$3.5B AirTrain Newark Replacement Re-Forms After Bids Blew Budget

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is restarting the substitute of the AirTrain Newark system as a roughly $3.5-billion program after bids for an earlier $2-billion procurement got here again far above expectations.

The price overrun pressured the company to desert its unique supply mannequin and rethink how the venture might be in-built a building market that has modified considerably for the reason that effort was first conceived.

Initially licensed in 2019 as a single design-build-operate-maintain (DBOM) procurement, the AirTrain substitute was supposed to switch long-term building, programs and operational threat to at least one personal consortium. 

Proposals obtained in 2022 mirrored a modified actuality far exceeding expectations amid pandemic-era price escalation, supply-chain disruption and a pointy pullback in contractor urge for food for megaproject threat, based on a Port Authority redevelopment presentation from September 2025. The company canceled the procurement as deliberate and returned to the drafting board. 

ENR has beforehand reported on earlier iterations of the AirTrain Newark substitute, together with the original procurement and subsequent design activity, earlier than the trouble was halted and reworked. What has emerged now just isn’t essentially completely different, however one other approach of delivering it. 

Below the reformed program, the Port Authority has damaged the work into smaller packages, separated system know-how from civil infrastructure and superior early works to cut back threat—modifications that, together with inflation, account for a lot of this system’s whole price leaping to $3.5 billion.

The revised method is now embedded within the authority’s current 10-year capital plan, with early design and procurement anticipated to advance in the course of the present capital-plan interval. Main building is anticipated later within the decade, based on Port Authority paperwork. 

A central constraint shaping staging and sequencing that has remained fixed is that the present AirTrain should stay in operation all through building with out interruption.

A Port Authority program map outlines the proposed scope of the AirTrain Newark substitute, displaying new and current alignments, deliberate stations, building areas and a upkeep and management facility as a part of the re-formed $3.5-billion program.

| Map courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Why substitute, not rehabilitation? The present AirTrain Newark system—a first-generation automated folks mover roughly three miles lengthy and in service since 1996—has reached a lifecycle level the place control-system obsolescence, unsupported electronics and declining reliability outweigh the advantages of incremental rehabilitation. 

In keeping with business apply for first-generation automated folks movers, retrofitting fashionable, software-based prepare management and diagnostics into legacy platforms is usually impractical in airport environments, the place outages instantly disrupt terminal operations.

Port Authority officers have publicly acknowledged the reassessment. Talking at ENR’s New York/New Jersey Infrastructure Forum final fall, Newark Liberty redevelopment director Ralph J. D’Apuzzo stated the AirTrain substitute stays a part of the airport’s broader modernization program and that classes from earlier megaproject procurements are informing the authority’s supply technique and scope.

Below the brand new framework, the Port Authority is anticipated to make use of a design-build construction for main civil parts, with automated people-mover programs procured individually. Environmental approvals for the substitute hall have been accomplished, with federal funds obtainable by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Improvement Program.

For contractors, the reset positions the AirTrain Newark substitute as a serious future airport infrastructure alternative spanning elevated guideway and station building, structural concrete and metal, electrical and communications work and full automated people-mover integration. 

Whereas no building begin date has been finalized, capital-plan projections place the majority of labor within the latter a part of the 2020s, with extra procurement authorizations anticipated by future board actions.