The East Side Access is a megaproject that connects the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) to Grand Central Terminal, giving commuters from Long Island the option to travel directly to East Midtown, reducing congestion at the overcrowded Penn Station. The project is the first expansion of the LIRR in over a century and it is expected that over half of Penn Station’s peak traffic will be diverted to the new 8-track terminal under Grand Central once opened.
The long-awaited and fervently wished-for project is due to open this December. Carlo Scissura, CEO of the New York Building Congress, said, it’s “a one-seat ride without having to go to Penn Station” and called it “a game-changer.”
The $11 billion project started over 15 years ago, and is described as “one of the single, biggest infrastructure projects in the United States…[it] includes a 700,000-square-foot underground terminal dubbed Grand Central Madison by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, with 17 high-rise escalators each 182 feet in length, eight new track beds, and two mezzanines sheathed in granite that sit 170 feet below the surface of Grand Central Terminal. The LIRR route will run seven miles from Queens’ Sunnyside Yards.”
In 2001, when the MTA and various other state agencies started conceptualizing the project, they believed it would cost only $3.5 billion — and be up and running by 2009. In the end, it cost three times that amount and took 13 years more.
The agency’s chief of external affairs, John McCarthy, sees it in a different light: “The MTA is close to delivering the new era of service that was reaffirmed by [MTA Chairman Janno] Lieber in 2018” and called it a “historic achievement.”
Some other costs associated with East Side Access have included the $2.6 billion Main Line Third Track project, the $450 million Jamaica Station Capacity Improvements, the $387 million Ronkonkoma Double Track project, the $120 million Ronkonkoma Yard Expansion, and $44 million for the Great Neck Pocket Track — all on the other side of the East River from Manhattan.
Clearly this was one of the biggest investments the city had ever made in transportation. But when it was finally approved, New York City was about to enter a period of remarkable employment growth. The city would add more than 900,000 jobs between 2009 and 2019 and annual ridership on the subway and the Long Island Rail Road had just peaked at record levels: nearly 1.7 billion MetroCard swipes for the subway, and more than 91 million trips on the LIRR. That rosy report came out one month before Covid hit. Now we’re still struggling through a post-pandemic recovery.
According to a report on Oct. 12, New York’s office buildings are 47 percent occupied on a typical workday. “There will be fewer face-to-face meetings and conferences, with increased usage of Zoom and other teleconference technologies,” and corporations continue to downsize, said Larry Penner, a mass transit historian and advocate who worked 31 years for the Federal Transit Administration.
In addition to the major change in the way people work post-Covid, there is the “growing perception, real or not, concerning increasing crime, shoplifting and homelessness on the rise in the city that also serves as a deterrent to attract more LIRR commuters from wanting to travel to Grand Central Madison.”
Yet, commercial real estate owners and developers, including ones who have put shovels in the ground nearby in anticipation of Grand Central Madison, remain bullish. Whatever the statistics, the MTA has been more positive about Midtown’s recovery and the project’s overall viability than most, even as COVID-19 gutted New York City office culture and the recovery has since been slower than anticipated. In May 2021, Lieber — who at that time was the MTA chief development officer — said he was confident things would be significantly normalized by the end of 2022. While we are nowhere near a recovery, the data does show progress toward the return to offices.
The question is whether this $11 billion project has come too late to be of maximum benefit to the city, but it certainly will be heaven-sent to those who continue to commute and can’t wait for the new ease and accessibility to travel from the West to the East side without leaving the train.
