Pete Buttigieg and Polly Trottenberg
Pete Buttigieg and Polly Trottenberg
Secretary; Deputy Secretary at U.S. Department of Transportation
New York officials were optimistic that the region’s immense infrastructure needs would be taken care of when Polly Trottenberg joined Pete Buttigieg in the U.S. Department of Transportation last year.
Trottenberg, a former New York City transportation commissioner, said she has been able to use her experience running the nation’s largest municipal transportation system to navigate a complex federal agency.
“It gives you sort of the big management chops, knowing how to manage big organizations, like a big federal agency,” Trottenberg told NY1 last year. “But it also gives you a feeling for what it’s like to be local government, to be on the front lines of: we need to fix your roads, we need to plow your street.”
Boy, have both of them delivered. When Congress finally passed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority got $10 billion to make its train stations more accessible, improve its operations, expand the second phase of the Second Avenue Subway line, and upgrade the Long Island Rail Road’s station capacity at Jamaica.
The region’s other massive underground rail system, the long-delayed Gateway Tunnel project, also collected $8 billion. Federal DOT officials approved an environmental review of the project, and Buttigieg personally assured Sen. Chuck Schumer the Hudson River tunnels would get their funding.
The infrastructure funds would also help repair the crumbling Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a project that Trottenberg once managed and suggested be replaced with a skyway on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.
And, in a nod to President Biden, who once described LaGuardia Airport as worthy of a “third-world country,” federal funding could potentially flood millions of dollars into upgrading the region’s airports, although the Port Authority wasn’t sure how much could be available.
Trottenberg said she has been looking out for the region’s interests even though she’s in Washington, D.C.
“Obviously, in a national role, you don’t play favorites. But, look, I am a New Yorker in my heart. … There are obviously some very important projects in New York right now,” Trottenberg told NY1 in February.
