How Subway’s weekend troubleshooter spends his Sundays
New Yorkers who take the subway on Sundays may not know the name Jose LaSalle, but they may have seen him in his orange safety vest.
Mr. LaSalle, 55, is deputy chief of weekend service diversions and coordination for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the city’s subways and buses. That makes him the person responsible for troubleshooting and handling customer complaints at stations when there are delays and service interruptions. He is known around the office as the ‘weekend shift czar’.
He grew up in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, but today he lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s East Village with his wife, Janet Rosario, 56, a New York City Transit conductor.
NO KEY. BUT: SUCCEED. Every Sunday that I’m not on vacation, I wake up at 5:30 am. As soon as I wake up, I get in the habit of checking Slack. I check if there are any diversions, things I can prepare for. Anything that affects customers – a bottleneck or anything that could affect their travel time – I check.
I press my Breville espresso machine, turn on Eyewitness News channel 7, and start showering so I can get out of the house at 6:15. Then I am mobile. I try to get to my first stop at seven o’clock. Where there is a lot of customer confusion, that’s where I want to go. This is often a metro station, but it can also be a bus stop.
DUCKING, DOVING Things always come up. You have to be like a boxer, diving and dodging left, dodging right. And you’re only as good as your team, so I have a lot of good teammates who help me dodge and not get hit. Lately we’ve had these operations in Coney Island, so I’ll go there first and then go back to the city, but then something might call us to Queens. I focus my attention on stations and bus stops where we want to make sure everything works efficiently. In some cases these are planned problems that we will check; in some cases they are not planned.
MULTILINGUAL When I arrive somewhere, I try to see how we can make the customer experience better for people. If there is a really problematic issue, I may be in one place for two, three hours or half a day.
In Queens, we worked on a major project dealing with accessibility issues related to the Americans With Disabilities Act. Several stations were affected: Queens Plaza, Roosevelt Avenue. There was a situation where you couldn’t get to Manhattan from Queens, so we had a big push to get customers as they got off the seven trains to go down to catch various other lines into Manhattan.
On line N we had bus and walking transfers to a station five minutes away. Queens’ demographics being what they are, we want to make sure announcements are made in Korean, Spanish, and Chinese in addition to English. We want every customer to be able to get information in the language they are familiar with.
COMMON TOWN HERO I have been with the MTA for 31 years. I worked every day, every holiday. It’s just part of the course. Sometimes these challenges we face every day make my day. That’s what I was hired for, to solve problems. I see it as a challenge to meet and exceed everyone’s expectations. Yes, it’s a tough job. But if it wasn’t a hard job, I don’t think I would want it. It gives me the opportunity to do good for New Yorkers.
FAST HOT What I eat depends on where I’m going. I grew up in Brooklyn, so whenever I go to Brooklyn, there’s a donut shop I like to go by in Greenpoint Peter Pan on Manhattanlaan. I’ll get a Boston Cream. I need that sugar fix. When I’m in StuyTown, I go there Ess-a-Bagel. I’m trying intermittent fasting, so that means eating twice a day in an eight-hour period.
AMBUSH I get bullied all the time. I have the habit of wearing my civil service vest. That will get you ambushed and knocked down, or however you want to put it, if there’s any trouble. You just have to stay calm and understand that people’s frustration is not with you, but with where they are.
As much as I try to tell customers that we have all these applications and emails that go out to the public about our planned work, not everyone checks their smartphone to see what time the train is coming. If I could get all our New Yorkers together at once, I’d tell them to use the app and check the weekend email so they know what’s going on. But that doesn’t always happen, so I always get questions. I like to give people their options.
THE BOSS The last time I was out of work on a Sunday was at seven o’clock. That was the Sunday of the New York City Marathon; I don’t want anything to go wrong. I’m usually done at half past three or four o’clock. I’ll either head straight home or stop at Urban Market if we’re having dinner at home. I get an order from Janet, she’s the boss. If we want to give Janet a break from cooking, we’re going to do that El Castillo de Jagua or Scarr’s Pizza for pepperoni, cheese and honey on a slice.
24/7 At home we laze around and catch up on everything that’s going on with the grandkids – they’re 9, 6, 6 and 1. We’ll FaceTime them. I’m a Knicks, Mets, Giants fan, so if there’s a game on I might turn it on. But for the most part, I still check my phone at work. As a weekend guru or weekend czar, I have to see what, if anything, changes or whether my bosses will contact me.
QUIET AND STRAIGHT I go to bed around half past eight, because the next morning I get up at 5 am. I have to say that as a New Yorker I take my job seriously. We’re used to queuing for things, but I don’t want our subway journey to be a long line of trains. I want to get everyone there efficiently. I see that these weekend people are often workers going to work. I want to do well for them.