MTA Construction

There’s a whole lotta fixin’ and fortifyin’ going on in the Greenpoint Tube. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

While traveling from Herald Square to Chinatown last night for dinner, I had the opportunity to ride the R train for the first time in this post-Sandy shutdown world. I enjoyed the R160s, but south of 14th St., the ride became something of a carnival trip. The conductor would flicker the lights while announcing repeatedly that the train would not be running south of Whitehall St. You’d have to be asleep to miss the ruckus.

As the work on the Montague St. tube passes through its second month, subway riders seem to have adjusted. It’s too early to tell the overall impact of the shutdown, but I’ve definitely noticed larger crowds at Canal St. and more people waiting on the 4th Ave. platform at Atlantic Ave. for a Bay Ridge-bound train. It’s possible that rides are shorter as the trip over the bridge is faster than the R’s winding route through Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, but multi-seat journeys just feel more annoying.

The R train can sustain such a shutdown though because its ridership is relatively low. What about those other routes providing key connections between Brooklyn and Manhattan that were also damaged during Sandy? Earlier this week, reporters had an opportunity to grill MTA CEO and Chairman Tom Prendergast on future potential plans for Sandy-related shutdowns, and he hedged a bit. Prendergast was in charge of Transit during and after the storm, and he knows more about the state of the infrastructure that just about anyone. He wasn’t though in the mood to share much.

During the back-and-forth, he discussed the state of the other East River train tunnels, noting that nine of the tubes were damaged “pretty substantially.” “We know,” he said, “there are problems in the other tubes.” Problems is never good word when talking about metal surfaces and electronic components exposed to saltwater.

Still, Prendergast wouldn’t give much information out on the status of the various tubes. He said that the Clark St. (2/3), Montague (R) and Cranberry St. (A/C) Tunnels bore the brunt of the flood. We also know from first-hand reports last year that the 53rd St. tunnel sustained water damage and that the L train’s 14th St. tube was inundate, but Prendergast didn’t mentioned those two tunnels by name.

He did say, however, that work won’t start in any other tubes until Montague is back up and running. “You really can’t deal with those [other tunnels] until you deal with these,” he said, referring to the ongoing R and G train work, “because you can’t close or limit capacity in too many tubes at one time or you actually reduce the level of service.”

As reporters pressed him to explain the damage, Prendergast remained vague. “We don’t believe they’ll be the same order of magnitude, “he said, but the flooding occurred in nine out of 14 under-river tubes. Anything we can do on nightly closures is where the focus will be and then we look at weekend closures and then what we call an out-of-phase which is a permanent seven days ago for a number of months…Hopefully we can do it with nightly closures.

If all of this reminds you of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote about the known knowns and known unknowns, well, I can see why. Something is coming, but we don’t know what. At some point, possibly in mid-to-late 2014 as the work on the Montague St. tunnel begins to wrap, we’ll hear more, but for now, the threat of future closures, to some degree or another, remains. Meanwhile, the MTA is racing against any future hurricane that could yet again bring floodwaters into the subways. Cross your fingers; hope for the best.

Due to Hurricane Sandy, the MTA’s new Fastrack program suffered a premature end in 2012. The November treatments were canceled as the MTA worked first to restore subway service and then to repair the transit system. Despite this road bump, Fastrack will be back in 2013, and yesterday, New York City Transit unveiled to me the full schedule of work lined up for the coming year.

In a press release issued Monday, Transit touted the benefits of Fastrack. The overnight subway shutdowns allow MTA workers unimpeded access to subway infrastructure, and repairs and renovations can be completed quickly and without the same fear of passing trains. The agency used some glowing phrases to describe “an increase in productivity and significant decreases in employee accidents and maintenance costs” and cited cost savings — to the tune of $17 million — and reduced delays as reasons for a 2013 return.

“Over the past year we have found this to be an extremely effective way to maintain a subway system that operates around the clock, seven days a week,” NYC Transit President Thomas F. Prendergast said. “We have seen concrete benefits in the way the system is being maintained through FASTRACK and we are now ready to roll it out to other line segments.”

As the 2012 version of Fastrack focused on the system’s core trunk lines in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, the new track segments venture further afield into the Bronx, Queens and Upper Manhattan. Still, the MTA assures its customers that these new routes have bend chosen because “there is adequate alternate means of transportation, including enhanced services along some bus lines during work periods.” I’d stick with alternate nearby subway lines over late-night bus service, but that’s just me.

So what are these new corridors? They include the Concourse Line (D) north of 161st St., the BMT Broadway Line (N/Q/R) between Queensboro Plaza and Court Street; the Eighth Avenue Line (A) north of 168th St.; the Queens Boulevard Line (E/F/M/R) between 5th Ave./53rd Street and Roosevelt Avenue; and the East Side IRT (4/5/6) north of Grand Central to 125th St. There will be a few one-offs during the year as well.

Each Fastrack segment will receive four treatments a year when service is shutdown overnight from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for four consecutive nights. First up is the D train’s Concourse Line during the week of January 14. That will repeat during the weeks of April 8, July 15 and November 4. The BMT Broadway line will be shutdown during the weeks of January 28, April 15, June 17 and September 30. The A train won’t venture north of 168th St. during the weeks of February 25, June 10, August 26 and November 18. The Queens Boulevard work will occur during the weeks of March 18, June 3, August 12 and October 14. Finally, the 6 train will be offline during the weeks of March 25 and September 9 while the 4 and 5 tracks will be shut down during the weeks of May 20 and October 28.

But! That’s not all. In addition to this trunk line work, there are a few other overnight Fastrack happenings. Out in Brooklyn, between the D train’s Coney Island Creek Bridge and the North Stillwell Interlocking, the MTA will conduct a weekend day-time Fastrack during the weekends of February 2, May 18, September 5 and November 23. Furthermore, a series of one-offs will dot the year. The J train tunnels in Manhattan will undergo maintenance during the week of April 1 while the F train’s Rutgers Tube through to Broadway/Lafayette will be off during the week of December 2. The R train will not run south of 36th St. along 4th Ave. during the week of May 6, and the 2 train will not operate south of Franklin Ave. during the week of January 21. The A/C/D trains will not run from 59th St. to either 168th or 161st St. during the week of September 16.

That’s quite the laundry list of Fastrack, and if you’re eyes haven’t glazed over yet, congratulations. The MTA is clearly engaged in an aggressive attempt at, well, something. It’s a money-saving effort to speed up necessary and vital repairs. It’s a major inconvenience to many late-night commuters who have few alternate routes. It is, as I’ve said before, the new normal, and it’s taking over more and more of the system. It starts up again in just a few weeks, and one day soon, we won’t remember when Fastrack wasn’t a part of the normal way of things. We don’t always like it, but we live with it.

Mayor Bloomberg — much to the chagrin of Joe Lhota — likes to opine on transit issues when, to put it delicately, the topic isn’t quite his forte. During the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the mayor seemed to pull timelines for the restoration of transit services out of thin air. Now, hizzoner has decided to tackle the problem of post-Sandy reconstruction costs.

As Dana Rubinstein reported today at Capital New York, the mayor seems to think we don’t need to better prepare the subway system for a flood. Let’s just take the money and run instead. In a radio interview, Bloomberg offered up this gem:

“I think a legitimate question is, if this happens only once 110 years, and if you get it back as quickly as they did, is that a good use of your money? You’d probably be better off taking those dollars, I think, and expanding the subway out to where people have now lived compared to when they did 100 years ago when the subways were built. Or have more trains, and better signaling so you can have more trains on the same track. There are a lot of things you could do with money to make the subway system better.”

There’s no doubt that, as Bloomberg says, there are a lot of things New York could do with that money. A $5 billion infusion of capital funds would cover a subway station at 41st St. and 10th Ave. on the 7 line extension and the next phase of the Second Ave. Subway. And I know and you know just how badly the subway could use that funding.

Yet, Bloomberg seems to be resisting progress here. In two consecutive years, we’ve gotten two storm swith the potential to be the storm that happens once every 110 years. Last year, the city dodged a bullet when the storm essentially passed over us; this year, Sandy’s full force hit us head on. New York’s politicians and the MTA can’t ignore changing weather patterns and the threat rising tides pose to the city’s transportation infrastructure. With an infusion of cash and an opportunity to prevent future catastrophic flooding, the time to act is now.

It’s tempting to sit back, as the mayor has done, and note how quickly things returned to almost-normal, but that’s not the right answer. Storm surges and flooding pose major threats to the subway, and even as New York City needs more of a Second Ave. Subway and transit expansion projects, it needs to protect the current system as well.

Apologies for the silence on Monday. I was out of town for the weekend and forgot to put up a note on Friday’s post along with the service advisories. I did get to experience the rains and storms along the outer bands of Tropical Storm Isaac. It’s dumping an impressive amount of rain down south.

The 7 line extension is just one of the city’s many overly expensive transit expansion projects. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

So over the years, as I’ve followed the progress of the MTA’s current (and future) megaprojects, I’ve returned regularly to the issue of cost. It’s no secret that the current subway and rail construction costs in New York City are out of control. The projects are billions of dollars over budget as well as years behind schedule, and that doesn’t even begin to account for the fact that these budgets are bloated to begin with.

Here’s a sampling of the problem: On Manhattan’s West Side, we’re getting a one-stop subway extension from 41st St. and 8th Ave. to 34th St. and 11th Ave. (with some tail tracks) for $2.1 billion. The project is set to wrap up a few months late, and we lost a golden opportunity to build a station at 40th St. and 10th Ave. over half a billion dollars. The Second Ave. Subway promises to deliver two miles of subway for nearly $4.5 billion. It is up to four years late depending upon which scoping document you read. East Side Access is an unmitigated cost disaster.

Meanwhile, New York’s projects are orders of magnitude more expensive that similar projects throughout the globe. Forgetting China where costs have crept up, New York’s subway construction costs trump any other comparable city’s. So why? That’s the question Stephen Smith tried to tackle in a piece on Bloomberg View last week. It’s worth a full read, but I’ll excerpt.

A huge part of the problem is that agencies can’t keep their private contractors in check. Starved of funds and expertise for in-house planning, officials contract out the project management and early design concepts to private companies that have little incentive to keep costs down and quality up. And even when they know better, agencies are often forced by legislation, courts and politicians to make decisions that they know aren’t in the public interest.

Comparing American transit-construction practices with those abroad yields a number of lessons. Spain has the most dynamic tunneling industry in the world and the lowest costs. In 2003, Metro de Madrid Chief Executive Officer Manuel Melis Maynar wrote a list describing the practices he used to design the system’s latest expansion. The don’t-do list, unfortunately, reads like a winning U.S. transit-construction bingo card.

Perhaps the most ostentatious violation of Melis’s manual of best practices is expensive architecture in stations. “Design should be focused on the needs of the users,” he wrote, “rather than on architectural beauty or exotic materials, and never on the name of the architect.”

American politicians have different priorities. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is spending $3.8 billion on a single subway station at the World Trade Center designed by Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect known for his costly projects. If New York could build subways at the prices that Paris and Tokyo pay, $3.8 billion would be enough to build the entire Second Avenue subway, from Harlem to the Financial District.

So that, you might be saying, is nothing new. What about the causes? Smith pinpoints a number of culprits. First up is the problem of a conflict of interests. U.S. transit agencies love their consultants, and the consultants can then bid on their own projects. Cross-pollination, in which transit officials move back and forth between the private sector jobs, also leads to inflated budgets and excess spending. Finally, lowest-price bidding systems often lead to project budgets that do not and cannot align with reality or a lack of quality control. Somehow, the new South Ferry station cost $500 million and is already still leaking. No one can be held responsible without timely and costly lawsuits.

Escaping this morass isn’t easy. It will require a full-scale overhaul of the contracting system and contracting laws. Plus, Smith doesn’t even touch work-rule laws in the piece which are clearly another source of extraneous spending and bloated budgets. Larry Littlefield, a frequent SAS commenter and former Transit budget analyst, sees some hope, albeit just a faint glimmer. “Remember how fast and how cheap they rebuilt the 1 train after 9/11? That’s what they’re capable of,” he said. “But it just doesn’t happen otherwise.”

In times of crisis, the MTA can do it right. The 1 train returned to service far faster than it should have, and the IND 8th Ave. line was up and running after far quicker than otherwise expected following a 2005 signal fire. But the big-ticket items that we need to improve transportation throughout the region are suffering. Bring down the costs, and the system can expand. It’s not an easy path to follow.

Early last month, the MTA announced their latest customer feedback initiative. With the promise of free rides for a few lucky participants, the agency launched a customer survey initiative designed to help the MTA better understand their riders’ opinions of existing services and their priorities for improvement. Three to five times per year, the MTA will approach those who sign up, and as a carrot for completion, some participants will receive a free pass good for 10 rides somewhere.

“We need a larger customer sample to drive our understanding of customer priorities down to finer levels of operation, such as individual subway lines or groups of stations,” Peter Harris, MTA Director of Market Research, said last month. “Our goals are to increase public participation while providing MTA planners with more in-depth, actionable information faster and at no extra cost, which we can do by adding well-designed online surveys to our existing research program.”

The few public responses to the survey announcement show the never-ending litany of suggestions and complaints. An article in The Poughkeepsie Journal highlighted practical and mundane areas of improvement. These suggestions ranged from doing away with a controversial $10 refund processing fee to better identifying Metro-North’s quiet cars to making sure fare vending machines aren’t reflecting the sun. Suburban commuters, it seems, have less to complain about on a day to day level than subway riders.

Within the five boroughs, complaints are endless. Gripes about delays are less indicative of systematic failures than they are of the daily ebb and flow of subway commuters. The louder complaints though concern the infrastructure. As pulsating LED lights have debuted at Bleecker St., riders from outside the core of the system are less than thrilled with station upgrades that seemingly never arrive.

One SAS reader complained of conditions at 191st Street, and I’ve heard similar complaints regarding the stations at 168th and 181st Sts. that are literally falling apart. Chambers St. on the BMT Nassau St. line sits underneath the building that houses much of the New York City bureaucracy, and it too is in shambles.

Venturing outside of Manhattan, we find recent coverage of conditions along the Sea Beach line. From the photos, you would never know some of these station elements date only from the 1980s as stairwells are eroding, and retaining walls at risk of giving out. Station conditions are grim, and it may be still be anywhere from two to six years until the MTA gets around to fixing up these stops. Subchatters are concerned with the structural integrity of the trench walls, and politicians are calling for emergency repairs.

All of which is to say that the list for improvements is endless, and then the cycle starts all over again. Even if the MTA can rehab every single station, they’ll eventually have to start over again as stations that were renovated within the past 15 years start to show their age. It’s the wear and tear of the daily commute played up against a backdrop of an agency that doesn’t have enough money to do what it needs to do and isn’t trusted with the dollars it has.

So the list will grow. Everyone wants his or her own local station to look the nicest, to be well lit, to have less water damage and fewer falling tiles, and when those renovations come, they cost too much and take too long. Just ask anyone waiting endlessly for the Bleecker St./Broadway-Lafayette transfer to finally open.

Odili Donald Odita's Kaleidoscope at the 20th Avenue station is one of many new pieces of art along the West End Line. (Photo MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design)

A little bit of housekeeping, so to speak, as the MTA announced yesterday two project completions. The three-year rehab work along the West End Line wrapped up with a ribbon-cutting on Thursday morning. The centerpiece of this project was a transformation of the Bay Parkway station into a fully ADA-compliant stop with three elevators. It is the 78th ADA “key station” in the system, and the MTA is now just 22 away from their promised goal.

In addition to a standard station rehab with lighting, platform edges and new staircases, Bay Parkway now features a system of free-standing pedestal speakers that provide riders with real-time information. These are i place as the station’s canopies do not extend the length of the platform. The other six stations — 71st Street, 79th Street, 18th Avenue, 20th Avenue, 25th Avenue and Bay 50th Street — underwent component-based repair efforts, and the 33,000 riders who use these stations will no longer have to battle delays and construction.

Overall, the $88 million projected funded through 2009 stimulus dollars brought station elements and the elevated structure south of 62nd Street into a state of good repair. That elevated structure, of course, was made famous in The French Connection. The rehab also features new station art developed by Arts for Transit. The MTA’s official Flickr feed had an album of the new art. I’m partial to the Kaleidoscope at 20th Avenue.

Meanwhile, at 7 a.m. yesterday, Transit re-opened the connection at Fulton St. between the A/C mezzanine and the southbound J/Z platform. The little-used transfer had been closed since March 5. With the re-opening of this transfer — although not the completion of work on this contract — the entire A/C mezzanine is now open, and the reconfigured platform access brings the total set of stairs available for straphangers to 10. The Fulton St. Transit Center is still on pace for a June 2014 completion date.

The cutter head of one of the East Side TBMs, shown here in 2011. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Earlier this week, the MTA made, in the annals of capital construction, a relatively major announcement. On Monday morning at around 7:30 a.m., the final East Side Access TBM came to a stop six feet beneath the LIRR Main Line in Long Island City. The TBM named “Molina” made two runs and will now be scrapped. With its end, for the first time in three years, the MTA has no active tunneling machine boring through the city.

As part of the announcement, MTA officials were celebratory in their statements. And why not? After all, through economic turmoil, delayed schedules and numerous changes at the CEO position, the MTA has managed to complete 16 TBM runs since SELI, the first of the East Side Access TBMs began mining back in September of 2009.

“Sixteen brand new, concrete-lined tunnels now exist under New York City where none did five years ago,” MTA Chairman Joseph J. Lhota said. “For about sixty years, two generations, the New York transit system was essentially functioning in a status quo, with little action on expansion to meet the needs of a growing region. Today, we are lengthening a subway line, building the first quarter of what will be a new north-south trunk line running the length of Manhattan, and realizing a long-held dream of connecting the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal. The conclusion of tunnel boring reminds us that New Yorkers remain capable of great achievements.”

As the tunnels dug out future train routes, New Yorkers and New Jerseyites will reap the benefits of the rock. Some college dormitory foundations have been constructed with the muck; a golf course has been stabilized; and much of the popular Brooklyn Bridge Park sits atop a foundation of dirt that once was under Manhattan or Queens.

The TBMs though won’t be put to further use in New York City. In its release, the MTA detailed the future of these machines. Adi, the Second Ave. Subway borer, is off to Indianapolis for future work while the two 7 line machines named for Mayor Bloomberg’s daughters have been dismantled. Of the four ESA TBMs, two are being scrapped, one has been dismantled and removed and the fourth has been encased in concrete and buried under Park Ave. at 37th St., a dead end for any sort of southern progress.

It is, of course, great news that the MTA has finished mining. Despite the years of work that still remain, with the tunnels in place, these projects are that more likely to move forward. No politician is too keen on seeing billions of dollars flushed down the drain as preexisting tunnels sit idle and unfinished. So the 7 line will open in less than two years with SAS due to wrap up in 2016 and ESA before the decade is out. It’s a generational change in the transit landscape.

Still, the MTA, with proper support, funding and foresight, could have done more. Adi, in particular, represents a lost opportunity as the MTA had a TBM underneath Second Ave. and removed it before the machine could dig south of 63rd St. or north of 99th. Subsequent phases of the Second Ave. Subway will be more complicated and costly due to the need to build a new launch box and procure and assemble another TBM. It’s redundant spending at its worst.

Yet, we have 13 miles of new tunnel, and that’s an accomplishment. Soon — or at least soon in the lifespan of a great city — we’ll have new train service and more transit options. It’s hard to be too upset by that news.