The MTA’s top boss said Monday the agency may change the designs of subway stations planned for East Harlem — after The Post revealed their excessive size, which has fueled the project’s massive cost.
A Post investigation found that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s current plans would build stations twice as long as the platforms needed to serve the Q train — part of a design decision that expert say contribute to the staggering $7 billion to $7.7 billion price tag for the Second Avenue Subway’s extension.
“We are going to use the design-build process to figure out ways in which we can adjust the design,” CEO Janno Lieber told the MTA board during a committee meeting at the agency’s headquarters in Manhattan, hours after The Post report.
“We can make it easier and faster to build,” Lieber said.
“We can’t change the labor rates in New York, we can’t change a lot of the other things that drive costs in New York,” he said. “But what we can change is using the creativity of the design and construction community to, in effect, improve upon what the [preliminary] design provides.”
Those improvements could include the overall design of the stations, which are set to be built at 106th, 116th and 125th streets, Lieber said.
Current plans call for stations that are 1,200 to 1,400 feet long, which is twice the length of the roughly 600-foot Q trains that will serve them and the needed platforms.
Experts said the flaw is a repeat of a design decision made during the construction of the first part of the Second Avenue subway through the Upper East Side that fueled the project’s record-breaking costs. The stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th streets are between 1,000 and 1,600 feet long.
As The Post reported, the MTA’s East Harlem designs stand in stark contrast to the stations built by the biggest transit systems in Europe — including those in London, Paris and Rome — where officials seek to minimize station size as much as possible to control costs and limit the disruptions of digs.
An apples-to-apples equivalent of building the Q-train’s East Harlem extension — based on what has been done in London, Paris or Rome — shows it could be done for between $2 billion and $2.3 billion, just a third of what the MTA expects to spend.
For example, officials in Paris squeezed a 410-foot platform into a 417-foot-long station cavern when they designed and built that new station directly in front of the apartment towers in the 13th District.
In London, the transit agency there fit a 400-foot platform into a 470-foot-long station cavern at the new Nine Elms station, which was built to fuel the redevelopment of a once-industrial part of the British capital.
