Following passage of funding for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 2025-2029 Capital Plan in the New York State budget, the MTA on May 28 reported that its Board has approved a proposed plan to be resubmitted to the MTA Capital Program Review Board in Albany. CPRB has now given it the greenlight, MTA reported June 18.
“It’s significant that the MTA’s 2025-2029 Capital Plan has been approved so quickly by the CPRB, but it’s not surprising,” said MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber in a June 18 statement on the plan’s approval. “This was the first capital plan in agency history to be based on a full-scale, comprehensive review of the infrastructure and components that make up our $1.5 trillion transit system, and the first to truly prioritize State of Good Repair. Governor Hochul, the State Legislature, and the Mayor’s Office recognize the urgency of making these investments to protect riders. Some projects are already getting underway, and more will follow quickly now that this final endorsement has been secured.”
BACKGROUND
The $68.4 billion plan (download below) continues to be “a historic investment in state of good repair work” and includes “targeted investments” to rebuild, improve, and expand the MTA system of subways, buses, commuter railroads, bridges, and tunnels, the transit agency reported May 28, noting that the plan was informed by MTA’s Twenty-Year Needs Assessment.
MTA Construction & Development (MTA C&D) “is ready to hit the ground running and deliver this capital work better, faster, and cheaper following final approval of the capital plan,” MTA reported. “Nearly half of work in the proposed plan has been initiated through internal processes at MTA C&D. The agency has already begun initial work on major projects in the 2025-2029 Capital Plan including modern signaling along the Fulton and Liberty lines on the A and C, the preliminary design phase of the Interborough Express, and resiliency efforts on Metro-North Railroad’s [MNR] Hudson Line.”
Among the other areas of investment in the proposed plan, MTA said, are “an order of 2,000 railcars [including 1,500 for New York City Transit and 500 for MNR and Long Island Rail Road], making 60 stations accessible, modernizing 75 miles of signals, installing modern fare gates at 150 stations, overhauling the Grand Central Artery [a four-mile stretch that carries 98% of all MNR service], updating customer information screens, enhancing security elements, rebuilding more than 80 power stations, and upgrading train shops and yards.”
“Credit to everyone at the MTA who worked so hard to get us to this milestone,” MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in the May 28 announcement.
“I’m thrilled to report to the Board that we have funding to move forward on the $68.4 billion 2025–2029 Capital Plan,” MTA Chief Financial Officer Kevin Willens added. “Funding transit, whether operating or capital should be treated like a core government service like water, sanitation and healthcare. It is an investment in infrastructure that is critical to the economy of the city and the state.”
“We’ll continue to do our part and identify savings as we have over the past few years as we move forward to implement this plan,” said MTA Co-Chief Financial Officer Jai Patel. “Today [May 28] marks a major milestone for the MTA. Having a fully funded capital plan protects the operating budget because it reduces the risk of additional borrowing.”
“This is the most rigorously vetted capital plan in MTA history, and we’re ready to deliver better, faster, and cheaper,” commented MTA Construction & Development President Jamie Torres-Springer.
Since the Board approved an initial proposed plan, MTA said that C&D “has revaluated which work can be moved in-house resulting in significant cost savings.” It noted that the in-house team “has proven its capabilities by building out its platform barrier construction and installation work”: MTA New York City Transit has so far this year installed barriers at 19 stations and remains on track to install barriers at 100 stations by year’s end. Additional capital plan work that will be carried out in-house, it said, includes “component work” at stations, substations, shops, and yards.
In MTA C&D’s 2024 Year in Review and 2025 Strategic Plan, “the agency found it had saved $3 billion on capital project delivery in its first five years,” MTA reported. “These savings have allowed the proposed 2025-2029 Capital Plan to deliver far more for riders than previous capital plans, while costing 4% less in inflation-adjusted dollars than the current 2020-2024 Capital Plan.”
