This year, there have been some positive signs about things changing in New York on subway construction – and yet, I’m uncertain about them. There are some signs that construction costs for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 are coming under control. The New York Post broke in January that the MTA is eying smaller station designs, to reduce costs, to the tun of $300 million; an article released a few hours ago adds that there may be another $600 million in potential savings. So, in theory, costs are going down, and they’re going down as the MTA implements something we’ve been screaming about at the Transit Costs Project, so we should be happy.
And yet, I’m uncertain – not negative, but still somewhat pessimistic about whether this portends an era in which New York can finally build more subways. The main reason isn’t even some mistrust in the MTA at this point – the reduction in station footprints is a genuinely good thing, and to the extent it’s incomplete, it’s because it’s a longstanding project with older designs. Rather, it’s a combination of what this means for future projects, and how it interacts with federal funding. In brief, federal funding is at the level of the project rather than agency, and this makes it hard for cost savings to be plugged into the most straightforward benefit – namely, being able to build more on the same budget.
How is the money being saved?
The New York Post is relying on an MTA presentation from January that defends the cost structure but talks about how to reduce station costs through reducing back-of-house space. Phase 1 of Second Avenue Subway built two deep-mined intermediate stations, at 72nd and 86th Streets; the platforms are 610′ (187 meters) long, and there are no serious prospects of ever running longer trains since the line is an extension of older lines, but the station caverns are, respectively, 398 and 295 meters long, where the norm in the European comparison cases we’ve seen is that the station dig is 3-15% longer than the platforms, not twice as long.