Brooklyn elected officials are pleased that MTA leadership agreed to restore the project that would link the Jay St. and Lawrence St. stations under downtown Brooklyn to the agency’s draft 2005-2009 capital program. The project, which Brooklyn has awaited for years, was bumped from the construction plan’s first draft.

The victory may be very temporary, however. Fully funding the MTA’s proposal will require about $3 billion per year in new funding. Champions of specific projects will need to be fully engaged for much of the next year to see that they are not cut if the eventual program level settled on by Governor Pataki and lawmakers are lower than the $25 billion or so the MTA program specifies (see MTR #468).

The big risk for the transit system as a whole is key political leaders holding fast to positions in favor of huge system expansion projects under a limited budget scenario. The inevitable loser in such a case would be the ongoing repair and normal replacement of infrastructure in the existing transit system. Governor Pataki has long backed the connection of the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, while Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has staked out a strong position for building the Second Avenue subway.

A cautionary tale about sticking to big transit expansion plans while beggaring other system needs developed in London during the 1990s. Because of cost overruns on the expensive Jubilee Line Extension project, direct government support for London Transport’s core infrastructure program was reduced in 1998 to about half of what it had been in 1993. The sorry state of the Underground apart from the new Jubilee Line Extension at the turn of the century is well known. Breakdowns and delays had grown steadily worse during the decade of the new line’s construction, spawning web-logs of rider horror stories with titles like “Tube Hell.” Now, in many ways, the Underground is where the NYC subway was in the early 1980s – looking at years of catching up on repair and replacement.

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