These year, though, those lines will escape the treatment simply because they’re in better shape than the rest of the subway system. “The amount of work along that corridor didn’t warrant shutting that segment at this point,” Transit spokesman Kevin Ortiz said to me earlier this week. Most of the stations that would be shut down along the Broadway line have recently been renovated, and the number of stations that come to mind that need the most work — mostly just City Hall — doesn’t warrant a total shutdown.

I didn’t have the chance to ask about the BMT Nassau St. line, but the Chambers St. and Bowery stations along the J/Z need far more work and attention than that provided by the FASTRACK shut down. Maybe one day, their times will come.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

So what, then, takes so long? According to Salon’s Will Doig, seven different elements, many of them interrelated, slow down transit expansion plans in the United States. Up front, he pinpoints the obvious. By combining funding from various sources — the feds, states, cities, the bureaucracy slow distribution of money, and oftentimes, there isn’t enough money guaranteed up front to see megaprojects through to completion. He also pays heed to the physical challenges of working around 100-year-old city infrastructure that was never properly mapped, and he fingers a societal addiction to cars that often serves to marginalize transit. He certainly isn’t wrong there.

In my opinion, though, his two key elements concern mismanagement and what he terms basic fairness. With a small group of companies qualified to build subways, mismanagement runs rampant. That is a problem that should be addressed if other SAS phases receive funding. The fairness element though is a tough one. He writes:

Good public transit is a cherished ideal of many progressives. Ironically, progressive values can end up making transit construction take longer. Part of the reason we don’t build as fast as China does is because we have workers’ unions, ADA compliance rules, and environmental concerns that require time-consuming impact studies. “If we didn’t have to put elevators everywhere and we imported non-union Mexican immigrants to do the work, you could build a lot more of everything,” says Duke, who hastens to add that he’s not in favor of that. Good, affordable transit is a human rights issue too, though, and in many ways the common link in our desire for healthier, less wasteful cities that serve everyone equally.

Many transit advocates may whisper that the fairness balance has tipped too far to the other side. The MTA issued its notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement for the Second Ave. Subway in March of 2001. The FEIS saw the light of day 38 months later in May of 2004, and the authority had to further revise its assessment in 2009 to find no material impact when it had to redesign station configurations at 72nd and 86th St. That is a time-consuming and costly process that should be streamlined as well.

Doig doesn’t dwell on another issue — NIMBYism — that can often stop subway expansion projects in their metaphoric tracks before they move much beyond an idea on paper. Lawsuits and community outrage can slow down worthwhile projects as well. Still, his list of seven can serve as a primer for readers of this site who want to know just why it’s taking so long for such a short subway extension underneath Second Ave. to become a reality.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

A cross-section of the new connection between Bleecker Street and Broadway-Lafayette.

Once upon a time back in 2005, the MTA announced an unfunded plan to move the uptown 6 platform at Bleecker Street south a few hundred feet, connect it to the IND station at Broadway-Lafayette and make the entire station ADA-accessible all for the cost of a cool $50 million. By the time money materialized for the project in 2007, costs had reached $60 million, and and in 2009, the MTA said the $94 million station rehab would wrap in November of 2011. November has come and gone with many signs of construction but none of the new transfer in place, and many straphangers have been wondering what exactly is happening there.

We now have an update and a revised overall price tag. According to MTA documents from the last board meeting, work is set to wrap at Bleecker St./Broadway-Lafayette by the end of this June, and the combined price tag for the entire project is now over $109 million. The price estimates come from the MTA’s capital dashboard (1 and 2). The increase — from $50 million in 2005 to $109 million in 2012 — isn’t as bad as it seems as the earlier figures were rough estimates based on conditions before any design or engineering work has begun. Still, this project is massively over budge and will be seven or eight months late.

The current delay is only three months. At some point within the last two years, the MTA had pushed back the expected completion date to March 2012. Now we’ll wait until June because the MTA has found that contingencies related to ADA accessibility have been expended. The work to relocate tunnel lighting equipment necessary for placement of the elevator has been slower and more expensive than anticipated. Furthermore, contractors ran into problems relocating a water main at Houston St. as well.

And so we wait. We’ve waited decades for this transfer to become a reality. Now we’ll wait some more. What’s three more months among friends anyway? After all, where would be if it didn’t take nearly as long to rehab one of the original IRT stations as it took to build an entire subway line from City Hall to 145th Street?

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Txch: What happens if Second Avenue isn’t completed?

MH: It will be a train that starts at 96th and services the East Side between 96th and 63rd streets. It resolves some of the issues that existed on the Upper East Side. I think that, to go further north would be easy. We have tail tracks that go all the way to 105th street. Then we have a five-block gap. Then from 110th to 120th streets we have a tunnel. If you build a station at 105th to 110th streets you now will have another station. So you can come from 110th Street all the way down. We will also provide the ability to go south from 63rd street.

It’s going to be the political will, the people’s will. The same way that No. 7 could go further south. Right now it stops at 34th but we have tail tracks down to 26th street. There are opportunities to expand the system to make it better. It’s just a matter of people’s desire to do that.

While the initial cost projections for Phase 2 of SAS aren’t much less than the Phase 1 price tag, I’ve long believed Phase 2 will happen. There’s simply too much preexisting infrastructure to forego this opportunity, and the need is too great. South of 63rd St. is another question though as the MTA would have to forge ahead through some very densely populated areas of Manhattan. Money, of course, remains an issue.

The more intriguing statement here though concerns the 7 line. Will the 7 line head to New Jersey? Will it loop over to Chelsea Piers or 14th St. to offer some sort of connection with the L? In the realm of the possible, the new extension is built to provide that hope for future. That discussion though should involve finding money for a station at 41st St. and 10th Ave. as well.

Anyway, check out the rest of the short piece. Horodniceanu talks about working with the community and how underappreciated the MTA’s services are in New York City. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask about onerous work rules that cause a spike in construction prices in the city, and until that part of the equation is reduced, these future projects will just remain good ideas that live on paper.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Workers at 23rd Street were able to give the track bed a thorough scrubbing with no trains zooming by. (Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin)

“State of Good Repair” isn’t a term used much by the MTA these days. Half a decade ago, it was the nearly unattainable Holy Grail of the status of the city’s infrastructure. We had fancy new rolling stock, but the tracks, signals, switches, shops and stations weren’t up to par. A never-ending cycle of multi-decade investment and work was designed to bring the system into a state of good repair, but as Transit came to learn the Sisyphean nature of their quest, the phrase slowly left the MTA lexicon.

This week, New York City Transit debuted its FastTrack program. For four nights — the last of which is tonight — from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., there is no service along the East Side IRT from Grand Central to Atlantic Ave. as work crews blitz the stations along that route. In a few weeks, the West Side lines will undergo a similar experience as the authority is piloting with a potential once-a-quarter plan to spiffy up the subways.

The origins of this idea remain a bit hazy. Jay Walder had spoken of full line shut-downs as early as May of 2010, and the MTA finally unveiled the current iteration of its FastTrack plan in mid-November. At the time, the authority explained that it could save at least $10-$15 million doing this week all at once rather than piecemeal over night and during weekends.

At the time, it was kinda sorta billed as an alternative to weekend work, but that was seemingly an optimistic interpretation of the MTA’s plans. They had always maintained that weekend work would go on as planned; after all, the capital investment projects never end. But by shutting the stations for a few days, they can get much-needed repairs out of the way quicker and more efficiently than they otherwise would. “This is not a replacement for weekend work,” Transit spokesman Kevin Ortiz clarified to me earlier this week. It does though add up to more inconvenience for many over the course of the week on top of endless weekend diversions.

Overall, the the MTA says these closures impact around 10-15 percent of the 250,000 people who ride the subway each weeknight, and so far, things have gone off smoothly. While a few newspaper reporters drummed up some ill-informed and irate straphangers and Transportation Nation ran a hilariously self-aware series of photo interviews with a balance of viewpoints, riders I’ve spoken with have found it annoying but hardly Earth-shattering. As New York’s subways enjoy an abundance of redundant service, most have found easy alternate routes to connect from Manhattan to Brooklyn. One compared this work to alternate side parking: It just happens, we deal with it and it’s not a major life event.

So what exactly is the MTA doing as they inconvenience 25,000 every weeknight? According to authority’s materials, crews have inspected repaired signals and switches and have replaced third-rail defects. They have cleaned stations, repaired broken tiles and replaced light bulbs. They have cleared the tracks of litter, debris and mud. They have repaired platform edges at various stations and have installed ADA warning strips at others. These aren’t particularly sexy repairs, but station components will look and work better because of it.

Yet, I can’t help but think that we shouldn’t need to cut off all service to make these repairs. Some of the track work requires shut downs, and concentrated access to the tracks requires alternate routing. Yet, by allowing the system to deteriorate, the MTA is forced to fast track its repairs. We still have a 24-hour system, and the MTA has always faced neighborhood opposition when it has threatened to shutter stations and reroute trains during the wee hours of the night. Here we are, though, with less weekend night service for 16 weeks a year. We still won’t enjoy that state of good repair.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

I appeared on NBC New York with Chuck Scarborough last night to discuss the line segment closure plan.

When word leaked out on Sunday night of a looming Transit plan to engage in partial line-segment shutdowns to speed up necessary track work, straphangers wondered if this would be the end of the 24/7 subway system as we know it. A day later and with an official MTA presentation on the books, we have a better sense of what this means for late-night weekday subway riders. It’s not great news for that relatively small group of riders, but it could mean fewer weekend headaches for the rest of us.

First, Transit addressed the rational behind the plan. Noting that 82 percent of the recent increase of subway service has occurred during off-peak and weekend hours, Transit now recognizes that it can no longer use those times to load up on disruptive work. It’s time, Transit officials said, to get creative.

“We are one of the few transit systems that operate around the clock, so it’s always a challenge to find time to do work on the tracks, especially with ridership up on weekends and overnight,” MTA New York City Transit President Tom Prendergast said. “Closing segments of lines so that we can get in and get the work done quickly benefits everyone. It’s safer for workers, less disruptive for riders and gets projects done more quickly for everyone.”

Just how much quicker the project get done will determine the future of this pilot, and it’s important to note that this project has two distinct components. The first involves partial line segment closures. These are set to occur for four nights in a row once per quarter on one Manhattan trunk line at a time from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. The following table lists the line, first-quarter shutdown dates, service area and number of impacted customers. The authority claims only a 10-15 minute increase in commute times, and it’s clear that, based on transit redundancies, those folks on the East Side in Midtown will have to walk the further for alternate subway service.

• 4, 5, 6: January 9-13, no service from 42nd St.-Grand Central to Atlantic Avenue, 38,500.
• 1, 2, 3: February 13-17, no service from 34th St. to Atlantic Avenue, 23,000.
• B, D, F, M: February 20-24. No service from 59th St. to West 4th Street, 35,000.
• A, C, E: March 12-16. No service from 59th St. to Jay St, 39,000.

I’m not yet sure how this will impact service on the E, F or 1 trains. The work here will involve track and signal repair as well as trackbad cleaning.

The second part of this plan is the one that should be drawing more headlines, but as it impacts fewer commuters and all in the Outer Boroughs, it hasn’t drawn as much scrutiny. For a few distinct capital projects, the MTA will engage in a continuous line shutdown over a series of days. By doing so, the authority will quickly complete capital projects and then have fewer weekend service changes.

The MTA has identified four projects that will impact riders and subway service. First, the authority is planning a nine-day shutdown of all Manhattan-bound F service from Parsons to Forest Hills. Second, the D train will run only local in both directions for nine days from Norwood to 145th St. Third, for 16 days, all D trains will terminate at Bay Parkway. Fourth, for 16 days, there will be no 2 service between 241st St. and Nereid Avenue.

Drilling down on the Forest Hills work, Transit says this nine-day shutdown will eight weekend and 20 weeknight shutdowns for a savings of $1.3 million — or 21 percent — for that project alone. Furthermore, Transit estimates that 90,000 customers would experience 150,000 hours of delay with a shutdown instead of 190,000 customers experiencing a combined 225,000 hours of delayed travel for weekend and off-peak work. Of course, knowing the MTA’s on-time rate when it comes to delivering projects, these projections should be taken with a grain of salt, but these are the numbers upon which the MTA is making its argument.

Ultimately, putting such a line shutdown program in place involves a balancing out. How can the TA provide enough service around the clock? What work schedule is least disruptive to the overall patterns of commuters? As the Authority says, “No time is a good time to do work.” If the line-segment shutdown plan — both for routine maintenance and capital projects — can improve our commuters in the long run, it is at least worth a shot.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Transport for London often shuts down entire sections of Tube lines to finish up work quickly. The MTA may soon do the same. (Photo by flickr user Bluey Birdy)

Part of what makes New York the “city that never sleeps” are its subway lines. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the subways always run. Some duplicative lines that offer extra peak-hour service shut down over night, but a straphanger can get on at any station and head to any other at any point in time. Now, according to reports, that could change.

For much of the past 18 months, MTA and Transit officials have struggled with keeping necessary maintenance on time and on budget while still offering as much subway service as possible. Yet, by starting work late at night during the week and wrapping up before the 5 a.m. rush the next day, the MTA has found progress slow and costly. In May of 2010, then-CEO and Chairman Jay Walder talked about full line shutdowns to improve work efficiency. “If you’re in London and you’re doing track work on the Jubilee Line, do you want me to tell you what the service announcement is on the Jubilee Line?” Walder said. “The service announcement is, ‘The Jubilee line is not running.’”

Even as late as last December, Transit President Thomas Prendergast expressed his desire to see such shutdowns implemented in New York. “Maybe for some of the more difficult tests, that take a long time to set up, pick one Saturday a month and do it at night, starting after five or six o’clock at night, look at things like that,” he said.

Now, according to a report in the Daily News based on MTA documents that will be presented to the authority board’s Transit Committee on Monday, the authority will shut down certain lines for “blitzes” that will look to speed up repairs. Pete Donohue has the details:

Every three months, a line segment — possibly stretching from midtown all the way to the southern tip of Manhattan or even downtown Brooklyn — would be closed for three or four consecutive weeknights, sources said. The new strategy likely will be tested first on the Lexington Ave. line between 42nd St. to the north and either Bowling Green in lower Manhattan or Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, to the south, sources said.

Trains would stop running at about 10 p.m. each night and wouldn’t start up again until about 5 a.m. the next morning. That would allow the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to get many projects and tasks done at once rather than piecemeal throughout the year. It’s a worthwhile tradeoff, one transit source familiar with the plan said.

“For a few nights, you won’t have service on a segment of a line but contrast that with work being done over far more nights and weekends with all the service diversions and train slowdowns.”

In addition to the Manhattan pilot, Donohue reports, Transit may blitz some Queens work too. The Manhattan-bound F would not run from Forest Hills to Parsons Boulevard for nine days in an effort to avoid eight weekends of construction.

The details of this plan will be, as I mentioned, released on Monday, but from prior conversations with MTA officials and various statements, it’s clear that the authority has high hopes for this pilot. Track workers won’t have to contend with train traffic that, due to necessary safety precautions, delays the work schedule. Furthermore, by going all-in during the week, the MTA can scale back weekend work as well.

With weekend subway rides on the rise, the MTA is willing to take a chance by cutting off service during the week on routes that have, as Donohue terms it, “parallel subway lines.” With ridership very low during weeknight overnight periods, the MTA is seeking a way to inconvenience fewer people while improving efficiency. It might take some getting used to this plan, but as the subways never sleep, the work must go on one way or another.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Today, over at The Atlantic’s new-ish Cities blog, David Lepeska examines how $1 billion doesn’t go too far these days. Noting how projects in New York are orders of magnitude more expensive than similar efforts around the world, Lepeska wants to know why. To find out why, he spoke with Robert Paaswell of City College of New York, and the professor points to the age of our system and the general costs of regulation. The main culprits, he says, are “New York’s higher regulation costs, over-conservative labor laws and financing via bonds, which lead to longer-term debt plans.”

Paaswell also pondered on the length of time it takes to get work done. There, he blames neighborhood sensitivities. “There’s no urgency by governments or citizens here to get subways done, and when it finally happens the construction causes so much inconvenience that people don’t like it,” he said. “In Europe, they don’t care too much about it, they just blast right through and get it done.” It is a perfect storm of inefficient construction and a public that wants the results but fears the means.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

It may be a while before funding materializes for future phases of the Second Avenue Subway.

Early this morning at the New York Law School, Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, president of the MTA’s Capital Construction division, spoke to a crowded room gobbling up their fruit slices and free croissants on the state of the MTA’s expansion efforts. For anyone whose been reading my site over the past few years, Horodniceanu’s presentation featured little new information. He spoke about the costs, complexities and challenges of the various big-ticket items and discussed how the MTA generates more construction jobs in the New York City area than anyone else.

Yet, despite the rather basic nature of the presentation, Horodniceanu let slip a few hints that this round of construction might be the last we see of transit expansion in and around the city, barring an unforeseen financial windfall anywhere. While speaking of the Second Ave. Subway, Horodniceanu discussed the impact Phase 1 will have and how the MTA is using the preexisting sections north of 99th St. as tail tracks. Of the future phases, he was less optimistic. “Sections two, three and four will be for our children or grandchildren,” he said with a sigh.

Later, during the Q-and-A when an audience member asked about the immediate future of the plans to extend the 7 line to Secaucus, Horodniceanu nearly dismissed it out of hand. He spoke of the engineering studies the city — not the MTA — is currently conducting but said point blank that the money isn’t there. It’s not there from the feds; it’s not there from the states of New York or New Jersey; it’s not there from the MTA. The only place I could imagine funding such a rail line would be the Port Authority, and they’re currently tapped out.

On the one hand, Horodniceanu is being politically practical here. The state hasn’t even figured out how to fund the current MTA capital plan, let alone any future ones. Why should we consider Phases 2 or 3 of the Second Ave. Subway if Phase 1 still won’t be completed for another five years? But on the other hand, Horodniceanu’s words are a bit discouraging. If transportation expansion and investment funds start to dry up by 2016, the city will likely faced stagnant growth and decaying infrastructure.

What also struck me about Horodniceanu’s words was how foolish it was to flat-out cancel the ARC Tunnel project. We’re reminded on a near-daily basis that the region is in desperate need of more trans-Hudson rail connections, and we were enjoying the perfect storm of funding, construction work and planning that would have produced ARC. Instead of reworking the project or trying to identify cost savings, Gov. Chris Christie flat-out canceled a 20-year planning effort, and it seems unlikely that a replacement will materialize within the next few years (or possibly even decades).

Enjoy the effort to expand our transit network while you can. As governments tighten their belts, increases in rail capacity will be few and far between. That’s some somber news for a Friday afternoon.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

As The Post details, turnover at the top of the management structure for these projects has become a major issue for the MTA. Brain drain, it seems, isn’t just limited to the Chairman’s spot. Jennifer Fermino has more:

Top managers on mega-MTA projects — who haven’t had raises in four years — are bolting at an alarmingly high rate, leaving crucial positions vacant and prompting concern from federal regulators. The Federal Transit Administration is so disturbed by the high turnover that in two separate reports, they’ve cautioned the cash-strapped agency to quickly bring in experienced managers to fill current and future vacancies on such massive projects as the Second Avenue Subway, according to government reports obtained by The Post. But that likely will be easier said than done. Unlike unionized workers — whose contracts ensure they get annual cost-of-living increases — members of MTA management haven’t had a salary hike in four years.

“There are obviously issues with MTA employees and staffing levels and pay scales,” said MTA board member Mitch Pally, who is on the committee that monitors the agency’s big-ticket projects. “I can assure you that management doesn’t make enough money, especially for people who are experienced,” he said. “These are complicated jobs.”

…Federal regulators lamented the “substantial turnover” among contract and MTA staff managers over the past year in their monthly report on the Second Avenue Subway. The agency “remains concerned that the continued staff shortage may impair proper functioning of the project quality processes,” the FTA said in another report, which suggests they hire more managers. In one area of quality management on the Second Avenue Subway, two of the MTA’s three agency consultants are new. Another outside consulting position in the same division also is vacant, according to the report.

This is what we call a vicious cycle. As unionized workers — those who weren’t dismissed, that is — earned raises and will fight for more, the MTA’s management minds have gotten none, and they’re starting to leave. They can get higher paying jobs at organizations that enjoy greater political and fiscal support than the MTA. So then why shouldn’t they leave? If that story sounds similar, it’s because that’s basically what Jay Walder is doing at the end of October.

The solution, of course, is a politically dangerous one. The MTA must be allowed to raise salaries to remain competitive in a global market. The authority can’t afford to see its projects completed slowly, haphazardly or not at all because its salaries aren’t high enough to attract and retain the leaders they need. Ultimately, this isn’t some great insight into the state of things at the MTA, but it’s a lesson few people in Albany and elsewhere have learned. Now it’s starting to get too late.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.