MTA says New York's mass transit is in dire need of climate resilience upgrades

Some 400 miles of subway tracks, half of Metro-North’s Hudson Line and several Long Island Rail Road stations are in dire need of upgrades to stave off flooding and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change, the MTA wrote in a report published on Wednesday.

The report, called the 20-year needs assessment, is a breakdown of the agency’s $1.5 trillion worth of transit infrastructure, and details which equipment planners believe most urgently needs fixing over the next two decades.

“If we ignore these threats we risk the survival of the system itself – and New York,” the assessment states.

The report finds more than 350 of the MTA’s 493 elevators at subway and railroad stations will need to be replaced by 2043.

The MTA also needs 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 tag for the slew of upgrades was not laid out in the report, but MTA officials said the work must be completed no matter the cost.

“This isn't wholly a doom-and-gloom kind of plan,” Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA construction and development, said at a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. “We are trying to call attention to the dire need for investment. But it's also a vision, a positive vision, of the future.”

State legislation required the MTA to publish the 20-year needs assessment this year, ahead of forming a five-year construction plan slated to begin in 2025. The report issues grades to individual projects to help prioritize which ones should be completed first.

The agency did not publish a 20-year needs assessment ahead of forming its current $52 billion construction plan, which runs through the end of next year.

“This is the first time that the agency has done anything like this level of detailed analysis,” MTA Chair Janno Lieber said at Tuesday’s briefing.

One page of the report shows contrasting illustrations of a polluted New York City filled with gridlock traffic and dingy subway stations — not so different from today — and another depicting blue skies and a clean, modern subway.

Springer said the more positive outlook would only be possible through investment in the MTA, saying the comparison is akin to “Biff Tannen, Marty McFly, contrasting futures,” 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 attached to the improvements, which the MTA says are so necessary, is a cause for concern.

"While the MTA's needs assessment is thorough and shows that our transit system is in dire need of investment, it lacks dollar figures showing exactly how much money will be needed to fix the subways, buses, and commuter railroads,” wrote Rachael Fauss with the good government group Reinvent Albany in an email. “The needs of everyday riders must come first. In an environment of limited resources, it is essential that we prioritize capital projects based on objective measures of need, not politics, to repair the subways, buses and commuter railroads and ensure that they continue to best serve New Yorkers in this era of climate change."

The report did provide some cost estimates, but only for potential expansion projects that could take decades to complete. The long-planned downtown extension of the Second Avenue subway to Houston Street, for example, would cost $13.5 billion, according to the report.

A potential extension of the W line across New York Harbor from Lower Manhattan to Red Hook would take $11.2 billion to build, the report states.

And a subway extension down Utica Avenue in Brooklyn to Kings Plaza — a project MTA officials promised when the agency was formed in 1968 — would cost $15.9 billion.

Construction head Springer tempered the expectations those projects would ever be built.

“The priority need over the course of 20 years is to address those 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 address the state of the existing system, what we always refer to as state of good repair.”

Spending watchdogs, including Nicole Gelinas with the Manhattan Institute, praised the report but said the it is strikingly similar to the Fast Forward plan that Andy Byford put together in 2018 during his two-year tenure as president of NYC Transit.

“As these needs far exceed the MTA’s own ability to generate revenues to pay for them, it will still be up to the political class – e.g. the governor, the Legislature, the mayor – to figure out which projects to prioritize, the expansion projects, in particular,” Gelinas wrote to Gothamist. “It’s unlikely that we can do more than one or two of those expansion projects in the next 20 years.”

This story was updated with the correct estimated value of all the MTA's infrastructure: $1.5 trillion.