Byford’s Back in Town!

Five weeks ago, Transportation secretary Sean Duffy grabbed back the Penn Station reconstruction project from the MTA. New York State’s transit agency, he said, was too sluggish, too spendy, too hidebound. (The move perhaps carried a whiff of punishment for holding the line on congestion pricing, too.) Never mind that Amtrak has for some time wanted its own breathtakingly expensive new arm of Penn Station so it didn’t have to share space and resources with the MTA and New Jersey Transit. Somehow, Duffy implied, that same agency would take over and run the project more efficiently. The whole move was a real “I alone can fix it” moment on the part of this administration, whose disdain for public transit is well known.

Turns out there’s a silver lining in the move: Train Daddy is back in town! Just in time for the likely mayoralty of Andrew Cuomo, the guy who hounded him out of his previous job in 2020.

Andy Byford, London’s savior of the Underground who was hired to rescue New York City Transit in late 2017, resigning barely two years later, has for the past couple of years been at Amtrak. There, he’s been working on high-speed rail, notably the long-beleaguered effort to build fast train lines up and down the spine of California. His two-plus years at NYCTA gained him vast affection within the agency plus a sizable bit of love from outside (leading to that nickname). Even though he had a pretty brief run as the man in charge of the subways, early indications were that he was getting the troubled system on a better footing. Governor Cuomo, for reasons that only later became clear — mostly, it seems, he was irritated at all the attention and credit given to Byford, and didn’t trust that change was coming vigorously enough — soon chopped him off at the knees, cutting his staff and eliminating transit-agency departments. Byford quit, then un-quit, then quit again a couple of months later. There’s a surprisingly emotional documentary about all of this called End of the Line, one in which Byford exits the agency amid cheers and tears, treated as a hero. This afternoon, the City Club (among others) sent out a press release praising his arrival, noting that he’s advocated through-running at Penn Station, a tricky-to-explain but significant improvement that would get a lot more capacity out of the tracks we have.

So he’s good at trains, he’s a sensible believer in government, and he works for Amtrak, Joe Biden’s favorite arm of the federal government. Why on earth did the White House deploy someone to do this who’s the opposite of horrible? All we can think of is that (a) the Trump people are so indifferent to public transportation that they didn’t know who he is, or, more likely, (b) they really, really, really want to poke a sharp stick in the eye of Andrew Cuomo, who as mayor rather than governor would no longer have much juice with the state-run MTA. (A real shift in the Andy-vs.-Andy power game.) Either way, this is an unexpected bit of Friday-afternoon good news. Welcome back to town, Andy Byford. Please, deliver us from Vincent Scully’s infamous rat burrow as soon as you can.