People always say the Mass Transit System is the lifeblood of New York. But it's even more than that. It determines our pattern of development. New York's business model is organized around the idea that we take lots of smart people, we bring them together, so that they can create economic value. The only way you can do that is with mass transit. and that's what makes New York work. The MTA has great engineers, but it's
tended to be broken up by disciplines, people who are experts in signals, or communications, or other aspects of the transit system. We're trying to build an organization around the principle of project management. MTA construction and development is a single new organization that's going to combine the capital operations in the New York City Transit, Long Island Railroad, Metro North and
Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority. We're going to combine them into a single project management organization that's going to be responsible for delivering all of the capital program across the agencies. Right now we're at the beginning of a massive new capital program that includes several priorities that are really hugely important to the region's future. one is that we're re-signaling huge chunks of the New York City Subway System so that we can run more trains more frequently and run them safely closer together. That's going to be transformation. Second is that we're going to make 70 stations in the New York City Subway System ADA-accessible. Then we're going to also completely transform many neighborhoods access to mass transit. The Penn Station Access Project, with four new stations in the East Bronx, is going to provide connectivity for people who now ride a bus an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half an hour and 45 minutes. It's going to allow them to get to Penn Station in 30 or 40 minutes. We're going to complete the East Side Access Project which will bring Long Island Railroad service to Grand Central Station. And together with the Third Track Project, is going to let us increase Long Island Railroad service in the peak hour by 45 percent. We're going to complete the Second Avenue Subway second phase, providing mass transit service to East Harlem and Central Harlem, service that was promised almost a hundred years ago. when they started knocking down the
elevated trains. And we're gonna keep making all of the investments in the railroads and New York City Transit and our bridges and tunnels which will bring the system closer to a state of good repair, so every day there will be fewer delays, fewer breakdowns and more predictable service, at a greater pace. We've been handed a mission to really fundamentally transform mass transit in the region. We're being given the resources to do it. We're being given the kind of money that will allow us to increase service, to make it much more reliable with some of the new technologies, to serve new areas of the region. And that is a tremendous opportunity
