Construction set to start in March on next phase of Second Avenue Subway

A rendering of the proposed station at 106th Street and Second Avenue.

MTA

Construction is set to begin in March on phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway, which will ultimately bring the Q train through East Harlem to 125th Street, the MTA revealed on Monday.

The MTA has awarded its first contract for Second Avenue construction work, with a $182 million procurement awarded to C.A.C. Industries to relocate underground utility lines between 105th and 110th streets starting in coming weeks.

The agency says that getting a head start on underground utilities — like electricity, water, sewage, and telecommunications — is a departure from what was done in phase 1 of the project, which extended the Q train to 96th Street. In phase 1, unforeseen utility lines (many of which are a century old and unmapped) in the way of construction led to long and costly delays, the agency admits in the hopes of avoiding similar mishaps in the future.

“We can do better. We acknowledge phase 1 could have been delivered better, faster, and cheaper,” Jamie Torres-Springer, the MTA’s chief of construction and development, told reporters on Monday. “We’ve learned the lessons from that.”

The $7.7 billion second phase — projected for completion in the early 2030s — will add three new stations to the Q line at 106th Street and Second Avenue, 116th Street and Second Avenue, and 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. The first phase, which opened in 2017, was nearly a century in the making, and in the preceding decades work in East Harlem was started before being abandoned.

Now, the MTA says it can save money and time by utilizing an existing tunnel built in the 1970s but abandoned amid the city’s fiscal crisis. That tunnel runs between 110th and 120th streets. The MTA will not have to tunnel between 96th and 106th streets, either: ancillary tracks for staging trains go from 96th to 105th streets, and the 106th Street station is set to be built using the “cut-and-cover”…