The MTA asked the city on Monday to significantly step up spending on the Second Avenue Subway and to give more cash for repairs to its transit network.
The state agency is facing a $14 billion gap in its five-year capital plan — more than half of which is devoted to the city’s subways.
“The MTA and its transit system are at a crossroads,” Chairman Thomas Prendergast wrote in a letter to First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris.
“Ridership has never been higher. The city’s population has grown and its location has shifted, putting pressure on transit in newly developed neighborhoods, and, in fact, the entire system.”
He said it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call the capital plan “critical to the future of the city itself.”
Prendergast asked the city to invest $1 billion in the Second Avenue Subway over five years, as well as an additional $1.5 billion for repair work and maintenance.
The Second Avenue Subway’s first phase on the Upper East Side is set to open in December 2016. The MTA will then expand the line to East Harlem to relieve the crowds on the Lexington Avenue line.
The letter came as City Hall said it would increase funding for the MTA by $25 million to $125 million a year over five years, as well as give the agency a separate $32 million grant to match money from the feds for transit service.
Officials say they had agreed to fully fund the MTA’s initial request and planned to announce it Monday, but that the state authority moved the goal posts. It had requested that amount before an Independent Budget Office analysis found the city should be giving more than $350 million a year to the MTA to keep up with inflation.
The city in the past had contributed $100 million a year to the capital plan.
The request was also put in before Mayor de Blasio floated the idea of a brand-new subway line on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn — and Albany said it would give the MTA an additional billion dollars in its new state budget.
“The state gave the MTA $1B in new money in the new budget,” spokesman Adam Lisberg said on Twitter. “The city, not so much.”
The Straphangers Campaign and the Riders Alliance blasted the small increase and said the city should chip in more. They called it “a missed opportunity to address one of the greatest problems facing the city now and in the coming years.”
City officials noted Albany hadn’t come up with a sustainable source of MTA funding, despite a $6 billion windfall from legal settlements.
