EDITORIAL: Another study will be a waste of tax money

Shore-area politicians push for new studies is nothing more than an attempt to make the math come out in their favor.

   What’s another million dollars among friends?
   That’s the question that members of the U.S. House of Representatives should ask as they prepare to vote on the 2008 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations bill, which includes a $1 million line item for a new study of a proposed commuter rail line in the Middlesex-Ocean-Monmouth region.
   There are three MOM options under consideration:
   • A line running northwest from Lakehurst and Lakewood through Jamesburg and Monroe and connecting with the Northeast Corridor line in Monmouth Junction.
   • A line running north from Lakehurst and Lakewood, linking with the North Jersey Coast in Red Bank.
   • A line running northwest through Freehold and then northeast into Matawan, where it would link with the North Jersey Coast line.
   All the lines would bring commuters into New York, once a new rail tunnel is completed under the Hudson River.
   This latest study was inserted into the federal legislation at the request of U.S. Reps. Chris Smith and Jim Saxton, Republicans who represent most of the Shore-area towns that support the Monmouth Junction alternative.
   Reps. Smith and Saxton say they just want to provide traffic relief to central New Jersey — but their idea of relief appears only to consider what will happen on Route 9 and not the impact of the rail line on downtown Jamesburg or on residential neighborhoods in Monroe and South Brunswick adjacent to the line.
   "The MOM Passenger Rail Line will relieve traffic on heavily congested highways like Route 9," Rep. Smith said in a press release last week. "The funds included in this bill will help move this vital project to the preliminary engineering phase."
   Perhaps, Rep. Smith doesn’t realize that the MOM line has been under discussion for going on two decades, with study after study showing the cost of building and operating the Monmouth Junction alternative to be higher than the other alternatives. The studies also showed marginally higher ridership figures for the Monmouth Junction line, but not enough to justify the expense.
   And yet the state and federal governments continue to throw good money after bad, continue funding the collection and analysis of essentially the same data with the politicians in Ocean and Monmouth counties apparently hoping that if they redo the math enough times the results will somehow be different.
   They won’t be. The Monmouth Junction line will remain the most expensive to build and most expensive to operate and it will offer the longest commute of the three alternatives on the table.
   In the end, as we’ve said on more than one occasion, the debate is about backyards. The politicians in Monmouth and Ocean counties — despite their high-minded rhetoric about the importance of expanding rail service and reducing traffic — are only interested in the alternative that will have the least negative impact on their own residents. At least the politicians in Jamesburg, Monroe and South Brunswick are being honest about their motivation.