NEW YORK CITY-Members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board are in for a bad start to their week on Monday, when the organization's officials are scheduled to present a new timeline—and budget—for the East Side Access project, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Initially expected to cost $8.3 billion and be completed in 2019, the project could now cost more than $10 billion and take until 2021 to complete. Whenever it's finished, the project will create a new below-ground train station linking the Long Island Railroad's main line tracks in Queens to a subway tunnel at East 63rd street, and then to a new station just north of Grand Central station.
The project would eventually allow the LIRR to send trains from its main line tracks in Queens through the unused lower level of a subway tunnel into Manhattan at East 63rd Street. From there, trains would proceed through newly bored tunnels to a new subterranean station in a pair of caverns carved out of the bedrock more than 100 feet beneath Park Avenue, north of the Grand Central Terminal building.
MTA officials and the project's backers say the project could shave as many as 40 minutes off the daily round-trip commute for 80,000 LIRR riders who now take the train from Long Island to Penn Station, then commute back to the East Side of Manhattan.
The East Side access plan has been derailed numerous times already by delays and cost overruns, the Journal noted. In 2006, when a federal grant agreement was completed, the MTA said it could run LIRR trains into the station by December 2013. The date slipped to 2016 by 2010, when Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff wrote to a US senator that progress had been "grim."
The latest estimate stems from the MTA rejecting a bid in November 2012 from a contractor slated to build large swaths of the project, according to the Journal. The bids came in approximately $365 million over budget. But rather than reject the bid, the MTA broke the contract into smaller portions, some of which are still up for bid.
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Rayna Katz
Rayna Katz is a seasoned business journalist whose extensive experience includes coverage of the lodging sector, travel and the culinary space. She was most recently content director for a business-to-business publisher, overseeing four publications. While at Meeting News, a travel trade publication, she received a Best Reporting award for a story on meeting cancellations in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
