Overview

The vitality of New York City’s economy is highly dependent on a modern, efficient mass transportation system that connects the city’s current and future centers of employment to the regional labor pool. The availability and adequacy of mass transit are major factors in business location decisions, driving demand for commercial real estate and dictating patterns in job growth. Despite their critical importance to business and economic development, major investment decisions on transportation projects are typically made without meaningful consultation with the business community or a careful assessment of long-term contributions of a given project to expansion of the city’s economy.

For this report, the Partnership commissioned the Boston Consulting Group and the University Transportation Research Center at the City University of New York to examine a variety of mass transit projects and evaluate them based on their ramifications for the economy. The result of this six-month project is a new perspective on transportation planning – and, more important, some significant findings about how future projects might be planned to maximize their benefits for the local economy.

Report Highlights

Of the seven projects examined in this study, four would clearly yield significant economic development benefits for New York City. However, three projects would yield more than five times their capital cost in economic development benefits: the Lower Manhattan Hub, the extension of the No. 7 subway line and the relocation of Pennsylvania Station to the Farley Post Office.

Key Takeaways

This study and its methodology should be the opening round of a discussion that leads to the development of a widely accepted model for estimating and weighing the transportation and the economic development benefits of transportation projects.