By: centraljersey.com
I want to support the proposed NJ Transit rail tunnel that would allow more trains to enter Manhattan – but it is difficult to support a boondoggle.
Gov. Chris Christie has shut down the project – known as Access to the Region’s Core – calling for a 30-day review in the wake of estimates by federal officials that the nearly $9 billion tunnel could run more than $1 billion over budget. James Weinstein, executive director of NJ Transit, told The Star-Ledger on Saturday that the agency was stopping new work and suspending future bids.
"Work already under way, including a track underpass in North Bergen and a tunnel segment under the Palisades, will continue," the newspaper reports. "But all new work, including real estate acquisition, will be frozen."
Project supporters, including the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said the announcement "casts a dark shadow over the project’s future."
"ARC will provide a much needed expansion of transit capacity to Manhattan, creating jobs, reducing traffic and pollution, and increasing property values around connecting stations," TSTC said in a press release. "A slowdown in work or reduction of tunnel funding will be disastrous for the project and for the region’s mobility."
U.S. Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg also sounded similar alarm bells, raising the specter of lost federal transportation money. But, as The Record pointed out in an editorial on Tuesday, spending money because you’re promised the money makes little sense – especially when it is not clear that the tunnel as proposed will address the region’s transportation problems.
No one is disputing the need for additional tunnels, just the efficacy of moving ahead with this tunnel as currently designed. The ARC project, at its inception, was meant not only to expand rail options for New Jersey commuters, but also to connect with Grand Central Station and the East Side of Manhattan, where the Long Island Railroad is working on its own expansion. It was a truly regional solution.
The project was scaled down, however, to cut costs and what remains is badly flawed. As currently planned, the ARC tunnel is just one of several rail projects being designed or built independently of each other, creating a patchwork of partial solutions and the real possibility that we will be looking at a different kind of gridlock when all is said and done.
"The current NJ Transit plan does not bring New Jersey commuters to the East Side," The Record wrote. "Although there are engineering obstacles to achieving that, they are not insurmountable. And all the proposals for new-and-improved stations empty thousands of new commuters into the same three-block stretch of Manhattan. There will be gridlock above ground."
The Sierra Club’s New Jersey Chapter is hoping the 30-day "time out" will be used to "allow the different agencies responsible for our transit needs to get together and come up with a comprehensive transportation plan for the region that will actually work."
The project, the environmental group says, "is poorly designed and does not meet the goal of making public transportation more accessible and functional."
"Unfortunately, this tunnel only meets the first of those goals and not the other four," said Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel. "Instead of connecting to Penn Station or the new Moynihan Station, the tunnel dead ends 180 feet below the ground, two blocks from Penn Station. The project is now the tunnel to Macy’s basement."
This, of course, is the problem with so many New Jersey transportation projects. What may have started as a major regional project – think Route 92, which began as a way to connect Route 206 with Route 33, or the Middlesex-Ocean-Monmouth rail line – gets sliced and diced until all that is left is a stump that serves little purpose and that, in all likelihood, will exacerbate the problem it was meant to fix.
So while I consider myself a supporter of mass transit, I just can’t see spending this kind of money to build a tunnel that just may create as many problems as it solves.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post. E-mail, [email protected]www.kaletblog.comfacebook.com/hank.kalet. msha

