MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber appeared on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” on Thursday, where he addressed several high-profile issues facing the agency, including the recent federal takeover of the Penn Station reconstruction project.
During a segment on the live radio broadcast, Lehrer asked about improvements that were made, and will be made, to the iconic Midtown transportation hub, as well as the chairman’s thoughts on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) lead on the makeover project.
“MTA riders, Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) riders and especially subway riders on the Eighth Avenue line — the A,C and E and the 1, 2, 3 Seventh Avenue Lines — are by far the largest group of riders who come into Penn Station. But we don’t own the station. We’re a tenant,” Lieber said. “And Amtrak—the federal government—is the landlord.”
Lieber has said he expects to participate in the federal agency’s efforts to revamp the station going forward. During the broadcast, he described the MTA’s 33rd Street Concourse improvements in 2023, which were the first major overhaul of Penn Station in decades.
“We fixed up the portion of the station that our riders use the most and that we control. It’s part of our lease,” Lieber said. “We fixed up the piece that impacts LIRR and subway riders, and it’s really popular with the riders.”
The area now features a more spacious concourse, new retail space and amenities.
“I want passengers to have really safe, convenient, usable facilities, so we were moving pretty quickly to try to make the rest of the station as good as the 33rd Street Concourse project, but the new administration came in and said, ‘You can’t do this. We’re giving it to Amtrak,’ and that’s okay,” Lieber said. “If the landlord wants to come in and fix the whole station because they own the whole thing, and the rest of Penn Station that we haven’t fixed up is kind of a dump, especially the areas tht Amtrak controls, I’m okay with that.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul has also been urging President Donald Trump to fund the overhaul of the world-famous hub.
“Clearly that effort has been successful, and I want to thank the President and Secretary Duffy for taking on the sole responsibility to deliver the beautiful new $7 billion station that New Yorkers deserve,” Hochul said in a media statement. “This is a major victory for New Yorkers, and the use of federal funds will save New York taxpayers $1.3 billion dollars that would have otherwise been necessary for this project.”
A mistakenly filed memo
Meanwhile, according to Crain’s, the attorneys for the Federal Highway Administration mistakenly filed an internal memo that appears to say the agency’s court case against congestion pricing is weak and “very unlikely” to win.
When Lehrer asked about the report, Lieber, however, declined to comment about the memo specifically — stressing, instead, that the MTA is confident that the toll program will not be “taken down unilaterally” by the feds.
“I’m not commenting on any of that, you know, the sort of the proprieties of legal practice, say, when someone does something accidental, it isn’t a topic of discussion. It kind of gets made invisible,” he said. “But the bottom line here is, we have, whether it was in response to whatever they’re talking about internally, whatever Secretary Duffy is tweeting or saying on Fox News, we have always been absolutely confident that congestion pricing could not be taken down unilaterally by the federal government.”
