Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Janno Lieber, chair of the MTA, is three-plus years into his unforgiving job and has become the first leader of the agency in a generation who’s been in charge long enough to oversee the creation of an entire MTA capital plan — the agency’s mammoth program to repair, modernize, and expand, the latest iteration of which he announced this past week. Mammoth, in fact, may understate the size of this one, budgeted at $68 billion, two-thirds of which would go to subways, buses, and the Staten Island Railway. The MTA board just approved it, even though it’s only about half funded, on the theory that Albany will come up with the rest. Mind you, that is without the $15 billion congestion-pricing payout replacement Governor Hochul still says she is somehow going to deliver.
There’s plenty in there that’s good and necessary and worth spending a fortune on: $2 billion for upgrades to power substations (we have a huge repair backlog, and one failure can cripple service for hours) and $5.4 billion for replacing signals (many of which date to the La Guardia mayoralty). Flip through the plan, though, and one section leaps out: the 234-page spending program on subway stations. It asks for $11.9 billion in improvements with more than half of that destined for accessibility projects at 60 stops (or more, MTA officials emphasize). The vast majority of that is about ADA compliance. Do the arithmetic and it comes out, on average, to $110 million per station for elevators.
This work is inarguably essential, both morally and legally. Every New Yorker needs to be able to get aboard a train. The MTA has settled lawsuits over disability access by agreeing to upgrade its stations. The federal government has granted deferments to the subways for decades — recognizing that getting such an old system into compliance without funding in place is an impossible demand — but its patience will eventually run out. There are hundreds of stations left to do. Even if the money materializes, that price for accessibility work is so extraordinary it is consuming the MTA’s ability to mount the sort of subway and railroad expansions it envisioned as recently as a year ago. It has never been more important for the MTA to get costs under control.
A person familiar with these projects walked me through the budget of one redo to explain why the costs are so high and how they can quickly grow. (The source was provided anonymity, and the budget figures have been rounded to protect their identity.) Roughly half the cost of a $100 million ADA project, $50 million, is directly linked to the installation. The elevator itself costs something like $5 million, which is more expensive than those in Europe because a host of American regulations demand larger, more complicated lifts.
And every station needs at least two: The first links the street level with the mezzanine where riders pay their fare, and the second sits behind the gates and takes them down to the station platforms. If a station has two platforms instead of one, it needs more; if a station has two platform levels instead of one, as at West 4th Street or the 14th Street 1/2/3/F/M/L complex, that increases the costs too. Often, areas like storage closets and rooms that hold mechanical equipment have to be shrunk or rearranged to make space for them. That’s all expensive, and the cultural demand that stations remain open during the work slows down the construction crews, which further drives up costs.
The other $50 million, though, demands interrogation. It comes from work that the MTA bundles into the elevator installations, arguing that it’s accessibility-related and thus federally required. This is because the law mandates compliance to the “maximum extent feasible” when altering or updating existing facilities, a Talmudic debate if ever there was one.
Take staircases: Ancient staircases in stations may have uneven heights between steps, and full ADA compliance requires uniformity to reduce the risk of tripping. But yanking out the stairs requires relocating or removing the electrical and communications wiring that has been run along the stairs over the years. Then the old stairs have to be jackhammered apart and hauled out of the stations using work trains, which is pricey. As long as we’re doing that, why not address the wear and tear around the steps? Then the new stairs go in — and since they often have slightly different riser heights than those they replace, they no longer land square with the platform, which means the concrete floor now has to be torn out and replaced. The combined cost of staircase and platform replacement can exceed $10 million apiece.
Some of that work is immediately necessary, the source emphasizes. Crumbling stairs are a safety hazard and must be rebuilt regardless of the reason or timing. But the MTA’s expansive interpretation of the ADA requirements opens the door for the various parts of the massive subways division to add their own station-improvement wish lists onto these projects. The $300 million overhaul of the West Side’s 14th Street complex — which encompasses the 1/2/3 train stops at Seventh Avenue, the crosstown L stop at Sixth Avenue, and the F/M stop at Sixth Avenue — set to wrap up this year is adding four new staircases to the station and has replaced and widened 21 more. The agency’s request for proposals also called for upgrading the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, plus repairing the architectural finishes, column beams, and tile walls. The executives in the subways division have leverage to force that work into these projects because their sign-offs are needed to get everything closed out. As a result, contractors have every incentive to begin with maximalist designs for every accessibility project.
These dysfunctions recall those that plagued the Second Avenue subway. An exhaustive review of the project by NYU’s Marron Institute — where, full disclosure, I am a researcher — revealed how consultants had drawn up large designs for the stations on the Upper East Side that grew even larger as the subways’ bureaucracy tagged on demand after demand. Then, as now, the MTA’s construction arm didn’t have the muscle to push back. Those pathologies revealed themselves in the original designs for the planned East Harlem extension of the line, which was the focus of a series of stories I wrote for the New York Post. Three rounds of reviews initiated by the MTA’s top brass have since cut a combined $1.3 billion from the East Harlem price tag, mostly from the station designs. This is progress — but it’s not a policy.
What the MTA desperately needs is the in-house ability to design, control, and then review the designs it commissions. In response to questions, agency officials acknowledged that the unit of roughly 100 people that once handled megaprojects had been done away with in a reorganization and that the responsibilities had been split up among a group of roughly 800 who, an MTA spokesman said, are “supporting all work, including mega projects.” (This brings up the age-old existential question about who’s steering the ship if everyone’s hand is on the tiller.) The old unit was one-sixth the size of London’s staff of 600, and even with the MTA’s reorganization, the overall size of the staff assigned to C&D hasn’t increased so the gap remains. Both teams are an order of magnitude smaller than the Paris staff of 2,000-plus. (The French group is sometimes also hired to build subways elsewhere, sharing and building expertise and bringing in some extra money.) It would cost the MTA approximately $60 million annually — one-half of one ADA project — to triple the size of its station-reconstruction staff to 300, bringing it even somewhat in line with its international peers.
We used to do this. The original subway lines were designed in-house by the MTA’s forerunners, but the function was outsourced in the intervening decades as officials were forced to find money to run the trains and sought to avoid paying for labor contracts protected by Albany as lawmakers loaded the agency with debt. Albany needs to address the consequences of its actions and explicitly give the MTA room in its budget to bring these functions back in-house. This spending would pay for itself if the new unit could trim just $5 million off each ADA project. If it could cut costs by 30 percent — roughly the amount the MTA’s subway-extension costs exceed London’s most expensive new line — the savings could put $2.2 billion down on plans to stretch the Second Avenue subway into a crosstown section on 125th Street. The MTA projects that will cost $7.5 billion; at London rates, it would run between $4.9 billion and $5.3 billion. The savings on elevators could cover almost half of that figure, and we could most likely get the rest from the federal government. The elevators, it turns out, are a terrific example of how investing a little can lift the whole city.
