Fulton's Folly?

The MTA is about ready to scrap what the agency once promised would be the Grand Central Terminal for Lower Manhattan. Because of cost overruns (go figure), the plan to build a soaring glass atrium over the Fulton Street station has been reduced in size once before, but additional cost overruns now threaten the whole project as never before.

Soaring construction costs could force the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to scrap plans for an architecturally ambitious glass-domed subway station in Lower Manhattan and lead to more than $1 billion in cost overruns for the authority’s major expansion projects, officials said Monday.

After a decision on Monday, plans are being revised for the Fulton Street Transit Center, shown in a rendering, in Manhattan.

The rising costs could slow progress on the three so-called mega-projects needed to expand the capacity of the public transportation system, including a Long Island Rail Road link to Grand Central Terminal, a westward extension of the No. 7 subway line and the first leg of the Second Avenue subway.

The news represents another setback for the subway station project, known as the Fulton Street Transit Center, which was envisioned as a central element in the recovery of Lower Manhattan after the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

“We’re just in the middle of a construction inflation crisis,” said H. Dale Hemmerdinger, the authority’s chairman. “And from our point of view as an agency that spends an awful lot of money, this is not good news.”

Elliot G. Sander, the authority’s executive director, ordered an immediate review of the budgets for the three mega-projects. The review will identify areas where costs can be cut and the projects scaled back, although he said that he hoped to keep cutbacks to areas that would not directly affect riders.

A “back of the envelope” calculation, Mr. Sander said, suggested that together the three mega-projects could see “$1 billion or more in additional costs.” The combined budgets for the three projects total $12.5 billion.

The problems were underscored Monday, during a round of authority board committee meetings, by the decision to drastically scale back plans for the Fulton Street Transit Center, a project to modernize and unravel a spaghetti bowl of interlinked subway stations in the vicinity of Broadway and Fulton Street.

Financed partly by federal funds earmarked for the post-Sept. 11 recovery of Lower Manhattan, the transit center was to be topped by an eye-grabbing glass and steel domelike structure called an oculus, which would direct natural light into the underground.

We've seen similar economic pressures on other projects, including the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, the Calatrava transit hub at Ground Zero, and the 7 Line expansion project which saw the MTA eliminate a train station in a cost-cutting move.

Increased material costs are a significant issue that doesn't get addressed, but another concern is simply that the delay between when these projects are announced and finally get underway provides still more time for costs to increase to what can be prohibitive levels.

UPDATE:
The New York Post editorial page slams the MTA for these delays and decisions, and Steve Cuozzo has been all over the MTA, calling this a boondoggle. After all, the completion date for the Fulton Street Transit Center was originally scheduled for last year. To give you some idea of just how screwed up the MTA is, their website still provides outdated costs, timelines, and the supposedly up to date information.

Commuters may get few of the improvements, and Lower Manhattan will continue to see nothing but holes in the ground for the foreseeable future. Nice.