Every once in a while for fun, Phil Plotch likes to phone the MTA’s Second Avenue Subway Community Information Center — a permanent storefront on 125th Street — to ask when the next phase of the mass transit project will begin.
“I called yesterday,” Plotch told me in March. “They said they’d start building it next year.”
Not only is the Second Avenue Subway unlikely to pick up construction again next year, continuing progress of the 8.5 miles of track running down Manhattan’s east side from 125th street to Hanover Square, it’s not particularly likely to be completed in many of our lifetimes.
In fact, it’s a legitimate question to ask whether New York will ever build a new subway line again.
“Ever?” Plotch asks. “As one of the MTA chairs said back in the 1970s, ‘Ever is a long time.’ ”
Plotch is a former MTA employee who worked on the Second Avenue line and is now an academic at Saint Peter’s University. In his new book, “Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City” (Cornell University Press), he traces the history of the Second Avenue subway, detailing the endless starts and stops the line has faced over the decades.
The first phase opened in 2017, but it had been on the planning board for nearly 100 years before that. Getting what we got took herculean feats of engineering and urban planning, including building stations nearly twice as deep as existing ones and shoring up aging edifices along Second Avenue.
Doing it again might take an act of God.
“To expand the subway system, all the stars have to align,” Plotch says. “You have to have popular support and a political champion. You have to have the ridership to back it, the city has to be in the right economic condition. Clearly now, this is not anybody’s priority.”
Previous generations were able to live without functioning streets and utilities. Now, if people lose heat or cable TV for an hour, they’re up in arms.
- Phil Plotch, on why today’s New Yorkers are less tolerant of the disruption caused by subway construction
One of the biggest hurdles is, of course, money.
The Second Avenue Subway, which was originally meant to include 16 stations, so far only includes three — 72nd, 86th and 96th streets. But that 1.5-mile “stubway” alone cost $4.6 billion (from an original budget for the entire project of $335 million in the mid-twentieth century), making it by far the most expensive train track in world history.
Even accounting for inflation, the cost per station was 25 times higher than back in 1904, when the system was built.
One reason is the care with which construction is undertaken now.
“People now are sensitive to noise and air quality and dust, that makes things a lot more expensive,” the author says.
“In the old days, you just opened up the street. [Workers] died. You didn’t worry about elevator access or fire safety or having really wide platforms for people with wheelchairs. Each regulation serves a good purpose, but when you pile on top of one another, it makes it impossible to build anything.”
The MTA also took pains to disrupt life on the Upper East Side as little as possible, which included keeping sidewalks and streets open during construction. (Plotch likens the process to renovating your apartment while there’s an engagement party going on.)
An estimated hundreds of millions could have been saved in labor costs — traffic wardens to control the flow of cars, for example — if the streets had simply been closed.
“While previous generations were able to live without functioning streets and utilities,” the author writes, “now, if people lose heat or cable TV for an hour, they are up in arms.”
Moving and digging through the tangle of wires, pipes and utility lines that now lie beneath Manhattan’s streets was another challenge that the builders of the original subway lines did not encounter. The city does not maintain accurate utility maps, so today’s Second Avenue Subway workers had no idea what they’d find when they opened a street.
Union rules also added to the expense. Regulations required, for instance, that the tunnel-boring machine be manned by 25 people, even though just nine were required to run a similar machine in Spain.
And as the MTA raced to make Gov. Cuomo’s arbitrary Jan. 1, 2017, deadline for completion, overtime costs piled up.
At one point, as many as 500 electricians were working simultaneously, each pulling down $54 an hour plus $52 an hour in benefits — $106 an hour in overtime with $70 in benefits. By the end of 2016, many of the workers were earning the equivalent of three weeks’ salary in just one week, according to the book.
The builders also had to deal with more stringent regulations than generations past. For example, analysis had to be done to determine if construction would uncover any Native American burial sites or whether storing the line’s trains at the Coney Island depot would harm any nearby plant or animal life.
Meanwhile, the soaring cost of Manhattan real estate added some $215 million to the bottom line, Plotch writes.
The MTA had to acquire easements through the basements of buildings and then move any mechanical and electrical equipment that might be in the way. One building on East 87th Street got $19 million to relocate its electrical, plumbing and fire-protection equipment, for example.
And things aren’t getting better when it comes to affording future phases. Plotch estimates that the coronavirus pandemic has set the MTA’s budget back “years,” as fewer people take mass transit or pay tolls on tunnels and bridges.
Several expensive mega-projects will also compete for whatever funds the city and state do have left, including a rehabilitation of Port Authority, leaving the prospect of new subway lines even more remote.
“Sometimes people will say that we’re going to get this big injection of federal money,” Plotch says.
“It’s just wishful thinking. The Second Avenue Subway will never be a high priority for the US government.”