Dream of downtown 2nd Avenue subway once again denied

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The MTA has for more than 70 years promised New Yorkers a Second Avenue subway in Downtown Manhattan — but that dream has once again been put on the backburner.

The agency, in a report published last year, said an extension of the line from East 63rd Street to Houston Street wasn’t a priority. The MTA is already working to extend the line north from East 96th Street to 125th Street and Lexington Avenue — but now says extending the line farther west into Harlem is a better idea than building a new downtown line.

Officials estimated the downtown extension featuring six new stations would cost $13.5 billion to construct and serve 230,400 daily riders.

Extending the line across Harlem to Broadway from Lexington Avenue and 125th Street — where the Second Avenue subway will terminate once its next phase is completed — would cost $7.5 billion and serve 239,7000 daily riders, officials said.

The estimates are laid out in the MTA’s 20-year needs assessment, a semi-decennial tome that prioritizes infrastructure repairs and grades the feasibility of expansion projects.

Gov. Kathy Hochul earlier this year put her support behind the uptown extension over the downtown one.

Dashing the dreams of a downtown subway along Second Avenue is a tale as old as the MTA.

When the agency was formed in 1968, consolidating the city’s disparate transportation authorities, officials promised the Second Avenue subway would run along Manhattan’s East Side. The line was to run from the Battery up to East Harlem and, eventually, into the Bronx.

The plan had been discussed for decades, but inaugural MTA Chair William Ronan declared the line would be a centerpiece of his master transit plan that aimed to make up for “30 years of do-nothingness.”

But a group of lawmakers led by then-Rep. Ed Koch decried the downtown route as one that would be too far away from those who lived in Manhattan’s East Side bulge. The city Board of Estimate in June 1969 tabled approval of the route, and the following month approved an alternate line that would loop around Avenue A before extending down to the Battery.

Construction broke ground on that alternate line within two years, but was quickly halted during the city’s financial crisis of the mid-1970s.

By the time the MTA came back to the Second Avenue Subway in the 2000s, it began by building three stops on the Upper East Side — and promised that, one day, it would run downtown.

For now, that day is not in sight.

This week in New York City transit news

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• The NJ Transit fare increase, which received unanimous support from its board on Wednesday, is still subject to approval by the state Legislature when it finalizes its budget this June. Read more.
• MTA CEO Janno Lieber said he’s confident New Jersey’s lawsuit over congestion pricing won’t stop the tolling program from taking effect this summer as expected. Read more.
• Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers say they want to crack down on the increasingly bold ways New York drivers evade tolls. They just haven’t agreed on how to do it. Read more.
• Police said a New York City Department of Environmental Protection employee was arrested Monday for fatally striking a Queens woman with a city truck while on the job. Read more.
• The transit workers’ union said the MTA denied eight Muslim bus drivers their last-minute requests to take Wednesday off to observe Eid al-Fitr. Read more.
• Mayor Eric Adams said this week that while he often rides the subway in the middle of the night, it’s not “realistic” for him to ride the train to work every day because of his schedule. Read more.
• Through the first three months of 2024, there were 48 fires caused by lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and e-scooters, resulting in 29 injuries and one death, according to the FDNY. Here are three ways the city is trying to prevent these fires. Read more.
• The city Department of Transportation said it’s phasing out printed receipts at parking meters and turning to a fully digital system, which will save 2,500 miles of receipt paper each year. Read more.

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Mary from New York asked us:

"I am not a dog hater but I do hate that they are allowed on buses. Why?"

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We’ve reported in depth about how dogs are becoming a more common sight on subway trains — and many owners are flouting the MTA’s rules. If the canines are taken on board they must be “enclosed in a container and carried in a manner which would not annoy other passengers.” The MTA says the same rule applies for buses. Data on enforcement of the rule aboard buses wasn’t immediately available. But our previous reporting found that the NYPD has largely stopped issuing violations for dogs on subways.