After a summer plagued by hours-long delays and service outages, New Yorkers’ frustration with the city’s rapidly deteriorating subway system has reached a boiling point. But while the MTA is desperately trying to close massive budget shortfalls by hiking fares in lieu of any kind of meaningful assistance from the State of New York, commuters have noticed that a series of mysterious metal towers have started appearing at the entrances of tunnels and bridges around the city.
And some are expressing frustration with Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the MTA for refusing to release any details about the towers’ purpose, despite planning to spend $100 million on them.
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One New Yorker, Jose Lugo, told CBS that the quickly appeared after the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel toll booths came down.
Earlier this month, Reinvent Albany asked the Authorities Budget Office to investigate whether the ‘MTA board was fully informed, before approving contracts’ related to the construction of the towers. The group is trying to figure out if the MTA board knew what it was doing when it approved a series of contract amendments worth some $47 million worth of expenses for the towers that currently sit at the entrance to the Battery and Queens Midtown Tunnels.
Eventually, the MTA plans to construct 18 such towers, saying only that they will serve some vague anti-terrorism-related purpose.
“It’s a bit mind-boggling that the MTA is approving $100 million for what appears to us to be big, decorative pylons,” says John Kaehny, the leader of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany. “What we’re asking for is transparency from the MTA.”
“What we’re asking for is transparency from the MTA.”
But the individuals in charge are staying tight-lipped about what the towers actually do.
Cedrick Fulton, the head of the MTA’s bridges and tunnels, refused to comment to media organizations asking about the towers, and MTA chaiman and former mayoral candidate Joe Lhota said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss details of the project, other than to confirm that they would serve some type of anti-terrorism-related purpose.
Shams Tarek, a spokesman for the MTA, told Politico that the towers ‘host cameras, traffic monitoring and other equipment related to homeland security that would otherwise have been hosted by the former toll booth structures’.
If this is accurate, then $100 million seems like a hefty price tag for such a project.
Citizens aren’t the only ones asking questions about the towers. According to CBS, some MTA board members, including New York City Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, say they know too little about the towers – especially considering that the MTA has already spent $50 million on them.
“It’s a $100 million MTA project shrouded in secrecy, with 18 of them for tunnels and bridges. So, what are they exactly?” Trottenberg said.
Let’s hope – for the MTA’s sake – that these pylons do have some kind of sophisticated functionality, and that this isn’t another classic example of the wasteful spending habits that have contributed to the subway’s present-day troubles.
As an upstate New Yorker We are used to this type of nonsense. Just the other day our illustrious governor was here seeking our love. He just loves to take tax dollars from one place,and pass them out in another. All the while trying to make us think he is taking real good care of us. It is sickening. Most of us up here wish that NYC would just float away.Of course while the governor and that thing that calls himself our representative Senator are there.
Maybe one of youse guys might oughta put a bullet in him.
They’re anti-Deplorable death rays.
Eventually someone is going to plow into one of them and make their contents available for examination to determine exactly what the do.
(FWIW, there is noting alongside, in, on, or near a roadway that someone cannot manage to somehow plow their vehicle into.)
NSA for your safety
Just another chapter in the disgusting reality of waste and fraud that we live in.
these are just the front end components of a vast system of sensors, networks and algorithms designed to uniquely identify each vehicle, its occupants, their location (within the network) and the history of travel.
it’s nothing to worry about, it’s all about fighting freedom.
it’s nothing to worry about, it’s all about fighting FOR freedom.
Fighting for freedom is what we do. Every time we discover some natural resource somewhere that is owned by someone else or is unexploited, someone is gonna get some freedom whether they want it or not.
No. He said what he meant. It’s fighting freedom. That’s what they do here. The fighting for freedom is done in other places with good stuff that we want to steal.
Big Brother and tyranny don’t come cheap.
The photo here only shows the top of the tower. All the odd angles of these seem to point to license plate readers/ facial recognition devices.
The lower section of the tower, not shown, appears to be a large side scan nuclear detector prettied up with a facade.
A product similar to the The Rapiscan-TSA TM850