Straphangers may soon be enjoying new subway lines, less crowded trains, a new rail line to LaGuardia, the sun, the moon and the stars – if you believe MTA boss Elliot Sander.
Actually, we’re joking about the astronomy stuff – just as we assume Sander was kidding about the rest of it. Given the MTA’s record, New Yorkers sure can’t just take his word for it.
Sander teased the riding public Monday with dreamy visions of all kinds of mass-transit goodies as he made his pitch for some $30 billion in capital funding.
The money would go for repairs, new equipment, track and station upgrades and several major expansions of the system – all outlined last week in the MTA’s proposed capital budget.
Finding even half that money, of course, will be difficult – to put it mildly.
But even if Sander gets every penny, there’s no reason to think he’ll spend it to good effect.
Consider the monumental dysfunction at the Fulton Street Transit Center project. The Post’s Steve Cuozzo laid out the gory details on these pages last week; suffice it to say that the MTA hasn’t covered itself with glory.
In ’04, officials promised a majestic Taj Mahal-like Fulton Street transit hub – at a cost of $750 million. There was little need for all the grandiosity, of course. But supposedly the money was there, officials reasoned – so why not spend it?
Yet now the above-ground structure has been all but ditched, and there’s scant progress on the station below. Plus, the MTA has upped the price tag to $1.2 billion, a 60 percent jump in just four years, even as the job was scaled back.
(Where’s Groucho Marx to ask how much it would cost for crews to do nothing?)
Meanwhile, the agency pushed back the “completion” (yeah, right) date for the Second Avenue subway by a year, and plans to link the LIRR to Manhattan’s East Side are six months behind schedule. (The MTA can’t even say when the Fulton Street project will be finished.)
And let’s see a show of hands of all those who like – or can even figure out – the new fare structure. (Thought so.)
So why would anyone think the agency can deliver on Sander’s fantasies?
Fact is, the MTA keeps asking New Yorkers to pay more and more for less and less. Yes, construction costs have soared. But the agency’s accountants might have anticipated that.
And they might have known that launching so many mega-projects at once in itself would fuel price hikes, particularly with so few contractors qualified to do such specialized transit work.
Meanwhile, the MTA’s $29.6 billion spending plan cites only $20.2 billion in funding sources, leaving a $9.4 billion hole. And that assumes Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial plan to charge a fee to drive in Manhattan not only passes, but pumps in the expected cash (the plan includes $4.5 billion from Mike’s “congestion pricing”).
Make no mistake: New York’s transit must be top-notch. No one has stressed that more strenuously than we have.
Sander may have stretched when he said, “If the [$30 billion] plan is not passed, it compromises the future of the region as we know it.” But he was echoing this column in noting that sub-par transit investment could mean heading “down the path of the ’70s and ’80s, with breakdowns in equipment, derailments and so forth.”
Again, there’s a need for massive transit work – to keep the system running, accommodate growth and, as Sander notes, keep New York competitive.
But the region is drowning in government debt already – with precious little to show for it. MTA brass will have to prioritize – and, more important, do a better job of managing projects and estimating costs.
If the agency hopes to spend such vast sums, it first ought to show that it can deliver something for the money.