[M II A II R II K]

L.I.R.R. Plan for East Side Needs More Time and Money


May 21, 2012

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/ny...y.html?_r=2&em

Creating a Long Island Rail Road link to the East Side of Manhattan will take six years longer to accomplish than originally expected and will cost nearly $2 billion more than the initial estimate, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Monday.

- The new completion date for the project is August 2019, and officials put the cost at $8.24 billion, up from an estimate of $6.3 billion in 2006. The 2006 estimate came after $2.6 billion in federal financing for the ambitious project was announced, and transportation officials said then that they thought the project would be finished by the end of 2013. It has been delayed a number of times.

- The announcement of the new cost and time estimates came during a meeting of the transportation authority’s board in Manhattan. The authority’s capital construction president, Michael F. Horodniceanu, described several factors that he said had contributed to the delay. Among them were the difficulty of building beneath an existing web of tracks and equipment in Queens and complications caused by unrelated projects, including building developments on the West Side of Manhattan and the planned replacement of tracks inside Amtrak tunnels running beneath the East River.

.....