“We’re mystified by the Mayor’s statement. The planned 16-month schedule was the result of months and months of negotiations between the USDOT and MTA, the state Department of Transportation and the Mayor’s own city DOT. Furthermore, the 16-month time-frame for such an expansive project that covers 28 counties and 22 million people is actually shorter than for many projects with relatively small geographic and environmental footprints. By throwing his own DOT professionals under the bus and refusing to provide the sign off that is required by the federal government, City Hall has already delayed the start of this project by two weeks and threatens to impose even further delays.”

ON BACKGROUND:

The US DOT's Federal Highway Administration on March 30 directed the MTA to undertake an Environmental Assessment with robust public outreach. The Central Business District Tolling Program involves 28 counties across three states, with a combined 22 million residents, including 12.3 million who are residents of Environmental Justice Communities. In addition, there are 5 tribal nations, one federally-recognized and four state-recognized, again across three states. As a result, the outreach and EJ outreach we are being asked to undertake, which will include more than 20 different meetings, is substantially larger than most other projects.

Even typical EA’s, without the robust outreach requirements, often take longer than 16 months. To give you some examples:

• The Penn Station Access EA is likely to take approximately two years, but significant analysis occurred before we began writing the EA.
• NJ Raritan River Bridge Replacement was an EA with early outreach and took 24 months. It involved one county and had 2 public information sessions as part of their early outreach.
• Bayonne Bridge EA took 33 months and involved two counties.

In the meantime, as we waited for direction from the previous federal administration, we worked to aggressively move the project before the EA process even begins. In October 2019, we awarded a contract to Transcore to design, build, operate and maintain the toll system equipment and infrastructure related to the project. We began preliminary design, tested different equipment and technology, and worked with our partners at the New York State and New York City Departments of Transportation to move the project along as much as possible while waiting for the required federal guidance on the environmental review. 

And this is the first congestion pricing initiative ever to be implemented in the United States. 

The talks with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have touched on a variety of issues, ranging from methodology for the analysis, to how we should reach out to Environmental Justice communities in study areas in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, to how data and analyses should be presented.

We, along with our partners at New York State and New York Departments of Transportation, have had multiple discussions a week with FHWA to work through issues big and small to help ensure when we submit the Environmental Assessment, we meet FHWA's, and more importantly, the public’s, expectations.

The Environmental Assessment requires a number of incredibly complicated traffic and air quality simulations. Toward that end, we’ve already begun to develop the data and have been running different scenarios through modeling formulas.

We are close to finalizing a project schedule. Once approved by all parties, we can release an array of informational handouts, our website, social media links, and other documents that will be part of our massive public outreach effort. Each document needs to be translated into multiple languages so they reach the widest audience possible. In addition, we are in the midst of planning a host of outreach meetings that will lay out the project plans and allow for input from residents from the entire study area that encompasses nearly 30 counties in three states.

Once we receive a formal finding on the Environmental Review from FHWA, and assuming that it is an approval for the project to continue, the contractor has up to 310 days to hit the go live date.