Cuomo Is Siccing His L Train Experts On The $11 Billion East Side Access Project

Inside the East Side Access's eastern cavern in 2015

Sure, Andrew Cuomo has been governor for more than eight years, but his career as an MTA good governance stickler/major capital project remixer is just beginning. While he dabbled a little bit in 2016 with the opening of the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway (and don't forget those tunnel tiles—those are some deep cuts!) Cuomo hit his stride earlier this year, when he announced that actually, the L train wouldn't be completely closing between Brooklyn and Manhattan for 15 months, thanks to the ingenuity of his own hand-picked team of experts. Now, the governor wants a fresh pair of eyes on the $11.1 billion East Side Access project to bring the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central.

Though Cuomo actually slipped this bit of news into the state budget that passed over the weekend, he told New Yorkers about it during a lunch on Thursday afternoon, and yes, there were (grand)dad jokes.

Cuomo pointed out that construction on the project, which is adding eight miles of new tunnel beneath Manhattan, began in 1969, and that its projected completion date is December 2022.

"At this rate, I don't think I'm going to be alive for the opening of the East Side Access. I think my grandchild will be there at the opening. Somewhere in the decade of 2040," Cuomo said. "The MTA story, it's always the same, they did a contract, the contractor's late, the contractor's over budget, et cetera. It's Groundhog Day at the MTA."

When it's finished, East Side Access will serve 162,000 passenger trips a day, and could shave 30 to 40 minutes off of a daily commute from Long Island into Manhattan, depending on your final destination.

While there's no timeline for when Cuomo's East Side Access expert panel is supposed to meet and issue their recommendations, the language in the budget says that the panel of "outside experts shall include members of the outside independent review team established to review the project commonly referred to as the 'L-train project.'"

Those experts were headed up by Columbia University engineering school dean Mary Boyce and Cornell University engineering school dean Lance Collins. A few weeks after they visited the Canarsie Tunnel with Cuomo, they dropped their bomb.

While MTA officials promised that there would be an independent review of Cuomo's new L train plan, that is not going to happen.

Gothamist visited the cavernous East Side Access construction site in November of 2015.