Gov. Cuomo called on the MTA Wednesday to create a 100-year plan to tackle its goals and challenges with a commission of transit experts from around the world.
“We have been operating the same subway system for the last 100 years,” he said in a letter to Chairman Thomas Prendergast. “The next 100 years, however, look radically different from New York.”
The transit system faces extreme weather, record ridership, and demographic shifts in the customers who uses its trains and buses, Cuomo said.
The Transportation Reinvention Commission, which will include international transit experts, would look at the system and then come up with a plan for the future.
It will hold public hearings, and then submit a plan to the governor before September, when the state will approve the MTA’s capital plan, a five-year budget for its infrastructure.
Prendergast said he would create the group.
“The MTA must do more than keep its network in a state of good repair,” he said. “It must prepare for a changing climate, adapt to changing travel needs and propel New York’s group.”