Summers in New York bring the smell of barbecue, speakers blaring at block parties, and sweaty treks to cool off at a pool or the beach. Increasingly, warmer weather here also means subways flooded by sudden downpours. Videos of water gushing through subway stations and trains have become a familiar sight for New Yorkers lucky enough not to experience such events first-hand. This year has been no exception. In just one hour on Monday evening, two inches of rain poured onto New York City—its second wettest hour ever recorded. (The top slot still belongs to 2021’s Hurricane Ida, the remnants of which deposited more than three inches in one hour, shattering a record set only weeks earlier, during Tropical Storm Henri.)
New York’s century-old subway is the most expansive in the country. Like just about every mass transit system on the planet, it is facing novel challenges wrought by the realities of a warming world, ranging from flash floods to excruciating heat. For years now, the Department of Transportation has funded researchers around the country to investigate these threats, explore how the United States’s vast transit networks can deal with them, and offer state and local officials practical solutions for future-proofing subways, bus routes, highways, and more. Since the Trump administration took office, that funding has been abruptly cut off. The climate crisis the White House denies is happening, meanwhile, is already here, and Republicans’ war on any research or programs that mention it is putting growing numbers of people at risk.
I recently spoke to a scholar with first-hand experience of these cuts. Alessandro Rigolon—an associate professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah—has been part of a network of researchers that the Department of Transportation’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration, which is tasked with figuring out how cities around the country can make their transit systems more resilient. Since 1987, 35 University Transportation Centers, composed of scholars from several different colleges and universities, each working on specific thematic areas, have received access to a reserved pool of federal funds to educate the transportation workforce and conduct practical research on issues ranging from congestion to disaster response to asphalt composition. Rigolon is part of a team that DOT had funded to catalog strategies that transit agencies in large and medium-size U.S. cities are using to address climate threats—reviewing municipalities’ plans for issues like flooding, extreme heat, and sea level rise, and interviewing transit and city planners about their approach to these topics and the barriers they face to making necessary changes. Grantees were also required to share the team’s findings with relevant professionals so as to “ensure that this work has practical implications,” Rigolon explained.
In early May, however, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a press release boasting about having cancelled $54 million in “woke university grants” that the department alleged were “used to advance a radical DEI and green agenda.” Rigolon’s project was among those on the chopping block. “Before the grants were terminated, we were told to try to clean up the wording around our projects, and eliminate words that the new administration would find ‘woke,” Rigolon told me. “We had to reframe the title of the grant around resilience to public transit and extreme weather,” rather than climate change, he said. “That bought us a couple more months.” On a Friday afternoon in May, he received word that his team’s grant had gotten the axe, effective immediately.
The decision was part of a government-wide gutting of funding for both transportation research and federally backed research more generally, hitting everything from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the National Institutes of Health. As Streetsblog’s Kia Wilson explains, University Transportation Centers special access to DOT funds was contingent on their research falling under “priority areas” determined annually, and which can shift from administration to administration. Until now, though, that funding has never been abruptly pulled after being allocated.
It’s never been more necessary. The transportation sector—including cars, trucks, ships, and planes—is the United States’ single largest source of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 28 percent of its annual total. Municipal transit systems also face urgent threats from climate change itself. The brutal, climate-fueled heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest in summer 2021 melted Portland’s streetcar cables and light rail lines. Sea-level rise is eroding the bluffs beneath a scenic train route that carries passengers, freight, and military transports between San Diego and Los Angeles. Hurricanes and tropical storms now semi-regularly kneecap transit infrastructure across the Southeast, while extreme heat in the West deters riders and poses health risks to transit operators. These sorts of disruptions further threaten people’s ability to get out of harm’s way when disaster strikes—a topic Rigolon’s team had just begun to explore when their funding was cut. “If a rail line is not usable, or if bus routes are inaccessible due to flooding, and there’s a massive evacuation needed,” he said, “then more people are going to have to travel via car. It puts people in danger.”
When cities flood, subways and sewer systems act as a depository for excess water that can stream in through entrance gates, elevator shafts, and (in New York City) 39,000 ventilation grates that need to be closed by hand. Additional pumps and storage tanks can help keep some of that out. Yet many of the changes needed to prevent flooding happen above ground, and beyond the ambit of transit agencies. Key to preventing flooding, Rigolon said, is reducing impermeable surfaces and creating “cities that are more sponge-like, with more green infrastructure” such as parks and “green streets” that slow, filter, and cleanse stormwaters through vegetation and inverted, more absorbent pavement. Planting trees near transit lines can help, too, and provide shade to keep riders cool on their way to metro stations and bus stops.
New York’s sewers are about as old as its subway, and neither system was designed to handle the kinds of extreme downpour that rising temperatures intensify. Even in dry weather, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority—which is controlled by the state—pumps out between 10 million and 13 million gallons of water daily. On Monday, it pumped out 15 million gallons. The combined sewer system that undergirds some 60 percent of New York City—whereby a single pipe carries both sewage and stormwater—can handle roughly 1.75 inches of rain per hour; the subway system can only handle 1.5. “The water will flow where it wants to flow,” said Daniel Zarrilli, Columbia University’s Chief Climate & Sustainability Officer, who until 2021 served as chief climate policy advisor to New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. “Whether it’s the city’s drainage network or the subway,” he said, “we need those systems to work together to head off that risk.”
That type of coordination can be difficult. While the mayor’s office in New York has broad authority over its own capital budget—which can be used to make certain infrastructure improvements—the subways are controlled by the legislature in Albany. Updates to zoning and flood standards in the building code need to be approved by the city council, and managing stormwaters holistically requires buy-in from the Department of Sanitation, the Parks Department, and the Department of Environmental Protection. “People have to put aside their own individual agencies’ top priorities to be able to work toward a common goal,” Zarrilli told me. “It takes leadership, and it takes time.”
It also takes funding that’s hard to come by for just about every state and municipal government. The MTA is projected to need some $6 billion over the next decade for weather resiliency upgrades; just a portion of that has been approved. The city’s current climate chief, Rohit Aggarwala, told the New York Times this week that critical sewer projects will cost the city $30 billion, compared to an annual budget for sewer projects of just $1 billion. The Times notes that the city and the MTA have both invested billions of dollars into resilience projects in recent years as flooding persists. A $68 billion capital plan for the MTA, approved in April, sets aside hundreds of millions of dollars for protecting the subway from extreme weather. It’s also budgeted $700 million through 2029 for resiliency measures like raising vents and stairways, and adding more pumping stations.
As it’s slashed transportation research funding, the Trump administration has also taken a chainsaw to federal programs aimed at preventing the priciest, deadliest damage from extreme weather. These funds, while modest, took pressure off of state and local governments that otherwise wouldn’t be able to finance much-needed resiliency investments. A sizable chunk of the $5 billion the Federal Emergency Management Agency has clawed back from its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, for instance, was set aside for state and local flood mitigation efforts. That includes $325 million for New York, $300 million for Florida, and $185.5 million for Louisiana.
Contra Sean Duffy, climate change isn’t a “woke” fantasy; it’s a force that’s already flooding subways and melting streetcar cables. For large and small cities alike, federal funding has provided a much-needed lifeline to help transit systems built for a cooler world adapt to the hotter, often wetter one we’re now living in. The Trump administration has been deadset on cutting off those funds, leaving commuters across the U.S. soaked, sweaty, and in danger.