As the Bishop-approved 7 line extension marches inevitably toward a 2013 completion, questions about the project continue to swirl. The City and MTA are at an impasse over the funding for a planned station at 10th and 41st St., and with the Hudson Yards project decades away from reality, this West Side extension will serve an area rich in space and poor in actual riders for some time.
Today, as the city comes to terms with the compromise transit package soon to be pass in Albany, the fate of the 7 line may again be at a turning point. According to The Daily News and some leading transit advocates, aspects of the 7 line extension — including the purchasing of new cars — are not high on the MTA’s priority list. As such, the new station at 34th and 11th Ave. will exist and serve whatever is in the area, but the MTA may not have the money for new cars to adequate service the entire line.
Pete Donohue has more:
Straphangers could wind up with an extended No. 7 subway line – but not more frequent train service – if the MTA has to adopt a leaner capital plan, experts said.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials have envisioned a 2010-2014 capital construction and maintenance program in the range of $25 billion to $30 billion. But transit managers will have to cancel or delay some big-ticket items if Albany doesn’t provide enough funding to pay such a large tab.
Buying additional subway cars to expand the No. 7 line fleet is one move that could be shelved, according to Bob Yaro of the Regional Plan Association. “You would be spending billions of dollars on the No. 7 line extension, but without the additional cars, you wouldn’t be able to handle an increase in ridership,” Yaro said.
Donohue notes that on the MTA’s prioritized list of capital projects, the 7 line extension is in the third tier. The agency would first like to complete the installation of new tracking, the upgrading of power and tunnel exhaust systems and an overhaul of their old buses. The second tier contains the expansion projects for the East Side, and the third tier, for now, features future legs of the Second Ave. Subway, money for a 21st century communications and signal system and the 7 line car purchases.
We could debate the wisdom in that allocation for a while. I’d argue that a communications and signal system should probably be prioritized in the first tier, but the logistic behind that project are substantial.
Maybe in the end, the state delivers the money, and the MTA can go ahead will all three tiers of its capital program. For now, though, the 7 line extension remains a troubled project, a victim of inter-agency fighting and competing agency aims. To build it without the added capacity would be a disservice to hundreds of thousands of Queens commuters.
25 comments
Isn’t the 7-line already undergoing a full upgrade for CBTC (Communication Based Train Control)? The line would need a new fleet of cars to take advantage of that, the existing R62As can’t handle it. (Maybe that’s the “underground track system” referenced in the 8th paragraph — a Daily News editor may have inadvertently removed relevant information).
It’s a bit ironic that the 7-EXPRESS logo is used at the top of this article, being that this project far from being on the “fast track”.
I could be wrong on this, but I’m fairly certain that the CBTC is backwards compatible. So the R62As can run along CBTC-equipped tracks, but they can’t take advantage of the technology. Perhaps that’s what you were trying to say?
The R62As can run along the same tracks, but then CBTC wouldn’t work at all on the line (it’s not exactly backward-compatible, but the old signal system isn’t removed when CBTC is added). CBTC runs trains closer together based on their actual position, not by the “block”, or section of track, a train occupies. If any train is not fully CBTC-capable, then the system doesn’t “see” it and can’t direct the train behind it properly; so the entire line falls back to the old signal system.
Does the 7 line really need more cars to service one stop where almost nobody lives…?
Yes. If you’re running trains a further distance, to maintain adequate service levels, Transit will have to add 10-car sets to the line. It’s just a matter of mathematics.
Not necessarily, if they shorten the wait times at the terminals. But OK, let’s assume they need one or two more sets. Are there no spares lying around…? Are we so short on equipment that we have to go out and buy new cars for such a minor increase?
Actually, the 7-line uses 11-car sets, not 10-car sets. But regardless, as I mentioned earlier- if the CBTC implementation still goes as planned, that includes all new cars/trains. The older R62As can still run, but then the line won’t operate using CBTC.
It’s exactly what happened on the L-line. CBTC infrastructure was installed and new R143 cars were purchased. But in order to accommodate a sudden, unexpected ridership spike, the new cars weren’t enough, so they kept the older cars on the line as well. This delayed the overall launch of CBTC on this line.
It wasn’t because of a unexpected ridership spike that they L was short R143’s. It was simply that they didn’t order enough taking into account that at all times some cars are in the shop for repairs and/ or inspections. Somebody should have been fired over this mistake but the people responsible are to highly paid only the lowest paid have any threat of being fired in the TA.
During rush hour, turnaround time at Times Square is something like 90 seconds or two minutes. I don’t think they can realistically shorten that. The fact is, if you make the line longer, it takes more time to get from one end to the other, so you need more trains to keep service running on the same headway.
And BTW Ben, they run 11-car trains on this line.
Duly noted. 11-car trains on the 7.
I think the last time I rode the 7 was last spring to go to a Mets game. I’m rarely on that line these days.
how much of this is already dug? is the 34th street station already started? it would seem to me that a 41st-and-10th station would make more sense currently than a 34th-and-11th station: more residents, less to dig.
Yes, they started digging at the new end of the line, and are working their way back toward the existing line. This is why the MTA and the city can still bicker over this issue, in that the sandhogs digging the tunnels aren’t close enough to 41st and 10th Ave. to bid the contract for the station there. As the sandhogs keep moving uptown with their TBMs, the issue will eventually come to a head. The city keeps digging up money to keep the 41st street station in the project after every time the MTA announces that the project is over budget and that station will need to be cut.
I would think that with the reduced amount of construction work in the city, thanks to the Financapocalypse, that any contract that hasn’t been bid yet, will actually come in lower than it would have, even a year ago. Though this is an underground project and there’s so much tunneling going on right now or about to be bid(ESA, SAS, #7Ext, ARC/THE, Water Tunnel #3, Croton Filtration, WTC, FTC) that underground tunneling costs are probably going up. Only so many skilled Sandhogs to go around.
thanks, that clarifies.
I say that unless they’re serious about extending the 7 south to Christopher Street (read: PATH), they should just build a station at Tenth Avenue and leave it at that (or have it turn uptown and serve Hell’s Kitchen, which needs transit badly). Right now, the only thing the 7 extension is doing is making the very-much-necessary ARC Tunnel more costly and less efficient than it could be.
It’s not the 7 extension that’s increasing the cost – it’s the delusion that a new station deep underground is a better idea than running the tunnels into the existing Penn Station tracks.
And the reason they have to build the deep underground station? The 7 extension.
No, they can still feed it into the existing station, so that the 7 extension will go underneath. It’s only if you want an entirely new station that the 7 extension becomes a problem – without the extension, the new station can be 50 feet underground, just like the 7, but with the extension, it needs to be deeper.
It is absolutely ridiculous to not have the 10th avenue/41st st station included. The 7 line extension should not have been nearly as high of a priority as it became, but to do it and not include the station in the middle (where people actually live) is just plain stupid.
Benjamin, did THIS ever occur to you, or to anybody else here?
Why does the Transit Authority even call it the #7 express?
I mean, they have the #4 and #5. They don’t call either one of them the #6 Express.
They have the #2 and #3. They don’t call either one of them the #1 Express.
They have the A. They don’t call it the C express.
They have the B. They don’t call it the Q express
I really can’t understand why the #7 Express is NOT called the #8 or the #10.
I’d thought of that as well, and the reason is because the other lines you mentioned don’t follow the same route for the entire stretch. Yes, the 2 and 3 follow the 1 between Chambers St and 96th Streets, but then they diverge along their own routes. Actually, in parts of Brooklyn, the 2/3 are local where the 4/5 is express.
Also, the 7 Express only runs in one direction at a time, on the center track. It would be a real pain to have the Manhattan-bound 8 turn into a Queens-bound 7, then back to a Manhattan-bound 8 again.
There is and 6 Express. It’s the peak direction express service in the Bronx.
The Express suffix is only for IRT lines that have all day (6AM-10PM) peak-direction express service. It doesn’t apply to most other lines because they have different service patterns or full time express trains.
I’ve heard there are purple 11s on the rollsigns that they could use for the Flushing express.
I think there are other unused numbers also: a green 8 for the Pelham express; a green 10 for the Bronx Thru Express (the rush-hour 5 service to 238th/Nereid); maybe some others.
That’s good to hear; I hope they start using one of those numbers for the Flushing express.
Coming to think of it, they could even use #9 for the Flushing express because it no longer exists as a “skip-stop” #1 train.
Interesting point, but I guess we have a difference of opinion.
I don’t think it would be such a pain.
I remember that at various times in my life, there were train lines that would run only in rush hour, and only in the direction of the rush.
I forgot to add that such an example, a LONG time ago, was on the Brighton Line in Brooklyn.
The D was the Brighton express in those days, and the M was the Brighton local.
And at that time, the QB ran rush hours only, in the direction of the rush.
On weekends, there was only the D, running as a Brighton local.