A few hours ago, the MTA presented on the latest of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. The presentation includes information about the engineering and construction of the three stations – 106th, 116th, and 125th Streets. The new designs are not good, and the design of 116th in particular betrays severe incompetence about how modern subway stations are built: the station is fairly shallow, but has a mezzanine under the tracks, with all access to or from the station requiring elevator-only access to the mezzanine.

What was in the presentation?

Here is a selection of slides, describing station construction. 106th Street is to be built cut-and-cover; 116th is to use preexisting construction but avoid cut-and-cover to reach them from the top and instead mine access from the bottom; 125th is to be built deep-level, with 125′ deep (38 m) platforms, underneath its namesake street between Lexington and Park Avenues.

The problems with 116th Street

Elevator-only access

Elevator-only access is usually stupid. It’s especially stupid when it’s at a shallow station; as the page 19 slide above shows, the platforms are about 11.5 meters below ground, which is an easy depth for both stair and escalator access.

Now, to be clear, there are elevator-only stations built in countries with reasonable subway construction programs. Sofia on Nya Tunnelbanan is elevator-only, because it is 100 meters below street level, due to the difficult topography of Södermalm and Central Stockholm, in which Sofia, 26 meters above sea level, is right next to Riddarfjärden, 23 meters deep. Emergency access is provided via ramps to the sea-level freeway hugging the north shore of Södermalm, used to construct the mined cavern in the first place. Likewise, the Barcelona L9 construction program, by far the most expensive in Spain and yet far cheaper than in any recent English-speaking country, has elevator-only access to the deep stations, in order to avoid any construction outside a horizontal or vertical tunnel boring machine.

The depth excuse does not exist in East Harlem. 11.5 meters is not an elevator-only access depth. It’s a stair access depth with elevators for wheelchair accessibility. Stairs are planned to be provided only for emergency access, without public usage. Under NFPA 130 the stairs are going to have to have enough capacity for full trains, much more than is going to be required in ordinary service, and they’d lead passengers to the same street as the elevators, nothing like the freeway egress of Sofia.

Below-platform mezzanines

To avoid any shallow construction, the mezzanines will be built below the platforms and not above them. As a result, access to the station means going down a level and then going back up to the platform level. In effect, the station is going to behave as a rather deep station as far as passenger access time to the platforms is concerned: the planned depth is 57′, or 17.4 meters, which means that the total vertical change from street level is around 23.5 meters, twice the actual depth of the platforms.

Dig volume

Even with the reuse of existing infrastructure, the station is planned to have too much space north and south of the platforms, as seen with the locations of the ancillary buildings.

I think that this is due to designs from the 2000s, when the plan was to build all stations with extensive back-of-the-house space on both sides of the platform. Phase 1 was built this way, as we cover in our New York case, and after we yelled at the MTA about it, it eventually shrank the footprint of the stations. 116th’s station start and end are four blocks apart, a total of about 300 meters, comparable to 86th Street; the platform is 186 m wide and the station overall has no reason to be longer than 190-200. But it’s possible the locations of the ancillary buildings were fixed from before the change, in which case the incompetence is not of the current leadership but of previous leadership.

Why?

On Bluesky, I’m seeing multiple activists I think well of assume that this is because the MTA is under pressure to either cut costs or avoid adverse community impact. Neither of these explanations makes much sense in context. 106th Street is planned to be built cut-and-cover, in the same neighborhood as 116th, with the same street width, which rules out the community opposition explanation. Cut-and-cover is cheaper than alternatives, which also rules out the cost explanation.

Rather, what’s going on is that MTA leadership does not know how a modern cut-and-cover subway station looks like. American construction prefers to avoid cut-and-cover even for stations, and over time such stations have been laden with things that American transit managers think are must-haves (like those back-of-the-house spaces) and that competent transit managers know they don’t need to build. They may want to build cut-and-cover, as at 106th, but as soon as there’s a snag, they revert to form and look for alternatives. They complain about utility relocation costs, which are clearly not blocking this method at 106th, and which did not prevent Phase 1’s 96th Street from costing about 2/3 as much as 86th and 72nd per cubic meter dug.

Under pressure to cut costs and shrink the station footprint, the MTA panicked and came up with the best solution the political appointees, that is to say Janno Lieber and Jamie Torres-Springer and their staff, and the permanent staff that they deign to listen to, could do. Unfortunately for New York, their best is not good enough. They don’t know how to build good stations – there are no longer any standardized designs for this that they trust, and the people who know how to do this speak English with an accent and don’t earn enough to command the respect of people on a senior American political appointee’s salary. So they improvise under pressure, and their instincts, both at doing things themselves and at supervising consultants, are not good. To Londoners, Andy Byford is a workhorse senior civil servant, with many like him, and the same is true in other large European cities with large subway systems. But to Americans, the such a civil servant is a unicorn to the point that people came to call him Train Daddy, because this is what he’s being compared with.

BRT, or bus rapid transit, can be done in one of two ways: closed and open. Closed systems imitate rail lines, in that there is a BRT route along the entire length of the corridor; open ones instead take a trunk route, upgrade it with dedicated lanes and other BRT features, and let routes run through from it to branches that are not so equipped, perhaps because there is less traffic on the branches. I complained 14 years ago that New York City Transit was planning closed BRT in the form of SBS on Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, a good route for open BRT. Well, now the MTA is planning BRT on the disused North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railway, arguing that it is better than reactivating rail service because buses could use it as an open corridor – except that this is a poor corridor for open BRT. This leads to the question: which corridors are good for open BRT to begin with?

Trunks and branches are good

Open BRT can be analogized to a Stadtbahn system, fast in the core and slow outside it. Like a Stadtbahn, it works best where several branches can converge onto a single route, where the high traffic both requires higher capacity and justifies higher investment; just as grade separation increases the throughput of a rail line, BRT treatments increase those of a bus through greater separation from other traffic and regularity of service.

Unlike a Stadtbahn, open BRT remains a bus. This means two things:

1. The trunk route must itself be a strong surface route. It had better be a wide street with room for physically separated bus lanes, or else a city center route that could be turned into a transit mall. A Stadtbahn system puts the fast central portion underground and could do it independently of the street network, or even run under a slow narrow street like Tremont Street in Boston.
2. The connections from the trunk route to the branches must themselves be strong bus links. If the bus needs to zigzag on narrow residential streets to get between two wider arterials, then it will be unreliable and slow even if one of the wider arterials gets dedicated lanes. A Stadtbahn system can tunnel a few hundred meters here and there to ensure the onramps are adequate, but a surface bus system cannot, not without driving its cost structure to that of a subway but with few of the benefits of underground running.

The North Shore Branch could pass a modified version of criterion 1, but fails criterion 2. In general, former rail lines are bad for such BRT systems, since the street network was never set up for such connections. In contrast, street networks with a central artery and streets of intermediate importance between it and residential side streets emanating from it, which were never used for grade-separated rail lines, are more ideal for this treatment.

Grids are bad

Street grids eliminate the branch hierarchy of traditional street networks. There is still a hierarchy of more and less important grid streets – in Manhattan, the avenues and two-way streets are wider and more used for traffic than the one-way streets – but there is little branching. Bus networks can still branch if they move between streets, which happens in Manhattan, but it’s not usually a good idea: Barcelona’s Nova Xarxa uses the grid to run mostly independent bus routes, each route mostly sticking to a grid arterial, and the extent of branching on the Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx bus networks is limited to a handful of short segments like the Washington Bridge.

In situations like this, open BRT would not work. Hylan is possibly the only route in New York that has any business running open BRT. For this reason, our Brooklyn bus redesign proposal, and any work we could do for Queens, Manhattan, or the Bronx, eschews the open BRT concept. The buses are upgraded systemwide, since features like off-board fare collection and wider stop spacing are not really special BRT features but are rather normal in, for example, the urban German-speaking world. Center bus lanes are provided wherever there is need and room. There is more identification of a bus route with the street it runs on, but it isn’t really closed BRT, which is a series of treatments giving the BRT routes dedicated fleets and stations, for example with left-side doors to board from metro-style island platforms like Transmilenio.

What this means more broadly is that the open BRT is not a good fit for most of North America, with its grid routes. Occasionally, a diagonal street could act as a trunk if available, but this is uncommon. Broadway is famous for running diagonally to the Manhattan grid, but that’s not a BRT route but a subway route.

The 2025-29 capital plan is out, and it is not good. There’s an outline of an ETA report to be released soon going over issues like accessibility, rolling stock costs, and the new faregates. But for now, I’d like to just focus on a high-level issue and how it relates to the subway’s history: State of Good Repair. The capital plan has a summary history of past capital plans on PDF-page 8, and it calls the 1990s and 2000s an era of underinvestment and deferred maintenance, the exact opposite of reality. It treats 2017 as a keystone year for system renewal, which it was not; it was, however, the year current MTA chair Janno Lieber was hired as the head of MTA Construction and Development (formerly Capital Construction). In effect, the plan falsifies the history of the system in order to treat the current leadership as saviors, in service of a plan to spend more money than in 2020-24 while having less to show for it, washing it all with the nebulous promise of State of Good Repair.

The history of State of Good Repair

Traditionally, capital investment is conceived as going to expansion. In New York in the first two thirds of the 20th century, this meant new subway and elevated lines, new connections between subway lines, station upgrades to lengthen the platforms, and new transfers between stations that had previously belonged to different operators. Maintenance was treated as an ongoing expense.

The finances of the subway after WW1 were shaky, and from the Depression onward, it never made money again. Of the two private operators, one, the IRT, was in bankruptcy protection during the Depression, while the public operator, the IND, was debt-ridden due to exceptionally high construction costs for that era and overbuilding. This made it attractive to defer maintenance, on the subway as on mainline rail everywhere in the United States. In 1951, bond money was designated for Second Avenue Subway, but then the money was raided for other priorities, including smaller extensions but also capital renewal, such as replacing the almost 50-year-old IRT rolling stock fleet.

In the 1970s, the city’s poor finances meant it couldn’t subsidize operations and maintenance as much as before, and the maintenance deferral led to a systemwide collapse. NYCSubway.org goes over the various elements of it: chunks of equipment and material were falling onto the street from the elevated lines, and onto the tracks from the retaining walls of open cuts; trains had flat wheels and no lubrication, leading to such squeal that the noise was worse than that of Concorde; train doors and lights malfunctioned; derailments and fires were common. By 1981, the mean distance between failures (MDBF) dropped to its lowest ever, 6,640 miles (10,690 km). One third of the system was under emergency 10 mph speed restrictions, and a quarter of the rolling stock had to be kept in reserve to substitute for equipment failures and could not be run in maximum revenue service. The new trains bought for the system, the R44 and R46, used new technology, for example higher top speed for the use on long express sections, but were defective to the point that the lawsuits against the vendors, St. Louis and Pullman respectively, bankrupted them. The origin of the conservatism of rolling stock orders and the pattern that all American rolling stock manufacture is done at transplant factories owned by European, Japanese, or formerly Canadian firms, are both the result of this history.

The State of Good Repair program as we know it dates to the 1980s, when the MTA, starting with the leadership of Richard Ravitch, began to prioritize maintenance and renewal over expansion. This meant five-year capital programs, to reduce the incentives to defer maintenance in a single year, and a lot of openly crying poverty, where leaders both before and after Ravitch would prefer to extoll the system and downplay its shortcomings. There was large spending on capital as a result, but no Second Avenue Subway. Instead, money went to renewal. Rolling stock was more conservative; the R62 was also imported from Japan, since Reagan cut federal aid to mass transit and so the MTA was free from Buy America’s strictures (in contrast, today states prefer to preemptively obey even when they’re not sure they will get federal funding, and even demand in-state plants). Its mean distance between failures was far higher than that of all other rolling stock, and this greater reliability continued into the R62A, R68, and R68A orders; the systemwide mean distance between failures kept climbing throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, to a peak of around 180,000 miles, or around 280,000 km, in 2005 and again in 2010-11. The slow restrictions that characterized the system in the 1970s were lifted, and rolling stock availability for maximum service rose.

The construction of Second Avenue Subway beginning in 2007 was not viewed as a rebuke to the SOGR program, but rather as the legacy of its success. Leaders like Lee Sander spoke of growth and new lines, setting the stage for what is now known as IBX and was known in then as Triboro RX. The political discourse in the United States at the time was one of transit revival, due to the then-new decoupling of car driving and oil use from economic growth, and the high fuel prices; this was also around the time American discourse discovered European and Japanese high-speed rail, setting the stage for Proposition 1A approving the construction of California High-Speed Rail in 2008.

The present of State of Good Repair

I’ve repeatedly criticized SOGR as a scheme allowing agency heads to demand money with nothing to show for it. The behavior of current MTA leadership is one such example; it is not the only one – Amtrak did the same under Joe Boardman in the 2000s. But it needs to be made clear that the SOGR program of the 1980s and 90s was an unmitigated success. There was visible improvement in the system due to better maintenance of fixed plant and more prudent capital investments, such as the trainsets bought in the era from the R62 to the R160. The present problems of the SOGR concept come essentially because its success in the 1980s and 90s led agencies to talk about it as the next hot thing, even while going in a rather different direction.

In the 2010s, the subway started facing new problems – but these were not problems of undermaintenance. The MDBF crept down to a little less than 120,000 miles at the bottom, in 2017, and was 125,000 miles in 2023. The oldest trains are the worst, but much of the problem comes from other issues than slow replacement of fixed plant. For example, the ongoing slowdowns on the subway – even in the 2000s it was slower than before the 1970s collapse, and speeds are noticeably lower when I visit than when I lived in the city in 2006-11 – come not from insufficient maintenance, but from tighter flagging rules, which are designed to protect workers on adjacent track, but in fact have coincided with more worker injuries than in 1999, with a particular deterioration in worker safety in the 2010s. Andy Byford’s Save Safe Seconds campaign was the right response to the slowdowns, and helped stop the bleeding.

And yet, the idea of SOGR persists, even though the problem it purported to solve has been solved. The worst offender is Amtrak: in the Obama stimulus, it asked for $10 billion for SOGR on the Northeast Corridor, promising trivial reductions in travel times; Amtrak’s chair at the time, Joe Boardman, was the very one who deferred maintenance in order to make Amtrak look more profitable on paper in the service of the Bush administration’s goal of eventual privatization, replacing David Gunn, who was fired because he refused to do so.

In effect, SOGR is now a byword for “investments that aren’t sexy.” Some of those investments are still solid, like those done in the 1990s. Others are wastes of money; their lack of sexiness makes them ideal for managers who rate themselves by the input of how much money their agencies get rather than by outputs like ridership or service quality, since the lack of visible output disempowers civil society and good government watchdogs.

MTA Construction and Development head Jamie Torres-Springer essentially uses this definition in his defense of the capital plan, saying “We looked very closely at a couple of asset types that haven’t been focused on in the past. And to some people, they’re not the most exciting assets. They’re the ones that ensure that we can provide service. It’s structures and power and station components.”

The MTA’s capital plan is likewise denigrating the agency’s own past, saying, of the era in which MDBF rose by a factor of about nine in the span of 15 years, “Investment lagged again in the 1990s and early 2000s” and “After years of progress in the 1980s, investment fell off, culminating in a ‘Summer of Hell’ in 2017. That year, New York’s subway had one of the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit systems in the world, with only 65% of weekday trains reaching their destinations on-time.”

The problems of train delays are not about investment or about maintenance. Rather, the train delays were about overly ambitious schedules, compounding with the problems of excessive interlining. Of course, interlining had always been present in the system, but the combination of new trains with better braking and signal timers installed based on the performance of older trains meant that the schedules could not be met without slowdowns; managers, in turn, changed how they measured punctuality from on-time performance to wait assessment, the latter more appropriate for subway lines with high frequency (like New York) and little complexity (unlike New York). MTA President Ronnie Hakim, coming from a legal rather than technical background, also denigrated the idea of speed, viewing it not as an essential feature of public transit but as a source of legal liability.

Non-sexy investment can target this; Byford alleviated some of the slowdowns with Save Safe Seconds. In the future, deinterlining the system, starting from DeKalb Avenue’s scrambling of the B, D, N, and Q, where trains lose two minutes due to schedule padding entirely to protect from cascading delays, is necessary. But this is not SOGR – in fact zero dollars are required in capital spending to deinterline DeKalb. Nor is it invisible – this is a visible change on the subway map, which passengers and good government watchdogs can judge for themselves, trading off fewer one-seat rides for higher speed and reliability.

But neither Lieber nor Torres-Springer seems interested in inexpensive fixes. No: both rate themselves by how much money they get rather than by whether it does any good, hence the denigration of the era in which SOGR was a success. As political appointees, they also have no loyalty to the system and its permanent staff, or even to well-regarded leaders (Byford, again) who do not come from the same political milieu. They fail because they exist to allow incompetent governors like Cuomo and Hochul to control a system they have no business running.