The MTA spent $86 million on a state-of-the-art, NASA-like “bus command center” that has gone unused for more than two years because it’s already falling apart, The Post has learned.
Transit officials have said the eastern Brooklyn command center, which replaces a smaller facility across the street, will serve as a “war room” for bus dispatchers. But the building has sat empty since former Transit President Andy Byford and other bigwigs held a celebratory ribbon-cutting there in June 2019.
With the building at Jamaica Avenue and Fanchon Place having suffered leaks, faulty heating and bug-infested bathrooms, dispatchers who are supposed to work there have refused to relocate from across the street, sources said.
The ribbon Byford cut with then-MTA buses president Darryl Irick in 2019 said “Grand Opening,” but dispatchers only started to move into the building last winter, sources said. That lasted only a few months because the heat did not work and the building’s electrical system couldn’t handle the workers’ space heaters.