UWS Subways At Risk Of ‘Catastrophic’ Delays

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY – The infrastructure that powers the Upper West Side’s subways is past its sell-by date.

“What you see here is [the] component age of our substations,” said Jamie Torres-Springer, President of Construction and Development at the MTA, at an agency meeting on Monday.

“It’s a good proxy for condition, [and] you can see that we have 540 components that are an average of 50-years-old and need replacement [across the system].”

The subway’s old? Is that news? Read on.

“Take a look at the Upper West Side,” Torres-Springer continued.

“You can see our substations with components in poor and marginal condition are at multiple consecutive substations, so we really have to get to those in the next [capital] plan. That requires a major investment to avoid cascading delays.”

Without repair, cascading delays are increasingly likely along the B/C lines in particular, which include local UWS stations along Central Park West at 72nd, 81st, 86th, 96th, 103rd, and 110th Streets.

A graphic appears to indicate that work is also urgently needed at major express stations like the 72nd Street 1/2/3 station on Broadway, as well as the 59th Street-Columbus Circle A/B/C/D/1 station.

What does it mean?

“When power facilities fail, we have catastrophic service impacts,” Torres-Springer explained at the meeting.

“There was an incident recently on the J/Z at Delancey/Essex when a transformer that was serving the signal system failed. But just that transformer failure, you could see severely disrupted service that day,” he added, referring to an incident earlier this month.

ABC7 reported on that incident, which involved “a power outage on the third rail at Delancey Street-Essex Street in Lower Manhattan,” and resulted in a shutdown of the J line.

The outage led to the aforementioned catastrophic service impacts, and a deluge of delays on the B/D/F/M and C/E lines.

In fact, power-related incidents are the “most disruptive” to subway service, according to the MTA, and delay an average of 30 trains.

However, the subway’s power system does have redundancy built in, so that a failure of a single substation does not necessarily result in service impacts, an MTA spokesperson cautioned.

Substations are only one component of the subway’s power system. Since that power ultimately comes from Con Ed, an outage upstream in their network can also cause an outage, even if MTA substations are working properly.

The MTA plans to spend $4 billion on power repair and upgrades, per its 2025-2029 Capital Plan.

Meanwhile? Keep your fingers crossed, Westsiders.