Posted on 10/10/2002 2:51:12 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
NEWARK, Oct. 9 — A decade-old proposal to build an additional rail tunnel to carry passengers between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan got a boost today as state officials said the project would now top their list of transportation priorities.
To emphasize that decision, the board of New Jersey Transit voted to spend $4.9 million on an environmental impact study of the project. Transportation experts said that by doing so, the agency was taking the lead in a planning process that has been going on for 10 years without clear direction.
New Jersey Transit's executive director, George D. Warrington, said an additional tunnel — with an inbound and an outbound tube — would in effect double the number of trains operating between New Jersey and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan during peak hours. New Jersey Transit and Amtrak trains now share a tunnel, also with two tubes, that is used to capacity.
The move was lauded by environmental and transportation advocacy groups, which said that planning for the future of trans-Hudson travel needed the kind of leadership that New Jersey Transit was offering.
The board chairman, James P. Fox, who is also state transportation commissioner, said he and Gov. James E. McGreevey would lead the effort to get the federal money needed for the tunnel, estimated to cost $4.5 billion. That will mean many other transportation projects may have to wait while the state pushes to get the tunnel built, he said.
The study authorized today will try to fine-tune and analyze the engineering components and environmental effects of such a project, and solicit public comment — all in an effort to quickly prepare an application for a grant from the Federal Transit Administration. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will join in the study.
For the last 10 years the port agency, New Jersey Transit and New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority have cooperated in a study of the region's future transportation needs under a program called Access to the Region's Core. The effort has identified the region's needs and proposed various alternatives to try to address them.
Three alternatives involving trans-Hudson rail traffic were developed and the study group is scheduled to indicate its preference shortly, Mr. Warrington said.
All of the plans seek to ease the bottleneck in the existing train tunnel, which can handle up to 19 trains an hour. A new tunnel would allow 21 additional trains at peak hours, and ferry New Jerseyans to and from the part of Manhattan where the greatest job growth is projected.
But Janine Bauer, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy group for mass transit, said the Access to the Region's Core effort had tried to be many things to many constituents — and failed to establish a consensus on a single plan or approach.
She said the three participating agencies seemed more intent on avoiding friction than coalescing behind a plan.
According to a number of officials familiar with the planning, New Jersey long favored a new tunnel that would not only come into Penn Station, but also provide a route across Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal. The M.T.A. was cool to the idea partly because it competed with the authority's preference to build a new tunnel under the East River to bring to Long Island Rail Road service into Grand Central.
But now New Jersey has emphasized its priority to expand capacity for Penn Station and indicated a willingness to forego, at least for now, a link to Grand Central. One New Jersey Transit official said the decision raised the possibility that both New York and New Jersey could work together to get federal funding, with each state supporting the other state's priority projects.
"It says we need you, you need us," Ms. Bauer said. "It sets up a political relationship for them to work together in Washington."
Stolen from Calvin Trillin
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