MTA transit strike slowed students’ travel plans

Juliana Kiyan Staff Writer

While many students were happy to finish their last finals of the fall 2005 semester on Dec. 21, New York City was in the middle of a 60-hour transit strike. Many members of the Vassar community had to brave their way from Poughkeepsie into the paralyzed city, spending extra money, time, and energy.

New York City’s subway and bus systems ceased operation from Dec. 20 to Dec. 22, as the transit workers’ union went on strike for the first time since 1980. Union members sought higher wages as well as the preservation of pensions and health care benefits for future workers.
Negotiations on contracts between the transit union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) eventually ended the strike.

Meanwhile, the city experienced an enormous increase in pedestrian and street traffic. More than 34,000 pedestrians walked over the four East River bridges per day to get to work or school.

Temporary traffic rules blocked cars with fewer than four people from entering in the morning, but there was still city-wide grid lock and a scarcity of available taxi cabs. News coverage of the traffic and pedestrians walking in cold temperatures was daunting for Vassar students ready to go home.

“I took [Metro-North] into Grand Central, but from there, since the subways weren’t running, I had to wait for my family to drive in from Queens,” said Andy Liu ’09. “With all the traffic, I lost three hours of my life that day.”

Others took alternate routes. “I live in Brooklyn, a completely different borough [from Manhattan], and what I ended up having to do was take Amtrak, which was twice the amount of Metro North, to Penn Station,” said Lea Peters ’09. “After arriving in Penn Station, I took the LIRR to Long Island and a family member dropped me home. What was normally a three hour trip home on the train and subway turned into a five-hour trip.”

Aware that many students planned on taking the MNR train into Grand Central, Director of International Services Andrew Meade advised travelers to reserve a place on airport service buses. Other students, in order to catch a flight out of JFK or LaGuardia, opted to bypass Manhattan altogether and paid upwards of $100 to take a taxi, shuttle, or limo directly to the airports. Director of Security Don Marsala worked to set up a shuttle program to ease transportation problems for students.

The city claimed it lost around $700 million during the duration of the strike. City officials retaliated by fining the union itself as well as the estimated 32,000 workers striking. Each day the workers missed during the strike, they would be fined two days’ pay.

The strike was considered illegal under what is commonly called the Taylor Law, established in New York State in 1967, which prohibits municipal workers from striking.