Questions linger about MTA's East Side Access

Even as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo led a cheerleading tour through the $11 billion East Side Access project site, skepticism and open questions remained.

The megaproject is designed to funnel the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central Terminal on Manhattan’s East Side, giving those suburban commuters a choice of Grand Central or the LIRR’s usual terminal, Penn Station on the West Side.

Grand opening is scheduled for next year.

A rendering of the East Side Access Long Island Rail Road platform under New York's Grand Central Terminal, 15 stories beneath street level.

It’s 13 years late — though the idea has floated for 60 years — and way over budget. It has often flown under New York’s infrastructure radar, even literally so, given that the new hub sits 15 stories below street level. The original cost estimate was $2.2 billion.

“It is the unknowns that will determine whether — and when — commuters will benefit,” said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA.

The LIRR is a unit of the MTA, one of the largest municipal issuers with $50 billion of debt including special credits.

“Long Island Rail Road commuters have been waiting for decades to be able to take their trains into Grand Central, through fits and starts, false hopes and countless delays, and significant cost overruns," Daglian said.

Cuomo on Thursday said all major construction is complete. He called it the largest new train terminal built in the U.S. since the 1950s and the first expansion of the LIRR in more than 100 years.

“We still have some systems work to do, electrical systems, et cetera, but all the construction is complete,” Cuomo told reporters.

Officials expect the new connection to double the LIRR's capacity into Manhattan with up to 24 trains per hour and cut travel time for Queens commuters by 40 minutes per day. It will feature eight tracks and four platforms in a two-level station.

Construction continued through COVID-19 despite the pause on much of the MTA’s capital work during the pandemic. More delays would have driven up the costs even further.

MTA representatives have long blamed the delays on quasi-public Amtrak for not streamlining construction efforts. The authority until recent years had a prickly relationship with the national rail carrier, which has significant operations of its own in Queens that East Side Access must thread between the LIRR's Jamaica station and Manhattan.

Amtrak controls Harold Interlocking, a large rail junction in Queens, about four miles east of Penn Station. Amtrak-related cost overruns, according to Long Island newspaper Newsday, were $340 million between 2014 and 2018 alone.

“The question that remains is, why did the MTA pay for the entire project and then get stuck with the cost of overruns caused by Amtrak?” Daglian said. “LIRR passengers will certainly benefit, but Amtrak — and the entire northeast corridor — are the clear winners here.”

According to Daglian, another helpful project postmortem would be assessing Amtrak’s contribution to delays and how to reconfigure project components to enable work-arounds amid unforeseen circumstances.

“Since the MTA and Amtrak have several significant undertakings ahead of them, including Penn Access, looking at lessons learned and applying them will be critical to helping keep costs lower,” she said. Penn Access is to bring direct Metro-North service from the Bronx, Westchester, and Connecticut to Penn Station, with four new Bronx stations in the works over what is now an Amtrak line.

Overarching variables include the degree of the region’s recovery from the pandemic and how changes to the work-at-home dynamic will affect commuter-rail and subway ridership.

Another uncertainty is who exactly will be in charge of the new terminal. LIRR will remain responsible for its railroad operations, for example, while fellow MTA unit Metro-North Railroad will handle the operations and management of the existing Grand Central Terminal and passenger concourse.

A scene from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Thursday tour of the nearly completed East Side Access Project under Grand Central Terminal.

The MTA has issued a request for proposals to outsource operation and maintenance of the new terminal.

According to the RFP, the MTA intends to “create a new subsidiary agency that will be responsible for the oversight and contract management of the service provider during the term of the contract and the contract will be awarded by [the MTA Construction & Development Co.] in the name of this new agency.”

Good-government organization Reinvent Albany questioned why the MTA, which is underdoing its own consolidation, needs a subsidiary to manage the terminal.

The intention could be “to mask potentially huge operating deficits,” said Reinvent Albany’s senior research analyst, Rachael Fauss.

“The MTA already has a vast bureaucracy, and it is unclear how this new subsidiary will fit into the MTA’s existing governance structure,” Fauss said. “At a time when the MTA is seeking to reorganize and centralize its operations, creation of a new subsidiary is completely counter to that goal. It will also be harder to assess labor costs with the use of an outside vendor.”

In addition, said Fauss, creation of the new subsidiary could shift substantial maintenance costs off the books of LIRR, “and make the MTA’s already complex budgeting process even more opaque.”

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New York Andrew Cuomo Metropolitan Transportation Authority Transportation industry Infrastructure
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