Back in March, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the region’s airports among other things, finally killed the absurdly expensive and wasteful $2 billion plan to build an AirTrain to LaGuardia. And last week, PANYNJ’s board approved an alternative to soup up bus service from nearby subway stops, which has long been a preferred alternative from local transit experts given the relatively low cost and time needed to implement what would be a significant improvement in getting to the recently-remodeled and now actually good airport.
But, as so often happens with transportation plans in any U.S. city, the good news immediately came with head-scratching. The Port Authority projects the entire project will take five years and $500 million to build. While this is certainly cheaper than the nixed AirTrain, it is bafflingly expensive for a bus upgrade project. To put this in perspective, other cities—not in the U.S. of course—can build entire new subway lines underground for a lower per-mile cost. And Paris just built an approximately six-mile tram line for less than the Port Authority plans to spend on the Laguardia bus routes. How is it possible to spend this much money on a bus project?
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There are actually two separate bus projects. One is an upgrade of the existing Q70 bus service from the Jackson Heights and Woodside subway stops to LaGuardia. The second is a new shuttle service to the Astoria-Ditmars subway station which serves different lines.
According to the engineering plan published back in March, the Q70 upgrade will involve new bus stops at LaGuardia—but these are “at grade” meaning not requiring substantial building—upgrades to traffic signals to prioritize buses, a new access loop at Terminal C, repurposing the shoulder of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway for one mile along with “minor widening” and a retaining wall to add a bus lane, and minor upgrades to the existing bus stops at the subway stations. For all of this work, the plan estimates, with a margin of error of 10 percent cheaper or 30 percent more expensive, it will cost $100 million.
“$100 million seems pretty high,” said Marco Chitti, a Fellow in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute and member of the Transit Costs Project. Chitti said it’s especially high considering the Q70 project doesn’t include any significant engineering projects or buying new buses. He said French cities often build rapid bus projects including separate bus-only center lanes with extensive street redesigns along the majority of the route plus new buses for that much or less.
The second project, the Astoria shuttle, is slated to cost even more: a whopping $340 million. (If you’re doing some quick math, you might notice $340 million plus $100 million equals $440 million, not the $500 million mentioned in the press release. The other $60 million appears to be going to various design, engineering, and consultant contracts.) Initial projections by the engineering report suggest this will require an all-new bus depot, up to 17 new electric buses, ADA upgrades and a new bus stop at the Astoria-Ditmars subway station, and a new roadway through Con Edison property. Chitti said this one is harder to judge because e-bus orders fluctuate in price given the early stage of technological development and the cost of the bus depot can vary depending on whether it’s basically a shed or an expanded maintenance facility. Plus, according to Chitti, acquiring land or an easement from Con Ed can be costly because “in our experience we’ve seen that [utilities] tend to extort compensation far above the market value.” And while other countries like Italy can retrofit old subway stations to be ADA compliant (or the Italian law equivalent) for about one to two million Euros, the MTA usually spends $20 million or more per station.
The engineering report makes clear that these are just initial projections based on about one percent of the necessary design and engineering work needed to do the project. As Chitti put it, this makes them little more than guesstimates. Unfortunately, the engineering plan doesn’t break down the cost estimates in any more detail than the top-line figure for each project. In other words, the Port Authority doesn’t say how much they expect each element of the project to cost, making it difficult to judge exactly how they arrived at these numbers. Port Authority spokesperson Thomas Topousis told Motherboard that these projects are only now going to a full design and engineering plan, “so anything we have will only be projections until the projects are fully developed.”
Chitti says these high costs are hardly a surprise given the region’s recent history building transit projects. “As a conclusion: too early to judge in detail but it seems costs are pretty high as is typical in NYC and more broadly in the US, as most of the issues we have pointed out in our research are still there,” Chitti wrote via email. “No reason to expect a different outcome with the same institutional framework, procurement practices, reliance on consultants, lack of competition, rigid labor rules etc. that produced the most expensive subway in the world.”
