Driving mandate

 

 AMNY

The number of people traveling in and out of New York City by car is higher than ever before, even as mass transit ridership continues to lag behind levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report on MTA finances from State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli revealed.

Crossings on the MTA’s seven bridges and two tunnels across New York City climbed to 335 million in 2023, already a record, and are expected to hit 339 million in 2024, according to DiNapoli’s report. That comes even as paid weekday ridership on the subway still hovers at around 70% of pre-COVID averages, with higher numbers registered on weekends, suggesting a permanent shift to working from home even as New Yorkers take transit for personal activities.

Even worse, MTA ridership over the next several years is expected to recover still more slowly than officials once projected: in November 2020, consulting giant McKinsey & Company predicted ridership would rise to 86% of pre-COVID levels by 2026, but MTA brass now concede it will likely average only 80% by that time.

Suck it, Open Plans.

 

Drive, we said

AMNY  

More people are driving cars in New York City than ever before, based on toll data from the MTA and Port Authority — a remarkable feat as the city prepares to implement congestion pricing in the hopes of dissuading motorists from getting behind the wheel in favor of mass transit.

Over 335 million vehicles were recorded crossing the MTA’s nine bridges and tunnels in 2023, which include the Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Cross-Bay, and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges and the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown Tunnels, among others. That’s a 1.3% increase over the previous record in 2019, when 330.7 million crossings were made, and the most ever seen in 87 years of data collection.

In 1937 — the first year that the MTA Bridges & Tunnels’ predecessor, the Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority, was in operation — the bridges saw only 18.5 million crossings. Back then, the TBTA had only three bridges in its portfolio: the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, and the Marine Parkway Bridge.

The Port Authority, meanwhile, has this year seen the highest number of vehicle crossings on its six spans — including the George Washington Bridge, Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, and the Bayonne and Goethals Bridges and Outerbridge Crossing connecting Staten Island and New Jersey — since at least 2011. Through October, the latest month that data is available, the Port Authority had recorded just over 102 million crossings.

In its 2024 budget proposal, the Port Authority projected its bridges and tunnels would see 122 million crossings next year.

New York City’s Department of Transportation could not immediately provide numbers for its bridges throughout the city, which include major spans like the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro Bridges and hundreds of short crossings all over the five boroughs. Unlike the MTA and Port Authority, the DOT does not collect tolls.

However, DOT did record that the number of vehicles registered in the city grew more than 10% between 2010 and 2021, according to the agency’s Streets Plan update earlier this year. The numbers for 2022 will be published in early 2024.

 

MTA trolls raise bridge and tunnel tolls

 

NY Post 

Tolls on the MTA’s seven bridges and two tunnels are set to go up April 1, with the agency’s board unanimously approving an increase on Thursday.

Current toll rates will increase an average of 7.08 percent, the MTA said.

Tolls will increase from $6.12 to $6.55 for E-ZPass users on six crossings: the Bronx-Whitestone, Triboro, Throgs Necks and Verrazzano bridges and the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels. Drivers without E-ZPass will be charged $10.17, up from $9.50 today.

On Upper Manhattan’s Henry Hudson Bridge, tolls will increase by 20 cents for E-ZPass users and 50 cents for everyone else. The Cross Bay and Marine Parkway bridges in Queens, meanwhile, will see tolls spiked from $2.29 for E-ZPass and $4.75 for everyone else to $2.45 and $5.09, respectively.

MTA officials opted to retain a discount for Queens residents for those two bridges, as well as the Verrazzano Bridge’s Staten Island rebate — which will now apply to all borough residents regardless of how many trips per month they take across the bridge.

At the same time, the MTA has created a middle-tier for toll collection: E-ZPass users whose devices are not affixed properly will be charged a “special rate” in between the regular and E-ZPass rates.

The MTA has hiked fares and tolls every two years since 2010. But transit officials delayed scheduled transit fare hikes last month, citing widespread financial hardship and low transit ridership.

Cross-sound tunnel plan dropped

From CBS 2:

A proposal to build a tunnel under the Long Island Sound connecting Nassau and Westchester counties has been dropped.

State Department of Transportation Commissioner Paul Karas said Thursday they decided not to move forward with the plan. Karas did not reveal further details as to why they are abandoning the plan.

A study previously estimated the tunnel could cost up to $55 billion.

Is cashless tolling really a trap?

From CBS 2:

Countless drivers are reporting that ever since cashless tolling took effect at Metropolitan Transportation Authority bridges and tunnels, they have gotten hit with a mountain of fines.

As CBS2’s Jessica Layton reported, cashless tolls have transformed the speed to get through the city’s congested bridges and tunnels. But now, commuters are complaining cashless tolls have caused them countless problems.

Since cashless tolling took effect, surprise fines have been piling up on unsuspecting drivers like never before.

Tom Reilly of Staten Island said at one point, he owed $2,200.

“It’s amazing,” he said.

Reilly did not know his debit card information was not up to date until he got hit with more than a mortgage payment’s worth of violations at the Hugh Carey Tunnel. And in another dilemma, drivers do not know when their account has a low balance – because those convenient indicators are gone with the new gantries.

Hunters Point South still waiting on sign offs

From Crains:

One of the final large-scale projects of the Bloomberg administration is languishing on the Queens waterfront despite its having been approved three and a half years ago. But there are signs that the development may finally be moving forward.

TF Cornerstone was selected in December 2013 to build a 1,197-unit apartment complex as part of the Hunters Point South complex on the Long Island City coast. Such projects typically take two or three years to complete, yet this one's design hasn't been finalized.

Sources with knowledge of the development told Crain's that delays piled up because of the tangle of utility lines and a train tunnel that run beneath the site. The complications of accommodating these subterranean obstacles was not initially apparent and led TF Cornerstone to alter its design of the building last year.

"The plan changed, and it needed to change based on what they discovered underneath the site," City Council Majority Leader Jimmy Van Bramer said at the time.

But changing the blueprints was not enough. Both Amtrak, which owns the rail tunnel running beneath the East River, and the New York Power Authority, which controls underground electrical lines, must also sign off on an agreement covering the building's design and construction to ensure no harm comes to their infrastructure.

Negotiations with Amtrak began more than two years ago, a spokesman for the rail line said, and are ongoing. However, project insiders said that a resolution is nearly at hand and other aspects of the project are now moving forward rapidly, suggesting that the building may get off the ground early next year.

Removal of toll booths is in the works

From the Office of the Governor:

Open road tolling will be completed at all MTA bridges and tunnels by the end of 2017. The schedule is as follows:

Hugh L. Carey Tunnel – January 2017
Queens Midtown Tunnel – January 2017
Rockaway Bridges – Spring 2017
RFK Bridge – Summer 2017
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge – Summer 2017
Throgs Neck Bridge – Fall 2017
Bronx-Whitestone Bridge – Fall 2017

With the implementation of open road tolling, state-of-the-art sensors and cameras will be suspended over the highway on structures called "gantries" that read E-ZPass tags and take license plate images, so vehicles no longer have to stop to pay the toll. Vehicles with E-ZPass tags are automatically charged. Non-E-ZPass vehicles have their license plates recorded and a bill is mailed to the registered owner of each vehicle every 30 days.

Amtrak tunnel takes developer by surprise

From Crains:

A Manhattan-based developer has reconfigured its planned 1,197-unit Hunters Point South apartment complex after learning an Amtrak tunnel and power lines ran under the city-owned project site, Crain's has learned. As part of the new design, developer TF Cornerstone will include a 600-seat school for the rapidly growing neighborhood on the Queens waterfront.

In 2013, the Bloomberg administration selected the developer and nonprofit partner Selfhelp to build an ODA Architects-designed residential project, including 700 affordable apartments, on part of the Queens peninsula dubbed Hunters Point South.

Nearly two and a half years later, though, blueprints have yet to be finalized. Amtrak and the New York Power Authority have been negotiating with TF Cornerstone since March 2015 to ensure construction doesn't damage the rail tunnel or the power lines.

It is not clear why the underground infrastructure took the developers by surprise, given that plans for the peninsula released in 2008 indicated whoever controlled the site would have to build around multiple easements.

De Blasio decides that water is not important

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has postponed work to finish New York’s third water tunnel, a project that for more than half a century has been regarded as essential to the survival of the city if either of the two existing, and now aged, tunnels should fail.

The new tunnel has already been completed and is carrying water into Manhattan and the Bronx. But segments that would supply Brooklyn and Queens, home to five million people, though also virtually finished, still await the building of two deep shafts.

If calamity or age forced the shutdown of City Water Tunnel No. 2, which is 80 years old, the primary water supply to much of Brooklyn and Queens would be lost for at least three months, city engineers said, the time it would take for an emergency activation of the sections of Tunnel No. 3 in Brooklyn and Queens that have already been finished.

The entire Brooklyn-Queens leg of the new tunnel was scheduled to be finished by 2021, with $336 million included in the capital budget in 2013 by Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, for whom completion of the third tunnel was the most urgent and expensive undertaking of his tenure.

But last year, Mr. de Blasio’s administration, eager to keep a lid on water and sewer rates that had grown by an average of 8 percent annually under Mr. Bloomberg, moved financing for the third tunnel to other projects, Amy Spitalnick, a de Blasio spokeswoman, said.

The city intends to finish the remaining portions of the tunnel sometime in the 2020s, but it has not set a date for completion nor allocated money in the budget to carry out the work. For the foreseeable future, the $6 billion tunnel will remain dry in the two largest boroughs, where well over half the city’s population lives.

The ol' reliable 7 train went down again

From the Daily News:

More than 540 New York straphangers were evacuated from a No. 7 train inside the tunnel under the East River on Monday morning after a mechanical issue led the tube to fill with smoke, officials said.

At least one person had been injured in the evacuation, officials said. The extent of the injuries was not immediately known, but wasn’t considered to be life threatening.

The trouble arose about 8:30 a.m. when a device known as a sliding shoe, which transmits power from the third rail to the train, fell out of position, an MTA spokeswoman said.

The shoe, as a result, touched a protective board, which caused smoke to develop and the train to come to a grinding halt.

The FDNY brought in a rescue train to evacuate passengers from the stranded one.

There's a $185M tunnel to NJ should we ever need one

From Crains:

Taking shape on Manhattan's West Side is a $185 million, federally funded tunnel that leads to nowhere, for now.

The 800-foot-long, 35-foot-deep concrete trench could someday lead to two new commuter rail tunnels under the Hudson River to New Jersey, if the billions needed to build them ever materialize.

The access tunnel is being built now because the massive Hudson Yards development with six skyscrapers, the tallest being 80 stories, will soon be built on top of it. Trying to dig such a huge trench through the bedrock after those buildings are completed, officials say, would be an engineering and financial nightmare.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was among the lawmakers who pushed Congress to approve Superstorm Sandy relief money for the planned flood-resistant access tunnel, calling it mitigation to protect infrastructure from future storms. But he argued it would have to be built now because the skyscraper developers could not be delayed indefinitely.

"We asked them to delay months, but if we asked them to delay years, they may have said no," said Mr. Schumer, referring to the Related Cos., the main Hudson Yards developers. "Sandy relief funding was there, available, the criteria fit, and the money was getting through quickly and fit the timetable."

The access tunnel is expected to be completed in fall 2015.

A look inside the 7 train extension

East side access project now more than $8B

From the CBS New York:

The project to link the Long Island Rail Road to the East Side of Manhattan now has a price tag of more than $8 billion.

The final cost is more than 30 percent above the original estimate.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials also reiterated Monday that the new completion date for the project is August 2019. The East Side Access project was supposed to wrap up by 2016.

MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota had revealed the delay earlier this month at a meeting of business leaders on Long Island.

He said there have been problems tunneling underneath a rail yard in Queens. The MTA has brought in experts from Europe to help with developing a plan going forward.

7 train tunnel to west side delayed

From AM-NY:

The extension of the No. 7 train to the Far West Side of Manhattan could be months behind schedule, the MTA official overseeing the project said Monday.

Problems have slowed down the project to extend the line to 34th Street and 11th Avenue from its current endpoint of Times Square, MTA capital construction president Michael Horodniceanu said during the agency’s transit committee meeting yesterday.

Although the MTA had previously promised that straphangers could ride to the new stop by December 2013, Horodniceanu said “there is a risk” riders won’t be able to use it for an extra “two or three months.”

The unspecified problems, Horodniceanu said, “pushed us a bit behind… We are working to try to resolve them.” He said he wouldn’t know the extent of the delays until next month.

The city is paying for the $2.1 billion subway extension, as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to improve business on the West Side. A spokesman for the mayor did not comment Monday night on the delay.

Discovery of a long lost tunnel

"I am going to take you into a long dormant tunnel in queens n.y. that was built in 1933 and was sealed shut soon after due to safety concerns. Several people told me that the ramp was NOT used by cars, but by horses, as it was a bridle path that was indeed sealed up in the late 1960s."

Mass transit should be up and running tomorrow morning

From WPIX:

Service Plan for Monday Morning

Subways: With limited exceptions, service will resume across the subway system at 6:00 a.m. Monday morning. Service will be less frequent than normal, and customers should expect longer waits and more crowded trains. Frequency of service will improve over the course of the day.

Exceptions:
3 trains will operate between 137th Street/City College and New Lots Avenue; Substitute bus service will be provided between Harlem 148th Street and 135th Street connecting with the 2 train.
C trains suspended; A trains will make all local stops from 207th St. to Lefferts Blvd.
No service in the Rockaways. (Rockaway Blvd. to Far Rockaway and Rockaway Park)
6 trains runs local in the Bronx
7 trains run local
S Franklin Avenue Shuttle (FAS) Suspended
N trains terminate at Kings Highway. Shuttle bus service between Kings Highway and Stillwell Terminal.
The Staten Island Railway will resume normal service at midnight tonight.

Buses: Limited bus service was restored in all five boroughs of New York City earlier this evening. Service levels will continue to increase but may not reach normal levels tomorrow.

Bridges and Tunnels: All MTA Bridges and Tunnels are open as of 7:00 p.m.

Tunnels over budget and behind schedule

From AM-NY:

Two of the cash-strapped MTA’s mega-projects are way behind schedule and over budget, according to a federal government review.

The East Side Access project, which will extend LIRR service to Grand Central Terminal, is running 18 months behind and $800 million over budget, while the Second Avenue subway line may open more than a year late.

The Federal Transit Administration said the MTA needs to start “dealing realistically with … cost and schedule setbacks,” make management changes, and get back to the FTA with “an achievable budget and schedule plan” to finish the East Side Access project, which receives federal stimulus money, according to a report obtained by amNewYork.

Although the MTA maintains that East Side Access and the Second Avenue subway will be done by September 2016 and December 2016, respectively, the FTA puts their opening dates at April 2018 and February 2018. It would be “quite difficult” for the East Side Access project to finish on time, the feds said, adding that costs could balloon from $7.3 billion to $8.1 billion. While the MTA projects the Second Ave. subway will cost $4.4 billion, the FTA puts the price tag at $4.8 billion.

Exposing our vulnerabilities

From the NY Post:

Some of the most heavily trafficked bridges, tunnels and transit hubs in the world are on a list of Port Authority facilities vulnerable to terrorist attacks, according to documents obtained by The Post.

The Hudson River crossings to Manhattan -- the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge -- along with the Bayonne Bridge, the roadway under the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the AirTrain to Kennedy Airport. all get inadequate policing, the documents show.

Sitting ducks

The Port Authority’s most vulnerable sites, according to its police union:

1. Lincoln & Holland tunnels, GW Bridge
An incident at one site would leave the other two without police coverage.

2. JFK AirTrain
There are no cops patrolling the rails 97 percent of the time.

3. Port Authority Bus Terminal
A roadway that runs below it is totally unmanned.

4. Bayonne Bridge
It is left with no police coverage several times during the day.

Why?

From the Daily News:

New York will spend up to $250,000 to jump-start the idea of extending the 7 train all the way to Secaucus, N.J. - but New Jersey hasn't pitched in a dime.

The city hired engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff this week to analyze how many riders the line could serve, how they would connect to the NJTransit train hub in Secaucus and - most importantly - how much it would cost.

Their study is due in three months, which Deputy Mayor Robert Steel said will help show government and transportation agencies in the region whether to go forward.

Other officials in New York and New Jersey are looking at the idea, but haven't put up any cash to make it happen.

It could give New Jersey residents their first direct train line to Grand Central Terminal, as well as to see the Mets or the U.S. Open in Queens.

The city is paying $2.1 billion to extend the 7 train to 34th St. and 11th Ave., where it will serve a massive office and housing development planned for the West Side rail yards.

7 to NJ?

From Eyewitness News:

The plan to build a tunnel under the Hudson was killed last month by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, but Tuesday night it was in a way, reborn.

The Bloomberg administration is quietly planning a proposal to ease the commute for folks from New Jersey into Manhattan by extending the number 7 subway line from Times Square, under the Hudson River, all the way to Secaucus.

The plan calls for building the 7 line all the way across the Hudson into Hoboken and then on to the Secaucus Transfer Station.

The plan would achieve many of the goals that would have been accomplished by that other tunnel that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed because of the cost.

Extending the 7 train would also be a much cheaper alternative.

It would shave billions off the final price tag.