About 400 miles of subway tracks, half of Metro-North’s Hudson Line and several stations on the Long Island Rail Road are in urgent need of upgrades to stave off flooding and other weather extremes exacerbated by climate change, the MTA wrote in a statement Wednesday published report.
The report, called a 20-year needs analysis, is a breakdown of the agency’s $1.5 trillion transit infrastructure and details which equipment planners think are most in need of repair over the next two decades.
“If we ignore these threats, we endanger the survival of the system itself – and New York,” the assessment says.
More than 350 of the MTA’s 493 elevators at subway and train stations will need to be replaced by 2043, according to the report.
The MTA will also need to replace 6,300 of its 8,700 rail cars and its entire fleet of 6,000 buses by then, according to the report.
The price for the numerous upgrades was not specified in the report, but MTA officials said the work must be completed regardless of the cost.
“This is not a completely dark plan,” Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA Construction and Development, said at a briefing with reporters Tuesday. “We are trying to draw attention to the urgent need for investment. But it is also a vision, a positive vision for the future.”
State legislation required the MTA to release the 20-year needs analysis this year before drawing up a five-year construction plan to begin in 2025. The report assigns grades to individual projects to help prioritize which should be completed first.
The agency did not release a 20-year needs analysis before developing its current $52 billion construction plan, which runs through the end of next year.
“This is the first time the agency has conducted a detailed analysis of this type,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said at Tuesday’s briefing.
One page of the report shows contrasting illustrations of a polluted New York City full of traffic jams and dingy subway stations – not much different than today – and another page shows blue skies and a clean, modern subway.
Springer said the more positive outlook was only possible through investment in the MTA, saying the comparison was akin to “Biff Tannen, Marty McFly, contrasting future prospects,” a reference to the 1989 film “Back to the Future Part II.” – itself a pastiche of the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Transit advocates said the lack of a price tag for the improvements the MTA says are so necessary is a concern.
“While the MTA’s needs assessment is thorough and shows that our transportation system is in dire need of investment, it lacks dollar figures that show exactly how much money is needed to repair the subways, buses and commuter rail,” Rachael Fauss co-wrote The good government group Reinvent Albany wrote in an email: “The needs of everyday drivers must come first. In an environment of limited resources, it is important that we prioritize capital projects that are based on objective measures of need, rather than policy, to repair subways, buses and commuter rail and ensure that they continue to provide New Yorkers with the best possible service during this time of climate change.”
The report did include some cost estimates, but only for potential expansion projects that could take decades to complete. For example, the long-planned extension of the Second Avenue subway to Houston Street downtown would cost $13.5 billion, according to the report.
A possible extension of the W Line across New York Harbor from Lower Manhattan to Red Hook would cost $11.2 billion, the report said.
And a subway extension along Utica Avenue in Brooklyn to Kings Plaza — a project that MTA officials promised when the agency was founded in 1968 — would cost $15.9 billion.
Construction manager Springer tempered expectations that these projects would ever be built.
“The primary need over 20 years is to address the assets that are in poor and marginal condition,” Springer said Tuesday. “Expansion projects only really make sense if we get the resources we need to fix the state of the existing system, which we always call “good state.”
Spending watchdogs, including Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute, praised the report but said it was strikingly similar to the Fast Forward plan drawn up by Andy Byford in 2018 during his two-year term as NYC Transit president.
“Because these needs far exceed the MTA’s own ability to generate revenue to fund it, it still becomes a matter for the political class – e.g. “Governor, Legislature, Mayor – figuring out which projects to prioritize, which expansion projects, etc. in particular,” Gelinas wrote to Gothamist. “It is unlikely that we will be able to undertake more than one or two of these expansion projects in the next 20 years.”
This story has been updated with the correct estimated value of all MTA infrastructure: $1.5 trillion.