New York
Newark Delays Persist as Union Official Says Controllers Briefly Lost Contact With Planes
Air traffic controllers briefly lost communication with planes at Newark Liberty International Airport last week, according to the workers’ union, a revelation that came as travel disruptions there extended into a second week.
Galen Munroe, a spokesman for the union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said that on April 28, controllers in a Philadelphia air traffic control center who are responsible for separating and sequencing aircraft in and out of Newark Airport “temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control,” and were “unable to see, hear, or talk to them.”
He did not say how long the disruption lasted, but Bloomberg reported it was 90 seconds.
The communication breakdown led to hundreds of delays and cancellations and three dozen flight diversions that day, according to Aidan O’Donnell, the general manager of New Jersey airports at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He added that for two hours that afternoon, no flights departed from or landed at Newark.
As a result of the loss of communication, Mr. Munroe said, controllers took absences under a law that allows federal workers who are physically injured or experience a traumatic event on the job to leave work. They did not “‘walk off the job’ as it has been reported by the media,” Mr. Munroe said in a statement.
The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged in a statement on Monday that “our antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our work force.” It said it was working to ensure that telecommunications equipment is more reliable in the New York area.
“Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers,” the F.A.A. said.
Some of the controllers in Philadelphia who help to coordinate arrivals and departures at Newark “have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages,” the agency added. “While we cannot quickly replace them due to this highly specialized profession, we continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace.”
The disclosure comes as one of Newark’s three runways has been closed for construction and as air traffic control centers nationwide have experienced staffing shortages. United said last week that it was forced to cut 35 round-trip flights per day from its Newark schedule.
Low clouds on Monday prompted the F.A.A. to pause departures of planes heading to Newark, leading to delays averaging four hours and exacerbating the travel chaos at one of the nation’s busiest airports. More than 300 flights into and out of Newark had been delayed and more than 150 had been canceled by Monday afternoon, according to the tracking site FlightAware.
At the main United terminal at Newark on Monday, travelers whose flights had been canceled expressed frustration with being directed to online customer service agents.
Phyllis Dotzen Rod said she was hoping to fly home to Myrtle Beach, S.C., after visiting her son in Manhattan, but her flight was canceled after she arrived at the airport. Her son was leaving for Asia and she was not sure what to do, she said.
“I’m stressed right now,” Ms. Dotzen Rod said as she waited in line at a help desk at Terminal C that closed just as she got to the front of the line. “Now I don’t know where else to go.”
Adding to her frustration, she said, she had been given a voucher for a meal and a hotel, but could not figure out how to get it to appear on her phone.
Judith Davis, whose flight home to Columbus, Ohio, was canceled because of the bad weather, said she had waited for 45 minutes on the phone for a customer service agent. She was among the travelers desperately searching for alternative flights at Terminal C on Monday.
“I’m very upset; I need to get back today,” Ms. Davis said, expressing frustration with the lack of help in the terminal. “You’re kind of left to your own to try to figure it out.”
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York on Monday called for the Office of the Inspector General to investigate the problems at Newark, saying a “real forensic look” into safety issues and outdated technology was needed.
“To say that there is just minor turbulence at Newark Airport and the F.A.A. that would be the understatement of the year,” Mr. Schumer, the minority leader, said at a news conference. “We’re here because the F.A.A. is really a mess.”
He said the problems at Newark could be a “harbinger, if issues like these aren’t fixed.” He blamed mismanagement at the F.A.A. and cuts imposed by the Trump administration for the staffing issues, and warned that the nation’s other airports could experience similar problems if they are not addressed.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark Airport as well as Kennedy International and LaGuardia Airports in New York, said in a statement on Monday that staffing shortages at air traffic control centers were to blame.
“The Port Authority has invested billions to modernize Newark Liberty, but those improvements depend on a fully staffed and modern federal air traffic system,” the Port Authority said. “We continue to urge the F.A.A. to address ongoing staffing shortages and accelerate long-overdue technology upgrades that continue to cause delays in the nation’s busiest air corridor.”
In a statement on Friday, Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, Newark’s largest carrier, attributed recent flight cancellations to equipment failures and said that 20 percent of air traffic controllers at the airport had “walked off the job.”
As a result, he added, there were “dozens of diverted flights, hundreds of delayed and canceled flights and worst of all, thousands of customers with disrupted travel plans.”
About 68 percent of the more than 3,300 scheduled departures at Newark this week were sold by United, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm.
Paul Rinaldi, a former president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association who is now a senior vice president of operations and safety at Airlines for America, a trade organization, said the systems controllers rely on have not been working “at an optimal level.”
“The issue is a lack of confidence by the controllers in the systems because of the interruptions they have had over the last eight months or so,” he said.
Last week, Sean Duffy, the U.S. transportation secretary, announced a series of incentives that he said would “supercharge the air traffic controller work force,” including $5,000 payments to new hires and academy graduates who successfully complete the initial qualification training.
On Monday, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey wrote Mr. Duffy in support of that plan. “Decades of underinvestment in the maintenance of critical air traffic control infrastructure, delays in upgrading to modern 21st-century air traffic control technology, and inadequate air traffic control staffing have resulted in a frail system nationwide,” Mr. Murphy wrote.
It was not clear when the delays at Newark Airport would clear up, and bad weather was likely to contribute to the headaches for travelers at Newark as well as at the other metro-area airports.
A Delta spokesman said that the airline had canceled three regional round-trip flights at Newark because of air traffic control constraints. Passengers on those flights were automatically rebooked on flights at LaGuardia and Kennedy Airports.
But those airports were also affected by the weather. Inbound and outgoing flights at LaGuardia were experiencing delays of about an hour because of low clouds.
The clouds and rain may limit flights in and out of the region until midweek. Rain may increase in intensity on Monday, with some thunderstorms also possible. The chance of showers will linger into Wednesday.
Judson Jones and Niraj Chokshi contributed reporting.
new video loaded: What You Need to Know About New York City’s Ballot Measures
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Karen Hanley, Melanie Bencosme, Nikolay Nikolov and James Surdam
November 1, 2025
It’s certainly exciting to see an elite runner like Abdi Nageeye or Sheila Chepkirui cruise by on First Avenue during the New York City Marathon. But for many it’s just as exciting to catch a glimpse of someone like Alanis Morissette, or Will Ferrell, posting far slower times.
See if you can recall (or guess) some of the other celebrities who have run the 26 miles and 385 yards on the streets of the five boroughs over the years.
On a rough day, a bus ride in New York starts like this:
Then there are the traffic jams …
the mistimed stop lights …
the bunched-up buses …
and the cars blocking the bus lane.
Zohran Mamdani has made this grim experience central to his pledge to improve city life. Can his bus plan actually do that?
Some of the slowest buses in America plod through New York, stopping and starting, bunching and idling, at about eight miles per hour on average. Speeds have improved little over the past decade. The least reliable buses seldom show up on time.
Zohran Mamdani has built a strikingly successful mayoral campaign by tapping frustration with this system and marrying it to his broader campaign pledge to make New York more affordable.
“Fast and free buses,” he has promised, the two goals always locked together.
Get rid of fares, in theory, and that should speed things up, ending the backlog of riders lined up at every stop. More bus lanes and better infrastructure could bolster those gains. And making buses free would be a boon, Mr. Mamdani argues, for New Yorkers who have said in surveys that they’ve often struggled to come up with fare money.
“Today in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one in five New Yorkers cannot afford the bus fare,” Mr. Mamdani said, defending his plan in the campaign’s final debate last week. Give people back that money, and more of their time, he suggests, and the economic benefits for the city would outweigh even the cost of a fare-free program he estimates could run $700 million a year.
Critics, and even some transit advocates, warn that his two goals are in tension: Spend such vast sums subsidizing the bus, and there won’t be much left over to improve it, especially at a time when the federal government is undercutting support for transit and the economy is shaky. Under any reasonable estimate, the annual cost to the city of making buses free would be more than transit officials expect to raise this year from congestion pricing, the Manhattan tolling program in the middle of its own political fight.
Whether fast buses and free ones can really go together depends on many questions, some beyond a mayor’s control, including whether Gov. Kathy Hochul would cooperate on higher taxes to raise revenue. Even if Mr. Mamdani were able to eliminate fares, what effect would it really have? And would it be enough to change the slog of riding a bus in the city?
Free and maybe faster
To understand the ambition of Mr. Mamdani’s plan, it’s helpful to first take in the vastness of New York’s bus network. It’s at a whole other scale from the subway system (and from any city currently running free buses):
Mr. Mamdani, who is the front-runner in the Nov. 4 general election, first championed the idea of free buses by pushing for a one-year pilot that made a single route in each borough free for one year starting in September 2023. Expanding the idea citywide would cover 340 routes that carry about 1.5 million paid trips per weekday.
Those rides represent a lot of money that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the bus and subway systems, would no longer be collecting at the fare box. The fare today is $2.90, set to rise to $3 in January (although the actual fare collected per paying rider is more like $1.90, after accounting for free transfers and discounted fare cards). If the city were to pay for this instead, the total cost would depend on ridership numbers.
The M.T.A. says the cost of a free-fare program is probably higher than Mr. Mamdani’s estimate. As the authority cracks down on fare evasion, and ridership and fares increase, it projects that by 2028 the annual bus fare revenue, including paratransit, could exceed $1 billion — much higher than the campaign’s numbers.
About a quarter of bus riders also transfer to the subway. And if they haven’t paid for the first leg of the trip, the M.T.A. fears that more passengers may be inclined to skip the train fare, too.
John J. McCarthy, chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said in a statement that the authority was pleased with the attention that transit has gotten in the mayoral race, but also expressed caution about making the buses free without more study.
“Why is congestion pricing successful? Because we took the time to study its benefits and impacts,” he said about the yearslong review for the toll program. “This proposal would demand the same kind of rigorous analysis.”
Still, the Mamdani campaign says the overall cost is relatively small — less than 1 percent of the city’s annual budget. But for the M.T.A., fare revenue covers about 19 percent of its $4.8 billion bus operating budget.
Mr. Mamdani suggests that the economic benefits of free fares could be twice as large as the costs. That’s hard to evaluate (the figure includes assigning a dollar value to the time you’d save by spending less of it stuck on the bus). His other claim is that eliminating the fare would itself speed up the buses.
That is theoretically true. All those seconds it can take each passenger to root around in a pocket, count out change or fuss with the card reader — at every stop — add up to real delays. And just one rider doing this can be the difference between making and missing a green light.
But New York’s own pilot program illustrates one hitch. Across all five free routes, ridership increased during the pilot by about 30 to 40 percent, mostly driven by existing riders taking more trips. The buses, however, actually slowed, because all those new riders still had to board the bus and request stops, offsetting the time savings from getting rid of fares.
That’s another complication: If ridership rises substantially, you have to add service to keep up with it, or you may not see any speed benefits. And that costs money, too.
Mr. Mamdani cites an estimate that free buses could shave 12 percent off trip times. The number comes from Charles Komanoff, a longtime transit advocate and mathematician whose traffic modeling helped inform congestion pricing. He first tried to assess the impact of free buses in 2007, as part of a study of whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to make transit free.
“That idea of free transit — it was visionary, it was lovely, it was beguiling,” Mr. Komanoff recalled recently. Politically at the time, though, “it was completely impractical.”
He put down the idea for nearly two decades. Then last December, he heard Mr. Mamdani, polling at the time in single digits, talk about free buses at a mayoral transit forum.
In April, Mr. Komanoff published a new report that is the closest thing to a white paper for the Mamdani campaign on the topic. His 12 percent time savings relies on some of his 2007-era data (bus riders then dipped a card instead of tapping it). This fall, he reran his analysis again, after riding the B41 bus in Brooklyn with The New York Times to collect new data. He estimates that ending fares could cut 7 percent off a trip on the route, assuming the ridership stays constant. That would still be, he said, “a triumph” — an improvement akin to what drivers have seen inside Manhattan’s congestion zone.
Faster but not free
The B41 bus, connecting the Flatbush commercial corridor to Downtown Brooklyn, is one of the busiest routes in the city. The comptroller’s office gives it a D grade for its poor on-time performance and high rate of “bunching” — when buses arrive too close together and disrupt scheduling. On the route’s slowest stretch, speeds dip below four m.p.h.
Flatbush Avenue is, in short, a prime target for redesign and better bus service — something the New York City Department of Transportation has already begun to work on. And it’s a prominent example of how buses could be made faster without killing the fare box.
We rode the corridor, timed how long it takes riders to board the bus, counted all the intersections, and worked with the transportation planner Annie Weinstock to analyze the route. A trip in the evening rush hour covering the Flatbush portion of the B41 takes 58 minutes on average. But if the bus were traveling the corridor totally unimpeded, it would need only 16 minutes to go from end to end. Everything else is a form of delay: The bus spends more time sitting at red lights, and almost as much time sitting in traffic:
Making the B41 substantially faster would require a series of changes:
Mr. Mamdani has voiced support for infrastructure initiatives like this, although the campaign’s estimated cost for the free-fare program doesn’t include the sizable expenses needed to do such projects in tandem. Transit advocates are also pushing the city to go further, leveraging an array of “bus rapid transit” improvements that would also enable riders to enter from all bus doors and to pay for the bus at sidewalk kiosks, while revamping more intersection signals to prioritize buses.
All-door boarding and off-board payment would logistically have the same effect as free fares, cutting the time it takes passengers to board. We asked Ms. Weinstock, who has studied how to implement faster buses in New York, to estimate how much all of these changes together would speed up the B41.
In an ideal world, all these investments could cut about 40 percent off the time of a B41 trip — far more than doing free fares alone. It certainly helps to speed up the process of boarding riders. But that’s not the thing that helps the most. And there are other ways to get those same savings while still collecting fares.
Of course, free fares are about financial savings for riders as much as time savings. But there are some other, less sweeping ways to do that, too.
About 375,000 low-income riders already pay half-cost fares under the Fair Fares program funded by the city. It subsidizes fares on the bus and subway for households making less than 145 percent of the federal poverty level.
But advocates want to push the threshold up to 200 percent — or even 300 percent, where a family of four earning as much as $96,500 a year would qualify.
“We think it would be much less costly than a totally free system,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, which has pushed for Fair Fares. He’s also a member of the M.T.A. board.
Mr. Mamdani supports expanding Fair Fares for the subway, alongside free buses. Doing both would further drive up the total cost of his transit agenda.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is polling behind Mr. Mamdani in the mayoral race, has said he would make the subway and buses free for New Yorkers making up to 150 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $48,000 for a family of four.
Free for some, faster for more
The allure of free buses is partly that many of these other interventions are harder. Roads must be ripped up and redesigned. Neighbors will complain. Infrastructure projects take years (the redesign of a roughly one-mile stretch of Flatbush Avenue is scheduled to be done next year). Even scaling up Fair Fares would require the city to do more to reach people who qualify — today only about a third of residents who do are in the program.
But you can declare the bus to be free tomorrow, and it will be free tomorrow. It’s a shortcut to improving an aspect of city life where nearly all other answers are slow and hard.
“It’s a guarantee that your life will be better in a way that you can feel every single day,” said Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston and someone Mr. Mamdani has often cited.
In Boston, the city pays to offset the fares on three high-ridership bus routes that serve lower-income neighborhoods (ridership is up, travel times about the same). That’s the kind of partial measure Mr. Mamdani could pursue: a larger pilot, a targeted set of routes, perhaps while expanding Fair Fares to aid more riders citywide. Maybe that buys patience for the harder improvements.
His campaign insists that the universality of free fares is the point. It’s what gives working-class riders access to the whole city. It’s what could unlock faster speeds for everyone.
But there’s evidence that New Yorkers might like the spirit of the pitch more than the potential reality of it. A recent New York Times/Siena polling experiment of two groups of likely voters showed 56 percent supported making the buses free, even as 57 percent said the city “should not do this.”
To voters, the value of Mr. Mamdani’s promise may largely be in the signal it sends: that he sees New Yorkers struggling on the bus and wants to make things better with big ideas. And that whether or not he really turns off all the card readers, surely he’ll do something to help your wallet, and to fix the buses.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller and an ally of Mr. Mamdani who also ran for mayor in the primary, suggested “fast and free” has a logic to it that’s not necessarily literal. Yes, you need resources to make the buses faster, he allowed, but you also need political will. And Mr. Mamdani is building it in a way that might not have worked had he promised “fast buses” alone.
“If you had had someone say, ‘Well, what if we make the bus a dollar cheaper than the subway, but also produce 20 interborough bus rapid transit lanes, and do all-door boarding to help everyone!’ — those might have been really good ideas,” Mr. Lander said, poking fun at his own policy-dense campaign.
“But they didn’t sufficiently capture the imagination of New Yorkers.”
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