MTA 20-Year Needs Assessment

Next steps

The 20-Year Needs Assessment underscores the urgency of investing in our region's transportation network,

especially our core infrastructure, and outlines what capital investments are needed over the next 20 years to keep New York moving.

A new perspective

This 20-Year Needs Assessment differs from previous reports in fundamental ways.

First, unlike previous plans that were constrained by anticipated budget allocations, we have used the data to generate a comprehensive and transparent analysis of need. This unconstrained assessment provides a more robust and clear-eyed outlook on the vulnerabilities our system will face over the next 20 years, including the dire state of some of its most essential infrastructure—as well as the opportunities ahead.

This is also the first 20-Year Needs Assessment conducted by MTA's newly formed centralized capital planning department, which examines all agency needs from a holistic perspective.

Unlike previous iterations of these plans, this report is intended to communicate more directly with the people who have the most at stake—the riders of our system. As a result, it connects our asset needs to the performance of our system and level of service for our riders. It lays out the broader implications of investment—and disinvestment—in the system and describes what it will take to meet performance goals for riders regarding reliability, speed, accessibility, safety, and other priorities. It underscores what's at stake—and what is possible to achieve.

A data-driven approach

Hundreds of expert staff from across every MTA agency have spent the past two years examining every element of the MTA's $1.5 trillion worth of assets, using a robust combination of new groundbreaking tools, agency data, customer surveys, and long-established inspection protocols, to provide unprecedented insight into the state of our system. Highlights of our sources of data include:

Our agencies perform regular and comprehensive inspections of the conditions of the assets. These inspections and engineering insights underpin all our findings. Without these, it would be impossible to know the condition of the system.
Our Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system provides us with the capability to track the performance of each individual system part. For example, systems like EAM help us to gain insight on where some assets have a pattern of many corrective work hours.
Our customer surveys help us to understand what customers care about most, particularly reliability, safety, and on-time performance.

Our comprehensive analysis of regional trends and emerging travel demand helps us to anticipate where new pressures will be made on the system.
Our new climate planning division used geospatial analysis to identify emerging threats.
Our first-ever Comparative Evaluation systematically compares the costs and benefits of every potential system expansion project, to help us identify the wisest investments, with the greatest impacts.

This 20-Year Needs Assessment is ...

Comprehensive

We are providing an unfiltered view of our needs, unconstrained by budget. While prior iterations of 20-year needs assessments have outlined a circumscribed set of needs constrained by anticipated funding, this 20-Year Needs Assessment offers a comprehensive examination of all asset needs across the system.

Transparent

An important first step in planning is to understand the condition of our assets; that's why we have focused on making the 'state of our system' easier to understand. As a second step, we need to plan for how we will get it done with the resources that are allocated. That second step is the five-year capital plan.

Transit riders waiting in a train station.

Responsible

Budgets over a 20-year period are difficult to create with any level of precision. Rather than give a false impression of precision, this document recognizes that:

Costs and timeframes for specific investments will—and should—be shaped by our approach to planning and executing the projects. This involves numerous defining decisions about how projects are bundled, sequenced, designed, value-engineered, and delivered. Projecting these costs and schedules without further project development would be premature and misleading.
Many factors that influence cost are simply beyond the control of the MTA—and not just at the margins. Especially when planning for a 20-year outlook, this often leads to projections that can be vastly different than actual costs, as recently observed with the tremendous unanticipated fluctuations in inflation.

Our next step is delivering the five-year capital plan

Over the past year, we have refined, prioritized, and packaged these needs into the next five-year capital plan. The process of developing this plan has allowed us to group the MTA's needs based on anticipated schedules and resources—and to bundle projects strategically to minimize impacts to riders. The five-year horizon provides a more informed and reasonable time period for projecting budget requirements.

The Proposed 2025-2029 Capital Plan was submitted to the MTA Board on May 28, 2025.

A new capital agency is ready to deliver

In 2019, the MTA created Construction & Development (MTA C&D) as a single, unified agency to oversee its capital program. Whereas historically, MTA's capital program was drafted on an agency-by-agency basis. MTA C&D's integrated approach has allowed innovations and best practices to be used across the program.

Since its creation, MTA C&D has ramped up the pace of capital investment. The 2020-2024 Capital Program is the most ambitious in MTA history, and MTA C&D is delivering results. In 2022, MTA C&D committed a historic $11.4 billion in new projects, with projects coming in $345 million under estimate. That year, the agency completed $6.2 billion of projects, including bolstering the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, upgrading accessibility at multiple stations, opening a storm-resilient Clifton Car Maintenance Shop, and much more vital state-of-good-repair work across the system. MTA C&D is currently executing a record-setting number of accessibility projects at 76 stations, advancing an unprecedented level of signal modernization (182 miles), and delivering on the generations-long promise to bring the Second Avenue Subway to East Harlem.

As a new agency, MTA C&D is taking a new approach to capital delivery to ensure projects are planned and constructed better, faster, and cheaper. In recent years, MTA C&D has implemented major improvements in project design and delivery, including implementing recommendations from the 2019 Crowe Forensic Audit as well as initiatives in the agency's inaugural Strategic Plan. These efforts have already brought significant improvements, from bringing costs of state-of-good-repair projects in line with peer agencies despite New York's high construction costs, to completing major improvements like LIRR's Third Track and the repair of the L Train Tube on schedule and under budget. Additional efforts include advancing significant regional improvements like creating four new Metro-North stations in the East Bronx.

Keys to success

Over the course of the next year, in collaboration with our regional partners, we will take this 20-Year Needs Assessment and use it to guide the creation of a five-year capital plan. In order to begin translating these needs and opportunities into an initial set of concrete projects, we will consider the system's needs holistically and identify opportunities to bundle projects together to create the most efficient and cost-effective approach. The five-year capital plan will be presented on Oct. 1, 2024.

Success will depend on resources

Our ability to address the needs identified in the 20-Year Needs Assessment will depend on the resources we have available. These include:

Sufficient funding

The vision that we establish for our system relies on adequate—and timely—funding. Without this support from our critical partners in the city, state, and federal government, we will not be able to meet the ambitious goals we have set for ourselves.

Different funding scenarios will yield different results. Our top priority must be rebuilding the critical aging infrastructure at risk for catastrophic breakdown without intervention.

A low funding scenario would require us to spend the vast majority of our resources on these urgent projects, with far less funding available for improving and expanding the system.

Strong partnerships

In addition to funding partnerships with the city, state, and federal government, we must also work together to ensure the system's success.

Our construction projects require close coordination and collaboration with local planning and transportation departments, utility companies, local businesses, and residents. By working efficiently and collaboratively, we can minimize costs, reduce red tape, and deliver benefits to the region.

We also depend on our partners to keep the system running smoothly. Stormwater is managed separately by each municipality. The future of the MTA depends on long-term planning by the relevant municipalities to reduce the threat of flooding. Con Edison provides the electrical capacity for us to transition our bus fleets to more sustainable designs and the power we need to keep our subways and trains running.

Successful collaborations can also yield major breakthroughs, like when the MTA and the New York City Department of City Planning worked together in 2021 on a zoning amendment that offers developers building over subway stations a density bonus if they fund accessibility upgrades. Industry partnerships are also creating jobs, building capacity in the system, and encouraging innovation.

These kinds of creative partnerships will be crucial to achieving the goals we share for our system.

Public Engagement and Support

Our work is done to benefit the public—so that the trains, buses, bridges, and tunnels the public relies on continue to be there for them. That construction work, though, can be disruptive, especially in old and constrained spaces. We need the public to be patient as we get past short-term disruptions in order to generate long-term benefits.

But it's not enough to simply expect that of riders. We will continue to do our part, communicating directly and honestly with customers about impacts, and, just as crucially, helping them understand the reasons we're doing the work in the first place. This partnership—between us and our riders—is absolutely essential to delivering on the promise of this plan. Our partners in the advocacy community, at organizations both large and small, will be essential in forging this link.

Over the next 20 years, we will deliver the modern, reliable system riders deserve.

If given the resources, we can transform our vital but aging system into a modern transportation network that positions the region for the next 100 years.

To learn more about what we need to get it done, read our appendices, which outline our needs in greater detail.