Mysterious metal towers are popping up at local tunnels, and soon they’ll start appearing at bridges, too.

But even people on the MTA board in charge of the towers can’t say why they’re being used or what’s in them, CBS2’s Dave Carlin reports.

Jose Lugo said the tall metal towers quickly appeared up after the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel tolls booths came down.  

“We don’t really know what’s the purpose of this,” he told Carlin.

It’s a $100 million MTA project shrouded in secrecy, with 18 of them for tunnels and bridges. So what are they exactly?

The MTA’s man in charge of the bridges and tunnels, Cedrick Fulton, dodged Carlin’s questions Wednesday.

“I said no comment,” he said.

Some MTA board members, including New York City Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, say they know too little about the towers – even with half the money already spent and some of the towers already up.

“A lot of the board members felt they didn’t have all the details they would have wanted, myself included,” she said.

Residents suspect there is much more going on in the towers than meets the eye and wonder if they’ll ever really know what’s going on inside of them.

“I’m going to guess that it’s not just a decoration,” Alyssa Renkas, of the Upper West Side, said.

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