Behind the Capital Program Dashboard, Part 1: A look back

The MTA’s Capital Program Dashboard is getting a major upgrade. Launched in 2010, the Dashboard has helped the public track how we’re investing in the transit system: what’s being built, where, and why it matters. As we prepare to release a new version later this year with a brand-new look and packed with user-requested features, we’re kicking off a series that explores the Dashboard’s history, how it works, and how it’s evolving to better serve riders, advocates, and data users alike.

But to understand why the Dashboard matters, it helps to take a step back. If you’ve spent any time in New York, you know there’s always construction somewhere. That’s true for our transit system too, where we’re constantly rebuilding, improving, and expanding the infrastructure that keeps the region moving.

While you might see this necessary work in the form of temporary service changes, construction fencing, or heavy machinery, what you don’t always see is the long-term planning and investment behind it. That’s where the MTA Capital Program—and our Capital Program Dashboard—comes in. If you're following the news, you might have read that we have a newly approved and funded 2025-2029 Capital Plan thanks to the leadership and commitment of Governor Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature in Albany. This is great news for riders, but what is a Capital Plan and what does that all mean?  Follow along as we explain how we plan our construction projects and how the public can use open data to track our progress.

Like a lot of big organizations, the MTA two types of budgets:

• Our operating budget covers the day-to-day costs of running service: paying employees, buying electricity, and keeping the trains moving.
• Our capital budget is different. It funds long-term investments: things like buying new train cars, replacing signals, upgrading tracks, and making the system more accessible.

Both are essential. But if you want to understand how we’re building a better transit system for the future, you’ll want to follow the capital budget.

The MTA’s capital investments are funded, budgeted, and organized into five-year “plans”. Our first Capital Plan started in the 1980s and was a major success in helping to restore the transit system from a period of disinvestment and set it on a path toward recovery and growth. Our latest plan, which covers the years 2025-2029, will be our ninth. Grouped together, the collective roster of investments from all our plans is called the Capital “Program”: our continuous push to keep subways, buses, railroads, and bridges and tunnels moving New Yorkers for generations to come.

* Our first Capital Plan began in 1982 and ran until 1986. Since then, most subsequent plans have covered five-year periods. As a quirk of history, the 1992-1996 plan (our third) was extended to 1999, shifting the Plan approval cycle to years divisible by five (Ex. 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, etc.)

From the start, we’ve always laid out our plans in detailed reports that outline the specific investments we’re proposing to make, our rationale in selecting and prioritizing those investments, and a forecast of how far they will take us in bringing the system into a “state of good repair.” However, after approval of each Plan, it wasn’t always the easiest to track how we were doing in delivering the improvements we set out to achieve. That is, until the Capital Program Dashboard.

We recognize that there is a broad community of users interested in better understanding the MTA’s Capital Program data. That includes transit advocates, journalists, civic technologists, researchers, and members of the public who rely on accessible information in order to hold us accountable and ensure that investments in the transit system are transparent, equitable, and aligned with the needs of the communities we serve. (Read more about our open data user personas.)

That’s why the MTA first launched a Capital Program Dashboard in 2010 with the aim of making information about capital projects accessible to the public in a unified platform for the first time. For the last 15 years, the Dashboard has allowed users to monitor our progress on delivering Capital Program investments and see what’s being built or replaced, where it’s happening, what the budget is, and how much we’ve spent so far. It also helps users understand project schedules, including anticipated project completion dates. Users can also download raw data to do analysis and cross-tabulations, like tracking the overall progress of a Capital Plan or the budgets for specific investment categories like signals, stations, track, or more.

When it first launched, it was ahead of its time and transformed how our open data users analyze project budgets, timelines, and our overall progress in improving the transit system. We've kept improving it over the years; just last year we added a new view to show projects related to Resilience and Accessibility.

But the time has come for a more comprehensive overhaul. After 15 years, both web development technology and the way that we do work at the MTA have advanced significantly. We’ve heard from users that they want a Dashboard that’s easier to navigate, more reflective of how projects actually affect service, and better suited to modern devices. The goal is to make the Dashboard not just a source of data, but a tool that empowers the public to understand and engage with our work. That’s why in the third quarter of 2025, MTA Construction & Development will launch an updated Dashboard with three goals in mind:

• Goal 1: Report on projects, not just budget codes

  The updated dashboard will shift the focus from using internal budget codes (we call them ACEPs) as the Project ID and instead orient the Dashboard around real-world projects, making it easier for users to see what’s being built, improved, or planned.

• Goal 2: Enhance functionality and user experience

  The updated dashboard offers improved navigation, search, and filtering tools to help users better explore project information. It’s also built on a modern platform that supports today’s web standards, including responsive design for seamless use on mobile devices.

• Goal 3: Help you find projects that matter to you most

  The updated dashboard helps you quickly find projects that matter to you, with a new “Service” view that groups projects by the transit lines they affect and a redesigned map that clearly shows where work is happening across the system.

This is the first in a series of blog posts explaining the work that’s going into addressing each of these goals. See below for a lookahead as we gear up to the launch of the Dashboard later this year.

• June
  • (New Blog Post) Behind the Capital Program Dashboard, Part 2: Reporting on projects, not just budget codes
• July
  • (New Blog Post) Behind the Capital Program Dashboard, Part 3: How we’re enhancing functionality and user experience
• August
  • (New Blog Post) Behind the Capital Program Dashboard, Part 4: Helping you find projects that matter to you most
  • Dashboard launch

We’ll see you next month when we explore a simple question with a surprisingly complicated answer: what is a project?