Second Avenue Subway - Current Development

Current Development

With the city's economic and budgetary recovery in the 1990s, there was a revival of efforts to complete construction of the SAS. Rising ridership on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line, the only subway trunk line east of Central Park in Manhattan, demonstrated the need for the Second Avenue Line, as capacity and safety concerns rose.

The MTA's final environmental impact statement was approved in April 2004; the latest proposal is for a two-track line from 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem, down Second Avenue to Hanover Square in the Financial District. The new subway line will actually carry two services. The full-length Second Avenue line, extending from Harlem to the financial district, probably will be given the teal T as its letter designation. However, it is the other service, a proposed reroute of the Q, which will begin carrying passengers first.

The MTA proposes to build the Second Avenue Subway in four segments with connections to other subway lines. The first segment (Phase I) is a proposed reroute of the Q, BMT Broadway Line across 63rd Street and north along Second Avenue to the Upper East Side at 96th Street. The other three segments, in the order that they are proposed to be built, are a reroute of the Q train to 125th Street from 96th Street (Phase II), 63rd Street to Houston Street (Phase III, introduction of the T train), and Houston Street to Hanover Square, Manhattan (Phase IV, full length T train service).

New York voters passed a transportation bond issue in November 2005, allowing for dedicated funding allocated for Phase I; the first construction contract of the current plan finally signed, the MTA is expected to receive a funding agreement from the federal government to complete Phase I.

The subway will be built with deep bore tunneling methods, avoiding the cumbersome utility relocation and cut-and-cover methods of past generations that made subway building disruptive for traffic, pedestrians, and store owners. Stations will retain cut-and-cover construction.

Construction began with utility relocation; the MTA anticipated completing this step in eight months, but was not finished 14 months after commencement. For boring, a trench will be dug from 96th to 93rd Streets; the tunnel boring machine will be placed in the ground at 92nd Street and will bore southbound, connecting shafts at 86th and 72nd Streets, which to be sunk as starting points for subway stations. Tunneling is expected to take approximately one year. As of June 2008, substantial portions of the utility relocation work between 91 St. and 96 St. were completed.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced on December 18, 2006, they would allow the MTA to commit up to $693 million in funds to begin construction of the Second Avenue Subway Line and that the federal share of such costs would be reimbursed with FTA transit funds, subject to appropriations and final labor certification.

In late January 2007, the media reported that a $333 million contract would be awarded within weeks to three American firms to build Phase One. The actual price was $337 million; the TBM will begin at 92nd Street, not 96th Street as reported. The station site at 96th Street will see cut and cover construction.

Groundbreaking for the Second Avenue Subway construction project was on April 12, 2007, in a tunnel segment built in the 1970s at 99th Street. The MTA reported that the 1970s Second Avenue subway tunnel (which will be part of Phase I and Phase II) is in pristine condition.

In June 2008, the MTA, facing cost increases for construction materials and diesel fuel affecting the prices of contracts not yet signed, announced that certain features of the Second Avenue Subway would be simplified to save money. One set of changes, which significantly reduces the footprint of the subway in the vicinity of 72nd Street is the alteration of the 72nd Street Station from a three-track, two-platform design to a two-track, single island platform design, paired with the elimination of the third track and simplification of the planned interlocking merging the BMT Broadway Line's Second Ave extension and the planned T subway, extending south of 63rd Street along Second Avenue. Supplemental environmental impact studies covering station configuration options for the proposed 72nd Street and 86th Street stations are underway.

The MTA is investigating the feasibility of making the Second Avenue line the first line in New York City (excluding the non-MTA JFK Airtrain) to feature platform screen doors. These doors would greatly reduce track fires and accidents. However, since current trains are not designed for Automatic Train Operation (ATO), a system would need to be designed that would enable human-operated trains to align with the doors at a station stop.An additional challenge to installing platform doors anywhere in the NYC subway system is the diversity of rolling stock. Even if platform doors were to be installed based on the newest cars' configuration, it would significantly reduce flexibility of using different car types on the same line for as long as the older cars are still operational. Many of the older cars have so far only used up about a half of their forty-year useful lifetime, which means it would take several decades before all of them are replaced.