Union raises concern over MTA bus communication system outages

Press Release from TWU Local 106, Transit Supervisors Organization,

It’s 2 pm. Does the MTA know where its buses are?
Critical communications and bus-locator systems at the MTA’s Bus Command Center have been down for more than 24 hours – and have been repeatedly failing for days, according to the bus dispatchers’ union. That means the Bus Command Center can’t communicate directly with Bus Operators on the road and doesn’t know where its buses are at any given moment, Local 106 President, Philip Valenti.
“The MTA spend more than $90 million on this command center and it’s a total boondoggle,” Valenti said. “Making matters worse, the clueless MTA wants to take dozens of bus dispatchers who work along bus routes, troubleshooting problems like buses bunching up together, and move them to the command center, where they couldn’t do anything.”
The Command Center’s radio and Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems are increasingly faulty, unreliable, and prone to outages, Valenti said. (CAD is a GPS bus-tracking system). They went down Friday, only worked sporadically over the weekend, and both have been down since yesterday morning.

“Reassigning supervisors away from the street and into a Command Center plagued by faulty radio and network systems is a dangerous decision,” Valenti said. “When communications systems fail, it puts bus operators, supervisors, and the riding public at serious risk—delaying responses to emergencies, disrupting service, and undermining safety across the system.”