Uptown & The Bronx, if you have a boat or submarine handy. (MTA New York City Transit / Leonard Wiggins)

Since getting wind of the MTA’s $600 million request for funds to repair and restore the South Ferry/Whitehall St. station complex, I’ve had a tough time wrapping my head around the exceedingly high figure. The total — which may not include repairs to the Montague St. Tunnel or nearby Broad St. station — is over ten percent higher than the cost of constructing the new South Ferry station, and a time when budgets at any level are maxed out, it seems on the surface to be just another example of the MTA’s inability to rein in capital construction costs.

The South Ferry price tag isn’t the only shocking number from the MTA’s Sandy Impact List. Restoring the A train’s Broad Channel connection to the Rockaways will cost $650 million, and repairing the damage to the signal system will run up to $770 million, nearly as much as initial estimates for a full CBTC treatment of the Queens Boulevard line. While we can argue that emergency dollars from the feds represents an untapped revenue stream of which the MTA should take full advantage, something else might be at work here. The MTA may be overestimating it needs.

After facing a rumbling of shock over the cost estimates, officials at New York City Transit have repeatedly stressed that the figure is just a guess for now. They don’t know how much it will cost and hope to get the total well below $600 million. Ted Mann of The Wall Street Journal followed up this argument with a piece on South Ferry this evening. He writes:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is still in the earliest phases of assessing the damage to its facilities, including how much it will cost to rebuild South Ferry, which filled with flood water and debris carried in by the tidal surge of superstorm Sandy…The MTA will seek to repair damage to South Ferry for less than the $600 million asking price, Transit Division President Thomas Prendergast said on Tuesday.

The transportation agency is keeping its damage estimates high enough to account for potentially high costs of reconstruction–especially if the station suffered serious structural damage–or for expensive components like escalators and elevators that could need to be replaced. “You don’t want to pad” damage estimates in seeking federal aid, Prendergast said. “If you destroy your credibility by padding numbers, that’s bad too. But you start with a number that you think is going to capture all your costs and you work back from that. And if we find we end up delivering it less, we’re not going to bill anybody for more.”

There is the possibility — though no guarantee — that some damage estimates will fall as evaluation continues and repair work begins in earnest, Prendergast said. “When you’re dealing with third parties who may reimburse you, you never want to start low and then work high,” he said.

In a sense, the MTA is following a practice it rarely pursues: By overestimating the costs now, the agency may look better in the public eye when repairs come in below target. They also may not know the full extent of the damage, and it is possible as well that the repairs will cost that much. After all, the entire South Ferry station was flooded, and salt water mitigation and subsequent repairs and hardening efforts will be substantial.

Still, these estimates bring to light a problem that has bedeviled the MTA for decades: Construction costs in New York City cannot remain this high if the MTA wants to continue to expand its network to meet growing demand. We can’t pay $600 million to repair a single subway stop just like we can’t pay $4.5 billion to build barely two miles of new subway. The MTA has needed to engage in a serious discussion of its capital construction spending scale for years. Maybe Sandy can push that dialogue in the right direction. After all, New Yorkers are beginning to suffer from subway repair-induced sticker shock.

MTA List No Mitigation

Earlier this morning, I posted on the steep costs of repairs in the aftermath of Sandy, and this afternoon, the Governor’s list of fiscal requests for the MTA hit the net. Via Transportation Nation comes the above list with the detail breakdown. You can also download it from here in PDF form, and the line items are shocking.

We already heard of the $600 million request for the South Ferry/Whitehall St. station, and now we know restoring A train service to the Rockaways will cost even more. The MTA Impact List requests $650 million for the restoration of the Broad Channel service, a figure that will embolden those wondering if restoring the line is the best use of resources. Overall, tracks and signals suffered $300 and $700 million worth of damages respectively, and the Hugh L. Carey (nee Brooklyn-Battery) and Queens-Midtown Tunnels suffered a combined damage total of nearly $800 million.

Further down the line, while the MTA’s major capital projects — the 7 line extension, Fulton St., the Second Ave. Subway and East Side Access — escaped major flood damage (in some cases by 25 feet or so), construction delays have mounted as well. East Side Access suffered $20 million worth of delays while the other three projects totaled around $5.6 million.

All in all, it adds up to $5.022 billion in repairs, and with these figures, it’s safe to assume that it will be awhile before 1 trains return to South Ferry and the A crosses into the Rockaways.

According to Governor Cuomo, it may cost up to $600 million to repair the South Ferry-Whitehall St. subway station. (Photo MTA New York City Transit / David Henly)

It’s been four weeks since Hurricane Sandy swept through New York City, and the storm and its aftermath has been our main focus since then. Fare hike hearings have become an afterthought for the MTA as storm clean-up and repairs have become the authority’s top priorities. Monday marked the first MTA Board committee meetings since the storm, and now the costs of the cleanup are coming into focus.

As the Board met — and more on that shortly — Gov. Andrew Cuomo discussed the state’s needs with its Congressional delegation. The price tags are steep. Overall, Cuomo believes New York needs $32 billion to recover from the damage inflicted by Sandy, and the MTA’s needs are considerable. Cuomo in a summary (pdf) noted that the MTA needs over $5 billion for repair work. As a comparison, one year of the MTA’s capital plan is also around $5 billion. The damage, clearly, was extensive.

“The devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy is of unprecedented proportions, ranking among the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history in terms of loss of life, property damage, and economic impact,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement. “Today’s meeting with our state’s Congressional delegation builds upon the close cooperation between local, state, and federal partners that has existed throughout Hurricane Sandy and in the storm’s aftermath. Working together, we will rebuild stronger and better than ever before, so New York State is better prepared and has the infrastructure in place to handle future major weather incidents.”

The specifics of the destruction are tough to come by, but some early estimates are leaking out. Thomas Kaplan of The Times tweeted:

This is mind-boggling: the MTA says repairing the South Ferry-Whitehall Street subway station will cost $600 million.

— Thomas Kaplan (@thomaskaplan) November 26, 2012

That’s a mind-boggling figure consider that the new South Ferry-Whitehall Street station opened three years ago and cost $530 million then. Kaplan later said the Governor’s Office confirmed that this line item was simply for the station and not, say, for the damage caused to the Montague St. Tunnel as well. In a statement to me, on Monday afternoon, though, the MTA said they “cannot confirm at this time” that the $600 million figure is a correct or final one. Still, repairs will not be cheap.

Also in Cuomo’s budget was a request for nearly $9 billion in prevention and mitigation investment projects. That’s a comforting request, but it’s probably not enough. During those Monday committee meetings, New York City Transit President Thomas Prendergast spoke at length about Transit’s needs and desires. In a PDF, he put forward his agency’s non-exhaustive wishlist for investment improvements. These run the gamut from stair and vent closures to elevator hardening to bladders or floodgates and “pre-engineering and site mobilization for temporary mitigation structures.” At the very least, Transit needs more than three pump trains, power redundancy systems and significant protection for its low-lying depots and vulnerable signal and communications equipment. None of this will be cheap.

Meanwhile, in addition to mitigation costs, the long-term outlook is bleak, and the MTA will have to accelerate its component replacement program. As Prendergast’s presentation noted, “general failure rates are expected to accelerate in system elements that experienced flooding.” These elements include electrical equipment, cable sheathings and even track beds that were inundated with garbage from the storm run-off. It was a mess.

So right now, it’s unclear how much money will flow our way and when. The MTA said on Monday that the R train will soon run to Whitehall and back through the Montague St. Tunnel to Brooklyn. J and Z trains will again reach Broad St. within the next week or two as well. But the outlook for that South Ferry-Whitehall St. station is hazy. The 1 trains will be turning through the old South Ferry loop for the foreseeable future, and the Whitehall St. station won’t take passengers until significant station repairs are completed. The Broad Channel washout too will take months to repair.

With these clean-up efforts under way and the monetary requests in place, we simply play the political waiting game. Despite astronomical cost projections, the MTA has a sense of what it needs to do to protect its infrastructure. Will Congress respond before the next storm hits? That’s a question perhaps better left unanswered as we hope for the best.