Lawsuits challenging the traffic and transportation analyses for the proposed West Side stadium now rest with a NY State Supreme court judge. The suits, alleging faults in the project’s environmental impact statement (EIS), were filed in December (MTR #485) and were presented in courtroom oral arguments on Thursday. 

The lawsuit by the Tri-State Campaign and NY Public Interest Research Group argues that the stadium study underestimates the traffic and related impacts of the proposed stadium. The suit was heard alongside a similar complaint filed by Madison Square Garden and West Side residents.

Although the Madison Square Garden suit raises other environmental issues, argument in court last week focused almost exclusively on transportation. The main complaint is that if the city’s estimation of how many stadium patrons will arrive by mass transit is wrong, traffic, air pollution, noise and other impacts will be far greater than what the EIS admits. The transit share predicted by the city is 68% prior to the extension of subway service to the area, and this was largely arrived at via surveys of Jets fans. Madison Square Garden, directly atop Penn Station and adjacent to numerous subway lines, generally sees about 50% of patrons arrive by transit. The TSTC/NYPIRG suit presents a detailed critique of this method of predicting mass transit use.

MTA and city attorneys argued that once the #7 extension is built, mass transit use will be even higher (the EIS predicts 75% will use transit to go to football games after the line reaches the far West Side). Judge Herman Cahn said he had read about the MTA’s budget woes in the newspapers and questioned whether the project would ever be built. The plan is for the project to be funded with future city revenues from the anticipated West Side development. However, the scheme is risky and costly, and is still a topic of serious debate. Moreover, the MTA is currently on the hook for any cost overruns the project may experience. The way the transit capital program discussion is going in Albany, the agency would do well to avoid that responsibility.

The lawsuits also argue that the stadium/#7 plan makes over-ambitious assumptions about completion of multi-billion-dollar mass transit projects elsewhere in the city that will be required to integrate the #7 subway extension and high levels of passenger traffic to the Far West Side into the city’s mass transit network.  The MTA claimed in its reply that the Second Avenue subway first phase and LIRR connection to Grand Central would be completed by 2010, but the statement is absolutely incredible to anyone reading the papers these days.

Generally, the lawyers for the MTA and city relied on assertions of agency and consultant expertise and pointed to the scale of the huge 8-volume EIS. They said that their traffic analysis went beyond football fan surveys, but that appeared to be primarily a review of other stadiums’ mode shares. Even arenas directly served by multiple rapid rail lines see a smaller transit share than the city’s planners predict for the West Side site, which is over half a mile from Penn Station but directly adjacent to the West Side Highway.

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