On Sept. 18, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority shed some light on its upcoming five-year transit spending plan through 2029, with details in limbo for that and spending from 2020 to 2024 due to New York’s June “indefinite recess”. Gov. Kathy Hochul of a congestion pricing program that was supposed to provide key funding.
Acknowledging the “elephant in the room,” two days earlier at the ENR NY/NJ Infrastructure Forum in Manhattan, Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA Construction & Development, told attendees that the agency was taking Gov. “at his word” that some $15 billion set for the current five years “will be restored in due course,” either through congestion pricing or “some other means.”
The agency announced that over the next five years, the $68.4 billion in spending includes $65.4 billion in system investments that it will present to the Capital Program Review Board on Oct. 1 for approval , and $3 billion for bridge and tunnel investments.
“The great thing about the MTA and the way we’ve been built over the last 40 years is that we’re required by law to work on five-year capital programs,” Torres-Springer said. “Even though sometimes there are pauses and reconsideration and things like that, and it’s a challenge to figure out how to fund each successive program, by law we’re always moving forward.”
Structural repairs will be a major focus of the MTA 2025-29 plan, due Oct. 1 at the Capital Program Review Board. The agency weighed various benchmarks to assess the necessary investment, including its own 20-year needs assessment and reviews by investment bank JP Morgan. , the state comptroller and the Citizens’ Budget Commission.
“We feel very confident that we can award very high volumes of work,” Torres-Springer said, citing $11.4 billion in contract awards by 2022 and expecting similar annual levels in the next plan. “This is our new normal,” he added, acknowledging that congestion pricing litigation reduced 2023 awards by $2 billion.
“We feel very good about what we have achieved in construction and development as a preferred owner for the industry,” he added. “We’re getting good bids. We’re getting competitive design-build procurement. Torres-Springer said the MTA will continue its trend of bundling projects into single contracts for cost and space efficiency.
Work on “structures and power” will be emphasized in the upcoming plan, with Manhattan’s Grand Central Artery also receiving attention, including a tunnel leading to the train station with “serious structural and life safety issues” . Throughout the subway system, 65 miles of elevated track and hundreds of miles of underground track are in “poor and marginal condition,” Torres-Springer said.
The MTA’s climate resilience strategy will address “six billion dollars of needs over the next 10 years and we intend to make a significant down payment on those in this next five-year plan,” which will focus on risks “high priority”.
Other efforts will address equipping bus shelters, shops and yards for an all-electric bus fleet by 2040 and ADA accessibility work, with 95% of subway stations to be renovated with an expenditure of 7.1 billion dollars. This will bring the overall system accessibility to 50%
Amtrak: Making up for lost time
US rail carrier plans aggressive infrastructure program over coming years, fueled by $66 billion in federal funding IIJA
Chart courtesy of Amtrak
With rail delays on its key Northeast Corridor line mounting, “years of underinvestment [are] showing up every day and that’s not acceptable,” said Jay Sankar, Amtrak’s vice president of infrastructure delivery, as he updated details of the U.S. passenger rail company’s push to take on major backlog infrastructure projects that are now possible with $66 billion in new federal infrastructure funding from the law: one-third earmarked for its busy Northeast Corridor.
“We’re now an operator of downtown passenger services and we’re also a builder, which Amtrak has never done before,” he said.
According to Sankar, Amtrak has hired about 8,000 employees in the past three years to boost a workforce depleted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with experience in engineering, construction and ownership with major project management. He said the company will award $15 billion in contracts by the end of the year, with about 700 current projects in its portfolio valued at $200 million or more, compared with “only a handful or two” of that size in 2019.
“These are projects that have been on the drawing board … for decades,” Sankar noted. “This version of [infrastructure law funding] it’s a down payment on the amount of infrastructure money we need.”
But Sankar warned that work on major projects must continue with limited or no track closures and more interaction with various users of the rail line. “There’s nothing Amtrak can do on its own,” he said, pointing to a new internal team dedicated to managing track access coordination and forcing account resources. The effort worked successfully on recent work on the Pennsylvania line, compressing the project’s completion from two years to eight months and saving $30 million, Sankar said, though he added that the effort by access is still “a work in progress”.
The acquisition also continues since last November in a major effort by Amtrak, in coordination with NJ Transit, to replace the Sawtooth Bridges, an early 20th-century link in the corridor in Kearney, NJ, that connects several lines and carries more than 400 trains daily. The project received $132.3 million in federal funding to support early construction. When complete, its new four-lane replacement structure will double the current capacity. Sankar said he plans to award a construction risk management contract, due to the complex logistics of the project, which he called a “site access and coordination nightmare.”
Sankar also noted that Amtrak plans to expand Penn Station, but did not confirm design or purchase details.
Showing a detailed slide of Amtrak’s project procurements and a number of planned alternative project delivery approaches, Sankar noted that if he had shown the same picture five years ago, they would all “say design-bid-build.”
He said a “forward-looking” view of upcoming acquisitions will be posted on Amtrak’s website probably next month.
Amtrak’s capital delivery “is two and a half years old, so we’re still building, we’re still learning, and we’re still looking for … support from … this industry to help us deliver on the plan,” Sankar said to the attendees .
“Awesome” work rate from NJ
Rich Shaefer, senior vice president of capital programs for New Jersey Transit, gave an update on work on the Portal Bridge rail project and the agency’s overall capital plan, noting that “for a relatively small agency, we accomplished nearly $1 billion in federal money in fiscal year 2023.” Related to the bridge, “we’re looking at October 2027 to start seeing the track with trains running on it,” he said. “It is difficult to understand the size of this structure; it’s almost three miles of work. In many ways, it’s a wall job that happens with a bridge in the middle.”
Construction averages $60 million a month, Shaefer said, “so you’re talking about billing $2 million every day. We’ve had months where we’re up to $5 million a day, which is impressive”.
The agency is investigating battery-electric locomotives with “the potential to eliminate our use of diesel throughout our system,” he noted. “We have a study of zero-emission buses, which we are also progressing.” Also in the works is a bus garage modernization, new bus terminals and renovated train stations, including New York Penn and New Jersey Station.
NJ Transit has more than 20 construction and design opportunities on the books, Shaefer said, noting “about $6 billion of work here that we’re doing in the design and construction community. My goal is that in the year that come, every month, there will be a ribbon cutting or a shovel in the ground for the start of construction in the state of New Jersey. It will be a landmark year for transit and for the state.
Jim Morrison, Senior Technical Advisor to the Gateway Development Commission, gave a program update on the construction of the planned new Hudson River Tunnels. “In the last year, we have established our full funding grant,” he said. “When I was here a year ago, the [commission] there were about 30 people. Now we are about 150 people”.
As for construction, “right now they are making land improvements to the river that will facilitate the tunnel work … and to remove obstructions.”
The Tonnelle Avenue bridge relocation project and utility facility in New Jersey is under construction, Morrison said. “This is a relatively small project, but it’s really the linchpin of this program. All of our other contracts feed through Tonnelle Avenue. “It’s the access point for mining… and for the removal of sludge from the tunnels. It’s really key.”
The $465.6 million contract awarded last month for the tunnels on the New Jersey side won’t be the last big award, he added. “The next ones will probably be bigger than this.”
A tunnel from the Hudson County Hoboken line under the river to 12th Avenue “is going to be a lot more complex and probably a lot more expensive,” Morrison said. “On the planning side, we’re taking a deep look at the systems. that will go into this tunnel and make it work: the rail, the electrical, the signals, the fire safety systems and the ventilation.”
