Richard Davey took over as the MTA’s head of subways and buses on Monday — and spent his first morning on the job meeting transit workers, greeting commuters, posing for cameras and ordering fixes for problems he saw on his own commute.
“The next-stop sign on my train this morning wasn’t working. They’re already working on that, as I understand,” Richard Davey told reporters early Monday while greeting commuters at the Roosevelt Avenue-74th Street station.
Davey called himself “a prolific texter and emailer.”
“If I see something isn’t working, it’ll get fixed,” he said.
The former top transportation official in Massachusetts also visited MTA employee break rooms, which he said “need to improve,” and flagged multiple broken Metrocard machines.
“How we treat our employees is key and I saw some places I wouldn’t want to use the bathroom, so we’re going to fix some of that,” he said.
Davey said safety was “number one, two and three” on the list of concerns raised by straphangers he spoke to on Monday. Many riders are on high alert after the April 12 mass shooting in Brooklyn and a system-wide spike in felony assaults, he said.
“We have a lot of work to do, obviously, with the city around safety,” Davey told reporters.
Davey said his primary job aside from safety is to improve reliability and customer service to encourage more riders to return to mass transit. Ridership figures remain well below pre-pandemic figures, and have barely recovered from the Omicron surge.
“We’ve talked about safety, but I’m also very much focused on what we within MTA can control ourselves,” he said.
“My message to New Yorkers is: You’ve got someone, and a team, at MTA Transit who are going to be focused on the system.”
Davey is the MTA’s first permanent NYC transit president since beloved “Train Daddy” Andy Byford quit more than two years ago.
