A Man with a Plan
When New York City offered big money for ways to fix the failing MTA subway, industry giants came up with some winning solutions. So did LAW alum Craig Avedisian.
When he arrived at the launch of the Genius Transit Challenge, Craig Avedisian felt like David in a midtown Manhattan ballroom full of Goliaths. The contest, with total prize money of $3 million, was open to anyone with ideas for improving New York City’s antiquated, maddeningly slow, miserably overcrowded, chronically underfunded, debt-ridden subway system. Outsiders were welcome. No idea was too crazy.
CEOs of transportation companies had jetted in from Paris, London, Zurich, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. They talked in their own lingo about dwell times and forced block signaling. The ballroom’s preferred seating rows filled up with teams from multibillion-dollar transportation titans Bombardier (66,000 employees), Bechtel (50,000), and Beijing-based CRRC (183,000), merely the world’s largest supplier of rail transit equipment.
Then there was Avedisian (1).
A commercial litigator with a lifelong passion for mass transit, 54-year-old Avedisian (LAW’93) had been riding the city’s subways for 22 years. He’d taken the Second Avenue line from his Upper East Side apartment that day in late June 2017, armed with ideas for increasing passenger capacity by adding cars and more efficiently opening and closing subway doors. “I was excited when I walked in,” Avedisian remembers. “I was intimidated when I walked out.”
Eight months and two rounds of judging later, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the subways and sponsored the contest, announced that out of 438 submissions by contestants from 23 countries, Bechtel and CRRC were among the eight winners in three categories.
To his astonishment, so was Avedisian.
He had tied with CRRC and CSinTRANS, an international provider of transit technology solutions, in the subway car innovation category; each had won $330,000 in prize money. He had beaten out Bombardier, with its 70-plus years of global transportation breakthroughs.
Avedisian was one of only two individual winners and the only one with no ties to industry. (MTA announcements, in a slight understatement, dubbed him a “transit enthusiast.”)
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