Smith-9th Street Rehab Pushed Back & Will Cost More!
Coney Island/Stillwell Ave. bound F train entering the Smith-9th Sts. station on the 
& 
. Resized photo courtesy of Eye On Transit.
This Sunday will be a year to the day that I wrote about the MTA’s plans to close the Smith-9th Street station/terminal on the & . The closure was apart of the planned repairs to the Culver Viaduct. As we know by now, that project has faced major concerns due to a lack of funds which is nothing new for big ticket construction projects or the MTA as a whole. However this past Wednesday, Brooklyn riders were hit with more bad news. Not only will the closure of the station & its rehab be pushed back, it will also cost much more money than anticipated. Mike McLaughlin of The Brooklyn Paper has more on this unsurprising turn of events:
It’s the same F-ing story at the crumbling Smith-Ninth Street station: repairs are going to cost more — much more — and take much longer.
As recently as June, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would spend $187.8 million to rebuild the elevated F and G tracks from Carroll Street to Fourth Avenue, and renovate the aging Smith-Ninth street station.
Brooklyn Bridge RealtyBut on Wednesday, MTA spokeswoman Deirdre Parker told The Brooklyn Paper that the work would cost “upwards of a quarter-billion dollars.”
The track work on the so-called Culver Viaduct is still scheduled to begin early next year and finish in 2012.
But the renovation of the decrepit Smith-Ninth street stop — which requires closing the station for ninth months — has been pushed back to 2011 from 2010.
Click here for the complete article.
Seriously does this come as a surprise to anyone reading this blog? I know it doesn’t surprise me. We all know the dire financial straits the MTA is in so hearing about projects being pushed back & eventually costing more should come as no surprise. Unfortunately with the history of the MTA being on the short end of the stick funding wise coupled with a crippling economy, these announcements will soon become the norm which is bad news for our infrastructure. Only if we could pinch ourselves awake to put an end to these nightmares.
xoxo Transit Blogger
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[…] MTA announced that the Smith-9th Streets station will be closed up to 1 year due to the project. A year later, news got worse as the project faced delays & would cost […]