Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s bid to play subway white knight is turning into one L of a mess.
More than a month after Cuomo announced a proposal to prevent a 15-month shutdown of the L subway line, no start date has been announced for the work and it’s unclear what alternatives will be implemented.
“We have to prepare and I don’t know when it will start at this point,” said Andrew Albert, an MTA board member who heads the New York City Transit Riders Council. “And we are supposed to get an independent consultant, but that doesn’t appear to be moving.”
Cuomo said in early January that instead of halting service on L trains between Williamsburg and the East Village, he had devised a scheme in which the work could be done with the trains continuing to run on a slowed-down schedule.
But the MTA still has to complete months’ worth of other construction on the line before the slowdown can start and the agency hasn’t started the process of hiring independent consultants to vet the plan as the board had demanded, Albert said.
East Village residents and politicians are fed up waiting for information.
“One month after Governor Cuomo announced plans for the L train, we still have too many questions that have not been answered,” said Erwin Figueroa, senior organizer for Transportation Alternatives.
City Council member Keith Powers said, “Even before we were going to shut down the L train, we needed more options to get people around 14th Street.”
The MTA and city Department of Transportation had already devised a host of other commuting options to help riders get around the original plan to shut the L-line tunnel under the East River for 15 months in order to fix major storm damage.
The alternatives included making 14th Street bus-only, creating an HOV lane on the Williamsburg Bridge, and building new bike lanes. But now that Cuomo has nixed the shutdown, those plans are on hold.
Leaked MTA memos indicate that even without a shutdown, there will be serious pain for riders, with massive service cuts, longer waits for trains and some stations made exit-only.
“We are presently meeting with local elected officials to provide updates, and working collaboratively with our partners in city government to develop a robust plan to share with the public soon,” said MTA spokesman Maxwell Young.