New Tunnels Unnecessary

The Antiplanner spent part of yesterday in Washington DC stuck on a train while Metro was suffering yet another service disruption. I eventually got off and took a taxi, and soon after reaching daylight I received a call from a New Jersey reporter asking what I thought about a revised plan to build new tunnels under the Hudson River to supplement the North River Tunnels Amtrak and New Jersey Transit use today.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed the tunnel project in 2010 because he didn’t want New Jersey taxpayers to have to pay most of the cost including the inevitable cost overruns. Christie is perfectly happy to have the tunnel built so long as New York pays more of the cost. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants the federal government to pay the vast majority of the cost (it was already going to pay 51 percent) because, after all, this is interstate commerce. Now Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has a grand plan to create a quasi-governmental corporation to build it, as we didn’t already have enough of those. The two governors claim to love this plan even though Schumer still doesn’t say where the money is going to come from.

The justification for building the project is completely unrealistic. As the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, noted when Christie first cancelled the project, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit predicted that Midtown Manhattan would soon gain 500,000 new jobs. That as many jobs as are inside the Chicago Loop and far more than any other downtown in America, and there is little evidence that Manhattan job numbers are growing that fast (and little reason why taxpayers outside of New York or New Jersey should subsidize that growth).

Aside from its side effects, Penegra cannot also be combined with other cheap cialis 20mg medications such as nitrate containing drugs. This eventually helps to improve your long term memory. cialis tadalafil tablets People should take these issues into consideration as a best buy viagra serious problem and should go for an urgent cure for it. How Erections Work? Your penis https://pdxcommercial.com/property/517-main-street-oregon-city-oregon-97045/ purchase levitra no prescription is soft and loose, when you are not sexually stimulated. Amtrak’s other justification for the new tunnels is that the existing, 105-year-old tunnels badly need maintenance and rehabilitation. Shutting one tunnel down for repairs, Amtrak claims, would reduce the system’s capacity by 75 percent. This justification makes sense; after all, whenever state highway departments need to repave a freeway, they build a completely new freeway for drivers to use instead. Wait a minute; no they don’t–this doesn’t make much sense after all. If Amtrak and New Jersey Transit can’t afford to maintain what they have, why should taxpayers pay for them to build even more?

Unmentioned by almost everyone is the fact that there are two other pairs of rail tunnels between New Jersey and Manhattan that are not being used to capacity, known as the Uptown and Downtown Hudson Tubes. On the New Jersey Side, the tubes connect to the Amtrak/New Jersey Transit line at Newark’s Penn Station, while on the New York side the Uptown Tubes connect to Manhattan’s Penn Station.

How much would it cost to reroute some New Jersey Transit trains through those tubes? Certainly a lot less than the $10 billion to $15 billion or more that it would take to build two new tunnels. An analysis by the South Western Regional Planning Agency found that this could be done at a 70 percent lower cost than building two new tunnels, and was that agency’s preferred alternative. Even some transit advocates liked this idea.Unfortunately I can’t find a copy of New Jersey Transit’s environmental impact statement for the Hudson River Tunnels on line to see whether it considered or why it rejected this alternative.

All in all, the plan to build new tunnels is based on overestimated benefits (in the form of overestimated job growth); underestimated costs (the tunnels were originally projected to cost $2.5 billion; now will cost at least $10 billion); and lower-cost alternatives that were either ignored or rejected. Sounds like a typical rail transit project.