NYC's Second Avenue Subway to begin with $182 million contract, and lessons learned from LIRR

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is weeks away from beginning work on a $7 billion effort to extend its Second Avenue Subway, and is looking to apply lessons from two recent Long Island Rail Road megaprojects, MTA officials said Monday.

The transit agency on Monday announced it had awarded Queens-based C.A.C. Industries Inc. a $182 million contract to begin work on phase two of the Second Avenue Subway, which will add three new train stations in East Harlem. The project will extend the line, which currently ends at 96th Street, to 125th Street, with connections to the Lexington Avenue subway line and to Metro-North.

MTA officials said the utility relocation work included in the new contract should begin by March. The remaining work, which is expected to last into the early 2030s, will be spread over three other contracts.

After nearly a century of planning, the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway was completed in 2017 at a cost of around $4.3 billion. While MTA officials have said the new subway line was a success — being used by as many as 200,000 daily riders at its peak — they also acknowledged that they would have done some things different if they had them to do over again. The first phase of project ran about four years late and about $700 million over budget.

“Phase one could have been delivered better, faster, and cheaper. We’ve learned the lessons from it,” MTA capital construction president Jamie Torres-Springer said at a media briefing in Manhattan Monday.

Torres-Springer said among the mistakes in the early days of the project was designing stations bigger than they needed to be, and not anticipating issues that delayed the project and “should have been identified in advance,” including softer-than-expected ground conditions for tunneling and necessary real estate acquisitions.

 “The organizational structure was unfocused, and it was unclear where the decision-making power lay,” Torres-Springer said. “The project wasn’t structured for success.” 

Going forward with the next phase of the Second Avenue Subway, MTA officials say they will look to emulate the successes of two recent LIRR megaprojects — the $2.4 billion Third Track in Nassau County, and the $700 million renovation of the railroad’s Penn Station concourse. Both efforts were delivered on-time and on-budget, the MTA has said.

MTA deputy chief development officer Mark Roche, who headed the Third Track effort in its early days and is now leading the Second Avenue Subway, said the MTA learned from those projects, in which a contractor handled more of the projects’ design than usual. “We got out of the way. That’s the major factor,” Roche said. “That created … so many less problems. They could solve problems themselves.”

To save time and money on the Second Avenue Subway, which is set to receive $3.5 billion in federal grant funding, MTA officials have already reduced the size of the three proposed new stations, and have opted to use a tunnel that was built in the 1970s for a future Second Avenue Subway line, but later abandoned. The MTA’s original plan called for that tunnel to be demolished.

The effort will rely heavily on funding from the MTA’s congestion pricing plan, whose future is threatened by several lawsuits — including by the State of New Jersey, the Staten Island borough president, and a New York City teachers’ union — challenging the project’s environmental review. MTA officials have said a delay in the implementation of congestion pricing, which they hope to begin this spring, could also set back some infrastructure projects.

Torres-Springer on Monday expressed confidence, saying, “We’re optimistic that we followed a good process, that the court will find in our favor, and that will allow us to keep all that work on schedule.”

By Alfonso A. Castillo

alfonso.castillo@newsday.com@alfonsoreports

Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.