Is New York transit ready for Amazon?
Andy Byford must prepare city’s already crowded system for onslaught of 25,000 workers
When Andy Byford, the New York City subway leader, met with Amazon executives during the summer, Byford boasted that Long Island City in Queens was a transit wonderland ready to serve their army of workers. The reality is far less rosy. Long Island City does have half a dozen subway lines, the Long Island Rail Road, buses and ferry boats. But the picture Byford painted glosses over the enormous challenges facing the city’s transportation network, which regularly struggles to get millions of New Yorkers where they are going.
The subway is still maddeningly unreliable more than a year after it was declared to be in a state of emergency. Last week, a relatively modest snowstorm paralyzed traffic across the region.
That same day, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway and buses, announced it was facing a budget crisis and might have to drastically raise fares or cut service. Still, Byford, former head of Toronto’s transit corporation, was optimistic about the system’s ability to handle a potential influx of 25,000 workers in Long Island City, the site Amazon picked for one of two new locations, along with a Washington, D.C., suburb in Virginia.
“This is obviously part of the reason — a large reason I would suggest — why Amazon was attracted to Long Island City,” Byford told reporters Thursday after an MTA board meeting. “It already has a rich transport-transit offer.”
But Jimmy Van Bramer, the city councilman who represents the neighbourhood, said one of the main subway lines serving the area, the No. 7, was already crowded and miserable and that Amazon’s arrival would only worsen the problem. “If you can’t get on those trains or if those trains aren’t reliable, then it is not transportation rich,” he said. “The everyday experience of riders today is one where you literally have to fight your way onto these trains and that’s if they come.” Van Bramer, who opposes the nearly $2 billion (U.S.) in incentives Amazon was promised from the state, said he had taken the No. 7 train to City Hall station on Monday morning and urged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio — two boosters of the Amazon deal — to do the same.
“It was packed when I got on in Sunnyside,” Van Bramer said. “It stopped and was delayed several times into City Hall this morning. That’s every day.”
During his meeting with Amazon, Byford said he had trumpeted his broader vision for the subway: A sweeping modernization plan, known as Fast Forward, that could cost $40 billion over 10 years. But his proposal has not been funded.
And now the MTA says it needs additional funding to avoid huge fare increases or severe service cuts.
Transit advocates have called on Cuomo, a Democrat who controls the subway, to approve a transit funding plan in Albany next year, including a proposal known as congestion pricing that would toll drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan.
“If Albany doesn’t approve congestion pricing this year and fund Fast Forward, all of the things Andy Byford is promising Amazon are all of a sudden a lot more precarious,” said Nick Sifuentes, executive director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy group.
The No. 7 line is currently being upgraded with a new signal system that should allow the agency to run two additional trains each hour. But an extra two trains would only carry about 2,500 additional passengers each hour — a small portion of Amazon’s eventual workforce, Sifuentes noted.
Amazon’s decision has also brought renewed attention to a proposal by de Blasio to build a streetcar along the water- front in Brooklyn and Queens, formally known as the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, or BQX. But the plan has stalled over questions about how to pay for it.
In announcing the Amazon deal, de Blasio said it reinforced the need for a streetcar in the area where, he said, the “gravity economically in New York City is shifting to the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront.” Some transit advocates were disappointed the state did not require Amazon to pay for transit upgrades as part of the deal.
In 2015, a developer won approval to build a skyscraper near Grand Central Terminal in exchange f or $220 million in transit upgrades near the site.