(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Devlin Barrett on December 19.)
WASHINGTON — Federal officials yesterday pledged $2.6 billion to bring the Long Island Rail Road to Manhattan’s East Side, a project touted as the largest single investment in U.S. public transportation, and one that will shave 40 minutes off many commutes.
When it is completed in 2013, the East Side Access project will allow commuters to disembark underneath the historic Grand Central Terminal, which already receives Metro-North trains from the city’s northern suburbs.
“That’s not like doing an addition on a house, OK? This is a big project,” Federal Transit Administrator James Simpson said at a news conference in New York, where U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and Gov. George Pataki signed papers cementing the deal.
Pataki called the agreement “a monumental step forward” in the project, which has a total estimated cost of $6.3 billion.
Currently, LIRR riders headed for the East Side must travel to Penn Station on the Manhattan’s West Side and then cut back. When it is complete, the new access terminal is expected to serve about 179,000 commuters a day. Officials said LIRR ridership has grown nearly 20 percent over the past 10 years, far outpacing projections.
Peters also signaled the Bush administration was preparing to give New York another $693 million in the upcoming federal budget for the long-delayed Second Avenue Subway, but that money still has to clear some legislative and bureaucratic hurdles.
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority hopes to eventually see $1.3 billion from Washington toward the first, $3.8 billion phase of that subway project.
If completed, the Second Avenue Subway would eventually extend 8.5 miles from 125th Street and Lexington Avenue to Hanover Square in lower Manhattan at an estimated total cost of $16.8 billion.
Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access are just two of many multibillion dollar transportation projects that New York officials are promoting.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the state’s congressional delegation have made infrastructure improvements a major goal.
“If New York doesn’t grow, it dies,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said yesterday. “People are flocking from all over the world to New York and we need more transit.”
Joseph Sussman, a civil engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared New York’s ambitious transportation agenda to Boston’s “Big Dig,” saying both required a great deal of money and patience.
“The Big Dig was worked on over the course of three decades before it actually came to fruition. There may be some reason for cynicism, but one has to keep the planning process ongoing if one is going to have some hope for projects to develop,” said Sussman.
New York, Sussman said, “is a city that’s made an extraordinary commitment to public transportation — it simply would not exist without it, and continuing to invest in it is of fundamental importance to the future of the city.”