Tunnel Vision: Time Running Out for the NY-NJ Hudson Railway

Last Thursday, pretty much everyone responsible for getting people back and forth to work between New York and New Jersey gathered on the same floor atop One World Trade Center for an all-day crisis summit. They had a unanimous message: The train tunnel that traverses the Hudson River is wasting away, and fast. So is the West Side terminal that takes in commuters who arrive by bus. Unless Washington, Albany and Trenton do something soon, the 616,000 New Jersey residents who depend on trains and buses to get to work in Manhattan—along with their employers—are going to face personal and professional chaos when they cannot get to work. This is not some wild prediction. It is a fact. But it was hard to walk away from the summit with any optimism—for the chances of actually doing something before it’s too late look bleak.

 

The Hudson rail tunnel upon which New Jersey Transit riders depend has served us for more than a hundred years—but it won’t be doing so for much longer. The tunnel and its two tracks need massive, massive repairs, both because of age and because of Hurricane Sandy, which flooded the tubes. The tunnel’s state is “calamitous,” said Elliot Sander, former chief of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and now Chair of the Regional Plan Association. “For now,” dealing with the tunnels “has to be the number one … priority.”

 

But Amtrak, which owns the tunnel, cannot close one side at a time to fix the tracks. Doing so would mean only six trains would be able to come through per hour, rather than 24—which would throw hundreds of thousands of people’s lives into disarray.

 

The plan, then, is to build a new tunnel with two new tracks, and then close the old one for repairs. We need the two new tracks, anyway. Since 1980, Hudson River traffic is up 63 percent, to 1.1 million crossings daily. But car and truck traffic is down—in fact, it’s barely above 1963 levels. All of the new people—and then some—take the train or the bus. And if you’re thinking people can just start driving gain, they can’t. “Congestion is actually going up in the core of Manhattan,” said city Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, because, well, New York has more people, too.

 

We were going to build a new tunnel starting five years ago, but New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie abruptly cancelled it. “We did lose a whole decade,” said Peter Rogoff, a bigwig at the federal Department of Transportation. “We didn’t have a decade to give. We cannot spend another decade thinking and talking about it.”

 

But that is exactly what we have started to do.

 

The new plan is for Amtrak to build another tunnel, as part of a project called Gateway.

 

How much will it cost? We don’t know—and Amtrak has wisely refrained from slapping a guestimate on this massive undertaking before it has finished designing it. But it will certainly cost billions of dollars, perhaps more. Amtrak has already spent $307 million on the project, mostly doing some work on the far West Side of Manhattan before the area gets covered in skyscrapers, which would make the work far more expensive. (Thank you, Amtrak, for saving us all billions of dollars!).

 

Who will pay? If you’re thinking Amtrak will foot the rest of the bill, you’re wrong. For Washington to borrow at record-low interest rates and send some money our way would be economically sound, but don’t expect it anytime soon. So Amtrak expects New York, New Jersey, and perhaps even New York City to foot a huge portion of the bill. We are the ones who use it most of the time.

 

And if Thursday’s summit was any indication, paying for the tunnel is an unsolvable problem, at least for now. The Port Authority isn’t offering any money. It has problems of its own. “Our biggest challenge is the bus terminal,” said Andrew Lynn, the authority’s planning director. “The structural slabs supporting bus operations will need to be replaced within 15 to 25 years. It’s really a mandatory issue.” That’s another multi-billion-dollar project.

 

As for New York State and City? Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio are still busy not finding money from the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s deteriorating assets within New York State. The real risk for them is that the feds could take money away from the MTA to help pay for Gateway.

 

When participants did talk money on Thursday, they furthered the illusion that somehow, “creative financing” or “public-private partnerships” would fix the problem. Such techniques can deliver a tiny fraction of the funds we need.

 

Could we waste another decade? We’ve already wasted a year since Amtrak started warning about the condition of the tunnels. And even in a good-case scenario, Amtrak will only finish design and “initiate construction” within the next five years. So that’s six years right there.

 

The worst-case scenario is an emergency shutdown of the existing tunnel—at the same time the bus terminal fails, too.

 

That would be a commuting crisis. But it’s also already an existential crisis for New York and New Jersey. As Amtrak’s Stephen Gardner, who is (sort of) in charge of building Gateway, said in reference to public-sector rail agencies—including much of the MTA: “All of us were created … to take over failing private assets.” The Pennsylvania Railroad built the existing Hudson tunnel. But during the second half of the twentieth century, railroads were dying and the government had to step in. Transit agencies have been “preservation[ists]”, he noted—just trying to preserve what was left. “How do [we] recreate the assets we inherited?”

 

If we don’t come up with an answer, the resurgance New York has seen in the past quarter-century won't continue.