While New York’s transit agency seeks more money, the lobby of major corporations is demanding that public transit workers and riders pay

Last month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which operates New York City’s bus and subway systems, two commuter trains, and nine bridges and tunnels, released its 2025-2029 capital plan, half of which is unfunded.

The capital plan is the latest in a series of 30-year plans to preserve and modernize the more than 100-year-old mass transit system, currently worth about $1.5 trillion. The MTA is critical to the economic viability of not only the City and State of New York, but also the tri-state region including New Jersey and Connecticut, and plays a central role in the infrastructure of the largest metropolitan area in the United States.

The plan includes, among other things, the purchase of 2,000 new railcars to replace outdated wagons, the installation of modern signals, the modernization of workshops, shipyards and substations, the disabled accessibility of more subway stations, the installation of new infrastructure to protect against rainwater and the purchase of 500 wagons of zero-emission buses.

However, all of these necessary projects come with a hefty price tag of $68.4 billion, of which $33.4 billion, or almost half, is currently unfunded or undetermined.

The agency estimates that two sources of revenue are the federal government, which the MTA hopes will provide $14 billion, or 20 percent of the funding, and the New York state and city governments, which will provide $8 billion, or 20 percent will provide 12 percent of their needs.

The MTA has concluded it needs to issue $13 billion in new bonds to cover 19 percent of what it needs to finance 51 percent of the plan. But the agency already has about $48 billion in long-term bond debt, resulting from decades of underfunded capital plans.

This has forced the agency to take about 15 percent of the money from the operating budget, which is now used to pay workers and some services such as paratransit. The authority claims these funds will allow it to manage the new debt as it has cash to pay 15 percent of the debt service. It is recognized that further absorption from the operating budget is not practical.

The MTA board voted in favor of the plan on September 25. The plan has now been forwarded to the Capital Program Review Board. It will then be presented to the New York State legislature, which will then decide whether and how to adopt the plan and how much money is available to pay for it.

New York’s big business lobbying group, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), also released a report on the MTA’s capital plan last month that takes a different view of how much more debt the agency can take on.

It is important to understand that the CBC’s proposals come from the ruling class itself. Its chairwoman is Marissa Shorenstein, a scion of a well-connected and wealthy Democratic Party family. She was the leader of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s transition team when she took office following Andrew Cuomo’s resignation in 2021. Hochul appointed her state gaming commissioner even though, or rather because, her father was a major lobbyist for the gaming industry. She was Cuomo’s communications director in the 2010 election and served as an executive at AT&T.