Cuomo's Transit Project Lunacy

Gov. Cuomo took the stage in a Midtown hotel ballroom at a recent breakfast to tell the pinstriped folks what makes New York so successful. “The transportation system is the circulation system that makes it all work,” he intoned.

Yup, as New Yorkers noticed when the governor closed the subways. But what (besides warm weather) makes the transportation system work?

Money.

Cuomo still has a weak grasp of that concept.

In the speech, Cuomo announced a brand-new project: an air train to La Guardia Airport from the No. 7 train in Queens.

“We will have a new train service that will get to LaGuardia,” he said. “You can't get to LaGuardia by train. That's unacceptable. We're going to change that over the next several years.”

Great — but …

Imagine you're in the middle of gutting and rebuilding a 100-year-old house so it doesn't fall down, while also adding two new floors and a sub-basement rec room.

Oh, and your contractors (who must work around your ever-present tenants, who hold standing-room-only house parties nearly every night) have told you your projects are going to cost way more than you budgeted. They'll take a few extra years, too, and so you've already run out of money and time.

And that's when you decide to building an Olympic-sized rooftop swimming pool too — at the same time.

The house is our subway and railroad system, which needs billions in spending just to keep on running, plus billions more in basic 21st-century upgrades, and is in the middle of billions more in expansion projects.

The MTA is late on nearly all these projects, and billions short of the funds to do it.

Cuomo's air train is the pool — which he has implied the MTA would build. At that breakfast, he publicly asked the MTA chief when it might be finished.

Yet the MTA already has $32 billion worth of massive investment projects to through over the next five years, and it's $15 billion shy of the current estimate of the costs.

Money from the coming fare hike is already spoken for — as is the cash from next year's already-scheduled fare hike.

Why is the MTA so short of funds for its current projects? Partly because it's borrowed so much — $34.1 billion over 30 years — for past projects.

And partly because Cuomo, heading into last year's election, forced the MTA to give away hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenues to its politically potent unions.

And it's not like the governor can easily just cut back on existing plans to pay for his air train. Of the MTA's $34 billion in big-project spending, about $22.2 billion is just replacing and repairing existing stuff. If you don't, the house will fall down.

Another $4.3 billion is for small improvements — better signal technology, for example, to space trains more closely together.

Yet Cuomo needs that for his air train, because without better signals, No. 7 trains would get too crowded with airport passengers.

The other $5.5 billion is almost all for new projects we started long ago.

The MTA needs another $2.8 billion to finish building East Side Access, bringing the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central by 2023 (or whenever). We've already spent $8.2 billion on East Side Access; that's wasted if we stop now.

And MTA chief Tom Prendergast said just last week that Cuomo's $450 million estimate for his air train is the “lower range.” The upper range? “A billion.”

There's nothing wrong with wanting to build stuff. New York exists because we built stuff.

But Cuomo's got to get serious about figuring out which projects are important and when, about cutting costs — and about finding ways to pay for it.

One bad sign: He told that breakfast crowd, “We're investing in the construction of the Tappan Zee Bridge to keep the toll down.”

That's utter nonsense: We're building a new bridge because the old one's falling apart. Tolls have to go up to build it — unless Cuomo can find $4 billion somewhere else.

And all this is only a taste of the governor's ideas on bridges, trains, subways and other infrastructure. His plans for the Port Authority don't add up, either (a column for another week).

If Cuomo doesn't straighten out the state's existing infrastructure mess before adding to it, he'll leave an even bigger mess for his successor.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post

This piece originally appeared in New York Post