“This bill includes the largest-ever federal investment in public transit and the largest federal investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago,” said John Samuelsen, president of the Transport Workers Union. “Critical funding from this bill will be used to repair, maintain and expand these vital modes of transportation, creating thousands of new union jobs in the transportation industry.”
Mr. Schumer said that $20 billion of the transit funds in the bill would be a new allocation, at least $1.3 billion of which would go to the M.T.A. Of the remaining total of about $70 billion in transit funding, the M.T.A. would get more than $9 billion, he said.
An M.T.A. spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
That money would be on top of the $14.5 billion in federal pandemic relief the M.T.A. is receiving. After getting $8 billion in federal aid last year and an additional $6.5 billion this year, the M.T.A. postponed a fare increase that was scheduled for 2021 and resumed its capital-spending plan.
The New Jersey governor, Philip D. Murphy, also hailed the bill, which he said in a statement included “unprecedented investments in mass transit, roads, bridges, clean energy, and broadband, while creating thousands of good-paying jobs.”
New Jersey Transit, which operates a statewide network of buses and trains, received $1.4 billion in federal aid through the CARES Act last year. The agency has used that money to offset the steep decline in revenue caused by the drop in ridership since the pandemic began early last year. A spokeswoman for NJTransit said the agency was still awaiting official notice of what it might receive from the infrastructure bill.
Officials from New York and New Jersey have been sparring over how to share the emergency funds the federal government allocated to their transit agencies. New Jersey officials have argued for using a traditional breakdown, but the New York side has argued that the M.T.A. should get a bigger-than-usual share because it has suffered more.
“New York’s view of its own troubles is outrageous and shows a lack of awareness of the significant hardship experienced by neighboring states,” 12 members of Congress from New Jersey wrote in a July 22 letter to Nuria Fernandez, the administrator of the Federal Transit Administration.
