MANHATTAN — At New York University on Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined his vision for how New York would look at the end of his third term, and touched on the 7-line extension to the far West Side.
Blogger Benjamin Kabak of Second Avenue Sagas fact-checked part of the speech.
"And Queens residents who work at the Javits Center, or elsewhere on the Far West Side, will begin riding the Number 7 Train past Times Square to 11th Avenue and down to 34th Street," Bloomberg said in his prepared remarks.
"It’s the first new subway track the city has built in more than four decade — and we’re on schedule to complete it on time and on budget in 2013."
Kabak writes that the mayor is "technically" correct to say that the 7 line is the new subway track the city built in the last 40 years. But it's not the first extension. The Archer Avenue line extension in Queens opened in 1988. In 1989, the 63rd Street tunnel opened, he wrote, connecting Queens to the East Side. The Sixth Avenue line wasn't connected to that tunnel until 2001.
Next, he cites a Citizens Budget Commission report released last week on MTA capital construction projects that contradicts the mayor's claim that the project is on time, but bolsters his statement on its costs.
"[T]he planned completion date for the entire project has been postponed from June 2013 to November 2014," the report read.
The project was originally supposed to open up the desolate Far West Side to redevelopment. This was back when a major overhaul of the Jacob K. Javits Center was in the works, as well as development of the space above the MTA's Hudson Yards. Now, with much of those projects stalled or scaled back, it isn't clear what riders on the extension will be going to.
There was also a plan for a station at Tenth Avenue and 41st Street, but, as the CBC also noted, it was dropped, and a required ventilation tower for the tunnel had to be redesigned.
"As a result, the design budget nearly doubled from $55 million to $107 million," the CBC wrote. "However, the overall project cost remains unchanged."
But costs had gone up 6 percent, from nearly $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion, since the project's inception back in 2005, the report said, even as "the scope of the project has been reduced" through, for example, the elimination of the Tenth Avenue station.
"The 7 line extension is not the only new subway in four decades; it isn’t on time; and it isn’t as originally promised," Kabak wrote.
"It’s arguably a bad use of money, and it will result in a subway line with few passengers that won’t alleviate overcrowding at a time when trains stuffed to the gills dominate the system."
