NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed on Monday will deliver billions in funding for the city’s mass transit and roadways.
Roughly $10 billion will go to the MTA toward major capital projects for its subways, buses and commuter rails, the agency estimates.
On top of that, outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday said another $2 billion will go toward bridge and tunnel work; $685 million for the region’s airports; $175 million for electric vehicle charging infrastructure and another $50 million for bike lanes and other safe street projects under Vision Zero.
“These are huge, huge investments. Any one alone would be a big deal, but they're all happening at once because of this bill,” de Blasio said during his daily news conference.
“What does it mean? It means more bike lanes. It means more green spaces, more resilient infrastructure, a fight against climate change,” the mayor added. “All of this combined in one piece of legislation.”
Regionally, another $30 billion in funding has been set aside for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor to improve travel times and capacity. That portion also includes funding for a badly needed replacement tunnel under the Hudson River.
Before the pandemic, the 110-year-old, two-track Gateway tunnel served 200,000 daily passengers via Amtrak and New Jersey Transit and was badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy.
Leaders at the MTA have said the money will help fund the next planned extension of the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan as well as wheelchair accessibility improvements around the subway system, where most stations still fail to meet ADA requirements.
“[The bill] is going to put approximately another $10 billion in the MTA’s capital budget so that we can do all that good stuff like buying new cars, buying zero-emissions buses, retrofitting stations so they’re ADA-compliant with elevators,” MTA acting chairman and CEO Janno Lieber told 1010 WINS Monday. “Good stuff.”
It's not yet clear how the city and state will spend road funding. Some experts and advocates have called on officials to use the funds to scale down or cap over highways like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the Cross Bronx Expressway, in an attempt to reckon with harmful slum clearance policies through which highways were built in the middle 20th century.
“The biggest chunk of cash coming to the New York region is for highways and there’s a lot of flexibility on how that could be spent,” Kate Slevin, of the Regional Plan Association, told amNewYork. “It’s largely going to be up to the states to figure out how to spend that money.”
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