MTA Plans To Pay $4B For New Subway Cars

NEW YORK, NY — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to spend nearly $4 billion to replace more than 1,600 subway cars over the next decade. MTA officials chose Kawasaki Rail Car, Inc. to potentially design and manufacture more than 1,600 cars for more than $3.6 billion, officials said Monday.

The Japanese company would get $1.4 billion to build 535 cars for the lettered subway lines under an initial contract the MTA Board's Transit Committee approved Monday. That includes 440 regular closed-end cars and 20 so-called open-gangway test cars — like those the MTA showed off in December — plus 75 new Staten Island Railway cars.

Every new car, known as the R211, will have wider doors, new lighting and color schemes, closed-circuit surveillance cameras and upgraded digital displays, according to an MTA contract memo. A sample of 10 cars would arrive by mid-2020 — the quickest timeline ever for a subway car contract, the MTA says. The open-gangway cars would be delivered by mid-2021, and every other car would arrive by mid-2023.

The contract gives the MTA the option to have Kawasaki build nearly 1,100 more cars by the end of 2027 for more than $2.2 billion. The MTA Board's Transit Committee approved the pact Monday; the full board will vote on it Wednesday.

"Kawasaki’s proposal demonstrated a thorough understanding of New York City Transit's operating environment and its needs," Steven Plochochi, the MTA's senior vice president for operations support, said at Monday's committee meeting.

The cars are needed to rejuvenate the aging New York City subway fleet as the MTA works to rescue the system from an infrastructure crisis. The new cars will be designed to go 150,000 miles between breakdowns, Plochochi said, compared with the current fleet's 126,500 miles.

The likely awarding of the contract will come nearly two years after the MTA started an international search for a company to manufacture the next generation of subway cars. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA, first expressed his desire in the summer of 2016 for an open-gangway design like those other countries use.

MTA officials picked Kawasaki over a consortium of companies that included Bombardier Transportation, the Canadian firm that botched the production of the newest R179 subway cars. The first Bombardier test cars were supposed to get rolling by October 2015 but actually arrived more than two years late — only to see three failures within two weeks, the New York Daily News reported.

The Kawasaki contract would charge $574 for each day the firm is late on a delivery deadline to deter it from falling behind, Plochochi said. Kawasaki has also agreed to double the warranties on doors, brakes and air-conditioning systems in case any of those parts break down.

Kawasaki will manufacture the cars at its factories in Yonkers and Lincoln, Nebraska. Manufacturing the first 535 cars will provide 470 American jobs worth $125 million.

(Lead image: A prototype of the R211 subway car is displayed at the Hudson Yards station in December. Photo by Noah Manskar)