The 14th Street Tunnel shutdown (also referred to as the L Project, the L train shutdown, or the Canarsie Tunnel reconstruction) was the partial closure and reconstruction of the New York City Subway's 14th Street Tunnel that took place from April 2019 to April 2020. The tunnel carries the BMT Canarsie Line (serving the ) under the East River in New York City, connecting the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and is used by an average of 225,000 passengers per weekday. A key segment of the 14th Street Tunnel, between the Bedford Avenue station in Brooklyn and the First Avenue station in Manhattan, would be partially closed for 15 to 20 months to allow for necessary and extensive repairs to the underwater tubes after it was flooded and severely damaged during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Two options were proposed in 2016: a three-year construction period where one tube at a time would be closed or an 18-month closure where both tubes would be worked on simultaneously. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority ultimately chose the 18-month closure option because it would be less disruptive to passenger service. The shutdown period was later reduced to 15 months to reduce service disruption. To accommodate displaced passengers, new or expanded bus, subway, and ferry service was to be added, and a 14th Street busway would have been implemented. The shutdown plan was criticized by riders who use the and people living along or near 14th Street in Manhattan, as it would have had adverse effects on other subway routes and on vehicular traffic. In January 2019, it was announced that the shutdown would not be a full-time closure, but a night and weekend closure. Ultimately, the line was not closed; night and weekend service was merely reduced.
Background
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused severe damage to New York City, and many subway tunnels were inundated with floodwater. The storm flooded nine of the system's 14 underwater tunnels, many subway lines and yards, and completely destroyed a portion of the Rockaway Line () in Queens, as well as much of the South Ferry terminal at Manhattan's southern tip.
The subway opened with limited service two days after the storm and was running at 80 percent capacity within five days; however, some infrastructure needed repairs, which were staggered over several years starting in 2013. A year after the storm, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which operates the New York City Subway, said that Hurricane Sandy "was unprecedented in terms of the amount of damage that we were seeing throughout the system." Reconstruction required many weekend closures on several lines and long-term closures on the Greenpoint Tunnel (), Montague Street Tunnel (), Rockaway Line, and the South Ferry station. A long-term closure was planned for the 14th Street Tunnel because it was significantly damaged by the storm surge. Moreover, the 14th Street Tunnel dates from 1924; thus its equipment was already 88 years old when Hurricane Sandy occurred.
Planning
Closure options In January 2016, the Canarsie Line between the Bedford Avenue station in Brooklyn and the Eighth Avenue station in Manhattan was proposed for either of two shutdown options. One option involved shuttering the entire segment for eighteen months. The other option would allow the MTA to operate two segments of track for three years: a single-track segment between Bedford and Eighth Avenues with a capacity of 5 trains per hour per direction, and regular service between Lorimer Street and Rockaway Parkway. For both options, the Third Avenue station would be closed and new exits and elevators at the First Avenue and Bedford Avenue stations would be added. The renovations would cost between $800 million and $1 billion; , the project budget includes $926 million. During the shutdown, workers would replace damaged communications, power and signal wires, third rails and tracks, duct banks, pump rooms, circuit breaker houses, tunnel lighting, concrete lining, and fire protection systems. Three new electric substations would provide more power to run more trains during rush hours.
The closure would affect the 225,000 subway riders per weekday who travel on the 14th Street Tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. This accounts for about 75% of the 300,000 riders per day who use the . Community meetings were held to determine which of the two options would be better. In an internal assessment, the MTA concluded that four out of five L train riders would be less impacted by the full-closure option compared to the partial-closure option. Additionally, the single-track option would result in severe overcrowding at First and Bedford Avenues. A subsequent poll conducted by transit-advocacy group Riders Alliance revealed that 77 percent of L train riders preferred the 18-month closure option. In July 2016, it was announced that the MTA had chosen the 18-month full closure option. Riders reacted with both disappointment over the closure, and relief that the service disruption would be shorter. The New York Post described the closure with the headline, "2019 is the year Williamsburg dies."
The MTA named Judlau Contracting and TC Electric as the project's contractors on April 3, 2017, at which time the duration of the shutdown was shortened to 15 months. It offered the contractors a $188,000-a-day bonus for completing work up to 60 days early. as well as a $15 million bonus for completing the project on time; the MTA also stipulated that the companies would need to pay a fine of $410,000 for each day that work is delayed past the 15-month deadline. The joint venture is also responsible for renovating the First Avenue and Bedford Avenue stations during the shutdown, as well as adding platform screen doors to the Third Avenue station. According to a July 2018 report, construction was supposed to be "substantially completed" by November 2020.
Initial mitigation plans
The MTA indicated that during the shutdown, the L route would only have a frequency of ten trains per hour between Bedford Avenue and Rockaway Parkway, because of severely constrained terminal capacity at Bedford Avenue. In mid-2016, the MTA devised preliminary mitigation plans, which proposed additional shuttle bus, ferry, and subway service. A ferry route between Williamsburg and the East Village of Manhattan would be instituted; the M14A and M14D buses might be converted to Select Bus Service; and dedicated bus lanes would be placed on crosstown corridors in Manhattan. The MTA would institute two out-of-system subway transfers, free if paid via MetroCard: one between Broadway () and Lorimer Street (), and one between Livonia Avenue () and Junius Street (). In addition, the plan included extending G trains from four cars to eight cars, as well as running the M train to Midtown Manhattan daily, instead of on weekdays only. Preliminary documents also proposed that the four toll-free East River bridges between Manhattan and Long Island (the Queensboro, Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges) might gain a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) restriction of at least three passengers per vehicle during rush hours.
In December 2017, the MTA and the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) released a more concrete mitigation plan, based on projections that 80% of riders would transfer to other subway services to get to Manhattan, while 15% would use buses. An HOV restriction on the Williamsburg Bridge during rush hours would allow it to accommodate three Select Bus Service (SBS) routes between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Route L1 would stretch from Union Square, Manhattan, to the Grand Street station in Brooklyn; L2 would connect SoHo, Manhattan to the Grand Street station; and L3 would go from SoHo to Bedford Avenue. In addition, 14th Street between Third and Ninth Avenues would be converted into a bus-only corridor during rush hours to accommodate an SBS route across 14th Street, connecting to a ferry route at Stuyvesant Cove Park near 23rd Street. The mitigation plan also entailed improvements to six subway stations, new entrances at two stations, enlarged crosswalks near these subway stations, longer G and C trains, three free out-of-system transfers, increased service on the G, J/Z and M trains, and a weekend extension of the M train to 96th Street and Second Avenue. Finally, the plan included an expansion of New York City's privately operated bike share system, Citi Bike, as well as upgrades to bike lanes on Brooklyn's Grand Street and a pair of crosstown bike lanes on 12th and 13th Streets. Some subway entrances on each of the affected routes would also be reopened.
On December 14, 2017, members of the New York City Council held a hearing in which they asked the MTA head and NYCDOT Commissioner over the shutdown. The central question was whether the MTA could complete repairs by the July 2020 deadline. It was projected that during the shutdown, the 14th Street buses would become the most-used bus corridor in the city, and that 70 buses in each direction would travel across the Williamsburg Bridge every hour. As a result, Lower Manhattan politicians worried that the narrow streets in the area would not be able to accommodate the high-capacity buses.
Modified mitigation plans +Proposed peak-direction shutdown headways in trains per hour (tph)LineRoutesHeadway beforeshutdown (tph)Headway aftershutdown (tph)BMT Canarsie Line(Bedford Ave to Rockaway Pkwy)20 10BMT Jamaica Line(Marcy Ave to Myrtle Ave) 1221 10 249 14IND Crosstown Line(Court Square to Bedford–Nostrand)9 15IND Crosstown Line(Bedford–Nostrand to Bergen St) 12IND Culver Line(Bergen St to Church Ave)1423 14 269 12IND Queens Boulevard Linelocal tracks919 12 2010 8IND Sixth Avenue Linelocal tracks1423 14 289 14
In June 2018, as part of a lawsuit settlement, the MTA agreed to install elevators at the Sixth Avenue station and conduct an environmental impact study on the Canarsie Tunnel rehabilitation's effects. The city also considered turning 14th Street into an exclusive busway 17 hours a day during all days of the week, and changed its initial plans for a two-way bike lane on 13th Street to two separate bike lanes on 12th and 13th Streets. When the 14th Street busway was enforced during the shutdown, the only vehicles that would be able to use the busway would be buses, trucks making deliveries on 14th Street, emergency and Access-A-Ride vehicles, and local traffic traveling for no more than one block. According to Winnie Hu, a transit specialist at The New York Times, the plan was inspired by Toronto's successful King Street Pilot Project, where restriction on ordinary vehicles on a section of previously clogged King Street sped up transit times for riders on the 504 King streetcar route, the Toronto Transit Commission's busiest surface route. The Toronto experiment allowed ordinary vehicles to continue to briefly use King Street, provided they turned off at the next stoplight.
Separately, the MTA revised contingency plans so that there would be four SBS routes. They included the already-planned L1 Union Square–Grand Street, L2 SoHo–Grand Street, and L3 SoHo–Bedford Avenue routes, as well as a new route L4 between Union Square and Bedford Avenue. The four routes combined would carry 17% of displaced L train riders, while subways would carry another 70% and other transport methods would make up the remaining 13%. Citi Bike announced plans to add 1,250 bikes and 2,500 bike-share docks during the shutdown. A private company also announced their intention to create a luxury "New L" shuttle van service during the shutdown.