by Jeff Stagl, managing editor

When Howard Roberts Jr. rides the subway to and from work each day, he makes sure he has a digital camera handy. The president of subway operator MTA New York City Transit (NYCT) photographs items on trains or at stations that need to be corrected. He’s concerned about every imperfection that could get in the way of NYCT serving more than 5 million subway riders daily.

Shortly after taking the reins of the Big Apple’s more than century-old subway system in April 2007, he took a snapshot of another sort. A former transportation consultant, Roberts sized up NYCT’s entire organization — one that also operates a major bus system serving more than 2 million riders daily and employs 47,000 — and came up with a big picture that revealed a major service-impairing flaw.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority agency’s subway division has a “stovepipe” organizational structure that’s poorly integrated because each department functions as a silo, says Roberts. As a result, the world’s second-largest subway system by size and third-largest by ridership is slow to identify and rectify operational shortcomings. For example, it might take a year to repair a broken speaker in one of NYCT’s 468 stations because it takes time for a work order to be drawn up, wind its way through several departments and continue changing hands, says Roberts.

So, he’s trying to decentralize NYCT to create a management structure that functions in unison — and with less bureaucracy — to speed decision-making and work processes.

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