MTA's virtue signalling on signal upgrades

 

THE CITY

The MTA’s multi-billion-dollar quest to speed up subway trips by replacing ancient signals is running into delays and cost increases.

The transit agency plans to spend more than $7 billion for new signals on sections of six lines as part of its 2020 to 2024 capital program. But snags with ongoing signal replacement projects in Queens and Brooklyn underscore the headaches and challenges that can accompany such ambitious and intricate projects.

“In terms of the daily experience that riders encounter, this is the biggest issue in terms of reliability,” said Ben Fried of TransitCenter, a transit research and advocacy organization.

On many lines, the traffic lights and indicators can date to the 1930s, limiting capacity on a system strained by high ridership prior to the pandemic. But with commuters steadily returning, state-of-the-art signals are key to MTA’s $51 billion five-year capital plan to upgrade the transit system.

“The benefits are great,” Robert Gomez, the MTA’s chief signals engineer, told the agency’s board Monday. “They provide for better service, faster running times, more capacity, shorter [waits] and bring the system to a state of good repair.”

The only two lines in the subway system equipped with modern so-called communications-based train control (CBTC) signals — the L and the No. 7 — produced some of the highest weekday on-time performance in October, MTA figures show, at 93% and 91%, respectively. That’s above a systemwide average of 83% last month.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates for “substantial completion” of launching a similar signal system along stretches of the E, F, M and R lines that run beneath Queens Boulevard and the elevated F and G lines in Brooklyn have been pushed back, MTA officials said this week.

The $663 million Queens Boulevard CBTC project, which was supposed to be in service this past March, is now scheduled to be operational by the end of the year, according to MTA documents — with its budget increasing to $729 million.

“It does happen far too often,” Andrew Albert, an MTA board member, said of the delays. “There will be some growing pains as different signal systems are phased in and phased out.”

And the project along Brooklyn’s elevated F line — aka the Culver Line — to modernize signals along nearly five miles of track between Church Avenue and West 8th Street, is experiencing COVID-driven delays that have pushed the substantial completion date from August 2022 to June 2023, MTA documents show.

 

$20B transit signal upgrade is needed

From Metro:

In the coming days it has been reported that New York City Transit Chief Andy Byford will unveil a new project to revamp the subway’s outdated signal system.

The subway signal system project could cost up to $20 billion to revamp as it is has not seen updates since the 1930s. Byford plans to install the signal system at all 472 stations.

The decision to update the system comes after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency last year after a slew of delays and train derailments that caused injuries to dozens of commuters.

The MTA did this to themselves

From the Village Voice:

In the summer of 2014, New York City Transit intern Philip Betheil was finishing up his master’s in urban planning at Columbia University when his boss, David Greenberger, gave him a project. The two worked for NYCT’s operations planning division, and Greenberger tasked Betheil with looking into an arcane bit of subway minutiae called signal modifications and what effect they had on train service. They worked on the report on and off over that summer, tossing more than a dozen drafts back and forth.

In August of 2014, after Betheil’s internship had ended, the draft report languished in the organization’s digital innards. (Betheil declined to comment on the record for this article. Greenberger did not respond to a request for comment.)

But now, more than three years later, the report, which was obtained by the Village Voice along with other internal documents, provides a radically different explanation for the subway’s declining performance than the one that MTA leadership has given the public. The root cause of the subway system’s decay, it turns out, isn’t budget cuts or overcrowding — rather, the collapse of the subway system appears to have been primarily self-inflicted by the authority itself, in response to a single accident two decades ago that set the transit system on a path to disaster.

Moreover, these internal documents suggest that much of what the MTA is doing to fix the subways, including the authority’s $836 million Subway Action Plan, is not addressing the bulk of the delays that are plaguing the city’s transit system. And only now has the subway’s leadership, since the recent hiring of New York City Transit president Andy Byford, begun to seriously consider its own role.

“It’s not that complicated,” a source with direct knowledge of the situation who asked not to be identified told the Village Voice. “The trains are slower because they slowed the trains down.”