The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a $6 billion to-do list to adapt the region’s transit to climate change — now it must get state lawmakers and federal officials to agree to fund it.
Transit officials unveiled a Climate Resilience Roadmap Thursday aimed at addressing the increasingly dire threat extreme storms, sea-level rise, heat waves and other weather hazards pose to New York transit. Since Superstorm Sandy walloped the region in 2012, the MTA says it has invested $7.6 billion in repairs and flood protections, but transit officials project that over the next decade at least $6 billion-worth of resilience projects will be needed to comprehensively safeguard the transit networks commuters rely on.
“This is something we have got to do now,” said Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chair and chief executive, during a Thursday news conference alongside rail tracks in the Bronx. “As I always say, for New Yorkers, transit is like air and water, we need it to survive and it will not survive unless we plan to protect the system from climate change.”
The 131-page report is the first by the MTA’s new climate planning division since it formed last year and prioritizes an estimated investment of as much as $2.5 billion into the subway system. Transit officials say those dollars would go toward shielding subway stations from stormwater, protecting trainyards from downpours and preventing open subway infrastructure from being flooded, including the 272 miles of track that run on or above ground.
Cash to fund much of the work outlined in the climate roadmap is expected to come from the bundle of infrastructure upgrades that is the MTA’s upcoming 2025-2029 five-year capital plan, which is anticipated to be released in the fall and is financed through a mix of state, federal and other sources.
In the meantime, the MTA is in the midst of carrying out its $54.8 billion-2020-2024 five-year capital program — work for which transit officials have been forced to stall because of lawsuits that threaten the expected June launch of congestion pricing. Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA construction and development, said the authority is also working to create resilience design guidelines to ensure new projects are built with the climate crisis in mind.
“It’s much more practical to make something more resilient when we’re first building it or rehabilitating it then going back and doing a whole retrofit project,” said Springer. “So we’re integrating resilience into everything that we do.”
Ask a subway rider and chances are they’ll tell you they’ve already felt the effects of a changing climate on their commutes. Flood waters from heavy rains routinely inundate the subway; since 2007 at least 200 subway stations out of 472 have been impacted by torrential rain events, according to the MTA. That translates to treacherous conditions including underground waterfalls, flooded tracks, and overloaded storm sewers backing up into stations.
Even on sunny, dry days the MTA pumps out roughly 10 million gallons of groundwater from the subway each day. This occurs at infrastructure called deep wells located along lines, such as the G, where the water table is above the subway’s tracks and requires constant pumping to keep groundwater out of the system.
Those systems, along with the 254 pumping stations peppered throughout the subway, become overtaxed during major floods and backup into stations, stalling service. Without broader upgrades, transit officials say sea-level rise and increasingly frequent major storms only promise to direct more of the MTA’s resources and manpower into bailing out water over ensuring the system can withstand the long-term effects of climate change.
Caroline Spivack , 2024-04-26 00:44:50
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