Without Congestion Tolling, the MTA has only $13 billion available to pay for the balance of $28 billion in remaining projects not yet underway as part of the current $51 billion 2020 – 2024 Five Year Capital Program. This will result in $15 billion of projects having to be postponed until the next 2025 -2029 Five Year Capital Program. The MTA is supposed to release the 2025-2029 Five Year Capital Program in October, less than five months away, It should be adopted on or before January 2025.
The MTA 2025-2044 Twenty Year Capital Needs Assessment released in October 2023 already identified more than $51 billion worth of safety and state of good repair projects to be funded out of the next 2025-2029 Five Year Capital Program. Many of the $23 billion 2020-2024 Five Year Capital Program projects currently underway will not be completed until 2025, 2026 or even 2027.
All of these projects have to be integrated with the annual 2025 and following years Annual Track Outage, Force Account (track, signal maintainers and other specialized craft in house employees), Routine Maintenance and Procurement Strategy plans for each MTA agency. This includes NYC Transit bus, subway, Staten Island Rail, Long Island and Metro-North Railroads, MTA Capital Construction and MTA Bus. It is necessary in order to support each agency’s respective capital programs. The plans provide a foundation to ensure projects will be initiated and completed on time and within budget accompanied by a minimum number of contract change orders that have been documented as fair, reasonable and justified.
There may not be enough resources to integrate the implementation of $15 billion or more carryover Congestion Price funded projects from the $51 billion 2020-2024 Five Year Capital Plan, $23 billion more in ongoing non-Congestion Price funded projects carried over into the upcoming $51 billion plus 2025 – 2029 Five Year Capital Plan.
The MTA lacks sufficient procurement, project managers, engineers, legal, and force account employees, along with track outage availability to proceed with all these projects in the same time frame. Billions of capital improvement projects will be delayed. Costs will increase due to inflation and other factors as time goes by. The upcoming $51 billion plus 2025-2029 Five Year Capital Plan should include a master integration schedule for how the billions in carryover capital projects will proceed with $51 billion or more in the new five year capital program. This is the only way we can determine if the MTA has the technical capacity to advance a record number of capital projects and programs in coming years.
Larry Penner
Great Neck
Larry Penner is a transportation advocate, historian and writer who previously served as a former Director for the Federal Transit Administration Region 2 New York Office of Operations and Program Management.
