Wednesday’s Headlines: Gonna Have to Pay for That Edition
Monday’s heavy rainfall was another tough summer weather experience for New York City’s infrastructure — something New Yorkers are becoming all too familiar with as the region’s climate warms.
Those photos of subways flooding with water aren’t the MTA’s fault, the authority’s Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber reminded the public on Tuesday morning — that’s on the city’s sewage system, which Gothamist reported needs $36 billion worth of investments to handle this new type of extreme weather.
“They don’t have the capacity to deal with rainfall in excess of an inch and a half, to an inch and three quarters in an hour,” Lieber explained on NY1. “We got 2.1 inches in that one-hour last night. That’s when the big back-ups happen, that comes back into the city — to the subway system, into the tunnels, and that’s when you get those crazy geyser conditions — there was one or two of them last night — where the back flow pops the manhole, and people see all this water coming out.”
“In the era of climate change, we may keep getting — looks like we’re going to keep getting — these kind of torrential rainfall events on a regular basis,” he added.
Mayor Adams made the same point at a briefing on Tuesday, according to PIX11 News.
The MTA has water management problems of its own at rail yards and bus depots and on the commuter railroads. It also has to deal with the many downstream impacts of storms like the one we saw on Monday.
To that end, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat are reintroducing their bill to set aside a new batch of $300 million in federal highway funds for mass transit agency resiliency.
An MTA spokesman warned that the money is earmarked for transit agencies and won’t help address DEP’s drainage capacity needs, but is welcome nonetheless.
“Public transportation systems already lack sufficient resilience funding, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events precipitated by climate change will disrupt and damage future public transit function,” Gillibrand said in a statement.
With reporting from Amy Sohn
In other news:
- Andrew Cuomo did the rounds with David Freedlander, Marcia Kramer, Tara Rosenblum and Errol Louis. The ex-governor, whose underfunding of the MTA led to the 2017 subway service crisis, told NY1’s Louis he would like to see the city take over the subways to make them cleaner.
- Mayor Adams: “I have a master’s degree in public administration, I have a Phd. in Cuomo.” (PIX11 News via YouTube)
- Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani brought his pitch to the city’s business community, some of whom wanted to discuss Israel. (NY Post, WSJ)
- The Second Avenue subway is coming to East Harlem, and neighbors are “bracing for change.” (Gothamist)
- New York City didn’t see any deaths from Monday’s storm, but Jersey did. (Gothamist)
- The Queens bus redesign “appears to have been well received by many borough commuters.” (amNY)
- Another summer tragedy: The young woman killed by a driver doing donuts outside Brooklyn shopping mall was her killer’s girlfriend. (Daily News)
- Two other outlets followed Streetsblog’s coverage of the latest injunction on Mayor Adams’s decision to remove three blocks of the Bedford Avenue protected bike lane. (Daily News, Gothamist)
- Race your bike to Montauk on Sept. 6. (@aerohaart via Instagram)
- And finally, “Bike lane, shithead!”:
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