit to the MTA’s LaGuardia Bus Depot on 85th Street in East Elmhurst, to what he said is one of the best in the city at keeping buses working and keeping them on the road as scheduled.
And he said it was more than just a trip to meet and thank the folks who keep it operating.
“The reality of history is that when they built the subway system, Queens was still a little rural,” Lieber said. “Now Queens has well over two million people, and it has less subway service per capita than any other borough. We need buses to work well in Queens, and this is a depot there it is really working well.”
Lieber said the facility is one of four in Queens, and serves 19 routes. He said the LaGuardia Depot has been able to measure its success well beyond the usual metrics of keeping buses repaired and clean and making sure operators are ready to go.
“Their maintenance operation is so strong that when we were having, about a year ago, problems where other depots were falling behind with fixing buses, we sent buses here from other boroughs,’ Lieber said.
MTA Bus Assistant Manager Edwin Santiago, who is in charge of the depot, runs a unit that services between 10 and 15 buses per day between regular maintenance and mandated inspections.
“This depot is one of the best,” said Frank Farrell, the Department of Buses executive vice president.
“This is a depot where they are really on top of their game,” Lieber said. “It’s nice to meet our front-line workers, who are the heart and soul of the system. It’s really about understanding what’s going on at different facilities so that we can have transparency and understanding and to make good policy decisions.”
Lieber said feedback is even more imperative in the wake of last year’s Queens bus route redesign, which introduced new lines while seeking to better meet the need for fast passenger service.
“Let’s say our PM rush comes in,” Farrell said. “We’ll fuel all the buses. We run them through the wash. We prime them for the next day and then get operator feedback on the buses. We look to address anything that needs to be addressed.”
And, he and Santiago added, there really is no stopping, as operations run day and night.
Those operations go beyond the primary task of getting buses where they need to go.
Santiago smiles when asked about lost-and-found procedures, and says there is no less of a need for efficiency in that area.
“Lost-and-found stuff is taken to the yard and put in a bag,” he said. “And we have to log everything that comes in. That is picked up by the command center periodically. And we have to record everything. If we find money, how much money?
“We get a lot of suitcases, because I run the Q70, which goes into the airport at LaGuardia. So I’m getting a lot of bags. And student IDs.”