Want to keep track of an MTA construction project affecting your commute? There’s a map for that.
The transit agency launched the latest edition of it’s capital-project dashboard Monday, giving straphangers a view into how it’s spending taxpayers’ $68 billion over the next five years.
“This dashboard is going to be the one-stop shop for tracking the status, timeline and budget for MTA capital projects, and the procurement that put them in motion,” MTA chairman Janno Lieber told reporters.
The agency’s 2025-2029 capital program is the largest to date, with a $68 billion budget including $10.9 billion for new subway and commuter rail cars and nearly $25 billion in so-called “state of good repair” work.
“We’re going to finally fix things like the power system, the tunnel and elevated structures that have been neglected for so long, the signal system,” Lieber said. “It’s all a little hard to see for the public, and we want to make sure that everybody knows what we’re doing and that we’re making progress.”
The map, which can be found at capitaldashboard.mta.info allows New Yorkers to navigate geographically among the MTA’s various lines, stations and other infrastructure. Clicking on a station or train line will bring up the capital budget projects associated with it, including the contract number, the firm hired to do the work, the total budget, the expenditures to date, and the timeline for project completion.
Clicking on the Borough Hall station of the Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5 train in Downtown Brooklyn, for example, shows that Judlau Contracting should be four months away from completing contract No. A37145 to add three elevators to the station and overhaul its staircases, wall tiles and other structures. As of September, the project had cost $114 million of a budgeted $165 million.
Clicking on the Atlantic Ave. Substation — one of a multitude of substations expected to get an overhaul in the capital plan — shows the project is still in the planning phase, with no details available.
For now, transit officials said, the dashboard focuses on accessibility projects and other in active procurement. Over the course of the next year, more will be added on a rolling basis. The map is also expected to show more information about the funding for each project — including which from the last capital plan are beneficiaries of the money gleaned from congestion tolling, and which are reliant on federal dollars for a portion of their finds.
“It’s vital that we keep an eye on capital work,” state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli — who has called on the agency to be more transparent in its capital expenditures — said Monday. “There’s detailed information in this dashboard on how and where money is being spent and where work is being done, and it’s focused on the MTA’s customers.”
“The MTA has assured us that there’s more to come,” DiNapoli said, “but this is true progress and it should be noted.”
