The start of congestion pricing has the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hitting the gas on the long-anticipated expansion of the Second Avenue subway Q line to Harlem.
The agency plans to award a $100 million, four-year contract to design, engineer and build new tunnels and the shell of the new 125th Street station, one of three planned new stops for the subway extension, by the summer. The MTA has issued a request for proposals that are due in March.
The latest phase of the Second Avenue project is expected to cost a total of $7.7 billion, including a $3.4 billion grant that the MTA must match with $4.3 billion in local funds to access. The MTA’s main revenue stream for the matching funds was in doubt up until the launch of congestion pricing last week.
The new contract covers a lot: The work includes the rehabilitation of an existing, unused Second Avenue subway tunnel built in the 1970s that runs from roughly 115th Street up to 120th Street, the use of massive boring machines to dig out two tunnels — one for uptown and one for downtown service — between 120th Street and Second Avenue to west of Malcolm X Boulevard and 125th Street, and the creation of a cavern that will house the new 125th Street station.
The MTA has already pre-qualified two teams of contractors who will compete for the new contract: A joint venture by Nanuet, New York-based construction firm Halmar International and the Miami-headquarter Civil & Building North America; and a second joint-venture led by infrastructure juggernaut Skanska USA, which is located in Midtown, with the Chicago-based Walsh Construction Co. and the Evansville, Indiana-headquartered Traylor Bros., Inc.
Transit officials say they expect to award the contract by the third quarter of this year.
Early last year, transit officials awarded an initial contract for a project to relocate utility lines that run under and along Second Avenue and neighboring streets. Queens-based C.A.C. Industries secured the $182 million agreement, which was briefly paused last summer while congestion pricing was on hold until Hochul kicked in $54 million in state funds to keep the utility work going.
The first three stations of the Second Avenue subway line opened in 2017 at a cost of $4.5 billion, nearly 90 years after the subway extension was first proposed.
In hopes of avoiding more delays and the cost overruns it encountered in the earlier phase, the MTA says it is doing some things differently. That includes acquiring street-level properties and advancing utility relocation work earlier on in the process, retrofitting previously built tunnels, reducing station sizes and streamlining the number of contracts.
Transit officials say these strategies have the potential to shave more than $1 billion off the second phase.
