Michael Horodniceanu, Who Oversaw Transit Megaprojects, Dies at 78

Michael Horodniceanu, who as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s president of capital construction helped complete gargantuan, seemingly interminable transit projects in New York City, died on June 22 at a hospice facility in the Bronx. He was 78.

His son Oded said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

From 2008 until 2017, Dr. Horodniceanu oversaw wildly complicated construction projects that cost New York billions of dollars. He tried to ensure that they became boons for the city’s transportation system rather than boondoggles.

“In a construction site, there are always problems,” Dr. Horodniceanu told the M.T.A. board in 2009, after a gap between the platform and track that was about an inch too wide delayed the opening of a more than $500 million South Ferry subway station. “My job is not to bring the problems, but the solutions.”

There were five ambitious projects under Dr. Horodniceanu’s control: East Side Access, a plan to extend the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal; an extension of the No. 7 train to the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s Far West Side; the Fulton Transit Center, a thorough redesign of a downtown subway hub that made switching between nine train lines less of an ordeal; the new subway station at South Ferry; and the Second Avenue subway, which Upper East Siders had dreamed about since the Great Depression.

Those last four were completed under Dr. Horodniceanu’s watch. Grand Central Madison, the new L.I.R.R. terminal below Grand Central Station, opened in January.

A genial figure with a mostly white beard who favored flashy bow ties, Dr. Horodniceanu was often in the hot seat when construction problems arose. Those problems ranged from quotidian delays and cost overruns to more unusual issues, like excavation explosions that shattered windows on the Upper East Side in 2012.

Perhaps the most intractable problem Dr. Horodniceanu faced was the extremely high cost of transportation construction in New York City, which a New York Times investigation in 2017 found was the highest in the world.

That investigation also found that the Grand Central Extension project employed about 200 more workers than the roughly 700 that were needed, and that those extra jobs had not been reported to the public when the authority discovered them in 2010.

“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” Dr. Horodniceanu told The Times in 2017. He said that the excess workers were laid off, but that no one knew how long they had been employed.

“They were each being paid about $1,000 every day,” he said.

When the new terminal finally opened this year, the agency put its total cost at $11.1 billion, or more than six times the average cost of similar projects elsewhere.

At least one construction delay faced by Dr. Horodniceanu originated far beyond the five boroughs: issues with diagonal elevators custom designed in Italy for the No. 7 train station at Hudson Yards, which officials hoped to open in 2013, before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg left office.

The elevators were made by an Italian company, but project administrators wanted software and components from American manufacturers.

The components functioned separately, but the elevator failed a test in Italy after it was assembled that summer, and lengthy European vacations meant work did not resume for some time. After facing other delays, the extension finally opened in 2015, at a cost of $2.4 billion.

In 2017, Janno Lieber, a real estate executive who had helped rebuild the World Trade Center complex, replaced Dr. Horodniceanu as the president of the M.T.A.’s capital projects.

Dr. Horodniceanu sent the authority’s board a farewell letter that praised the two subway expansions, and the opening of Fulton Center and the new South Ferry station, as a “grand slam of megaprojects.”

“Working together, we improved the lives of many New Yorkers and forever changed the face of public transportation in the City of New York,” Dr. Horodniceanu wrote. “We made history.”

Michael Filip Horodniceanu (pronounced ho-rode-nee-CHA-noo) was born in Bucharest, Romania, on Aug. 4, 1944, to Filip and Clara (Hascalovici) Horodniceanu.

In 1961, the Horodniceanus followed a wave of Romanian Jews who emigrated to Israel after World War II. They settled in a suburb of Tel Aviv, where Filip worked as an administrator for the national health care system and Clara became a bookkeeper for Elite, an Israeli chocolate company.

After graduating from high school in Haifa in 1963, Michael served in the Israeli Army. During his time there, he met Bat-Sheva Maltzman at a party. After he got out of the Army, he went to what is now Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, while Ms. Maltzman studied political science and developing countries at Tel Aviv University. They married in 1968.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1970 and then moved to the United States, settling in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens. He earned a master’s degree in management from Columbia University in 1973, and five years later he completed a doctorate in transportation planning and engineering at what is now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.

After earning his doctorate, Dr. Horodniceanu joined some colleagues from Tandon at Urbitran, an engineering, architectural and planning company, and he worked there full time in the 1980s. He also taught at Tandon and at Manhattan College in the Bronx.

In 1986, Mayor Edward I. Koch appointed Dr. Horodniceanu traffic commissioner. In that position, he oversaw the city’s traffic enforcement agents and its parking meters.

After David N. Dinkins became mayor in 1990, Dr. Horodniceanu returned to Urbitran, where he served as chairman and chief executive. In 2008 AECOM, an infrastructure consulting firm, bought Urbitran, and Dr. Horodniceanu left the company to work for the transportation authority.

After leaving the M.T.A., Dr. Horodniceanu returned to Tandon, where he became a professor of civil and urban engineering and the inaugural chair of the Institute of Design and Construction Innovation Hub, which seeks to facilitate communication among different professions to make building projects faster, more cost efficient and more sustainable.

In addition to his son Oded, he is survived by his wife; another son, Eran; a grandson; and three granddaughters. He lived in Forest Hills.

Before it finished its work on the Second Avenue subway line in 2011, one of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s tunnel-boring machines, the behemoths that eat through miles of Manhattan schist and other rock, was named Adi, after Dr. Horodniceanu’s only grandchild at the time.