As everyone that commutes to New York City knows if one of the tunnels that trains use goes out of service your commute becomes a nightmare. Because of the latest tunnel shutdown, that happened this July, the Obama administration has again brought up the idea of building the third tunnel under the Hudson River. Governor Christie in October of 2010 killed the ARC tunnel project dubbed “The Tunnel to Macy’s Basement” because of the high financial cost that only New Jersey would have had to bare, plus of course where it would have ended.
Back in 2010 the tunnel being built would have had commuters come out in an underground terminal near Macy’s basement. It would have been so deep that Jim Gearhart said “It’s so deep one escalator can’t handle it; there would be several at angles and elevators. How’d you like to be caught down there in an emergency? Jim Gearhart of 101.5 FM jokes they might as well go a little deeper and have a portal to China.” The reason it was to be so deep was it had to duck under other underground tunnels and infrastructure. Just poor designing and planning it seems to me.
I will not be discussing the merits of The Tunnel to Macy’s Basement, but will now address the needs and problems of building a third Amtrak tunnel under the Hudson River. One of the most basic problems is that it must miss any other underground obstacles in its projected path and the best place for it to end up is Grand Central Station or Pennsylvania Station, not Macy’s basement!
While it sounds simple enough in principle to avoid these underground obstacles, in fact it is very hard to fit a tunnel in with all the things that are already there. You have to remember that underground there are electrical and telephone lines as well as the New York City Subway plus a Steam Tunnel that supplies heat to many buildings in Manhattan. If you were to look at a cross section of the Island of Manhattan you would see how hard it is to thread an additional train tunnel that goes to either of the main train stations.
Now another problem is who is going to pay for the tunnel? Is it going to be an Amtrak project or would it fall to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to pay for it? The answer seems to be that both the Federal government and both State governments need to share the costs of building it with Amtrak doing the maintenance. The Federal government should of course provide a majority of the funds with New York and New Jersey providing the rest.
One of the problems is the way of thinking of the Obama Administration, “President Obama’s transportation secretary said Tuesday that the region’s apparent inability to do anything about the decrepit rail tunnels connecting midtown Manhattan to New Jersey is “almost criminal.”
“It’s perhaps one of the—if not the—most important project in the country right now that’s not happening,” federal transportation secretary Anthony Foxx said, during a panel discussion hosted by the New York Times.”
Why does this administration think that an Amtrak tunnel’s maintenance is somehow under the purview of the two states it connects? What is criminal is that Congress has a way of thinking that Amtrak should be self-sufficient and not take any money from the government. That is totally unrealistic and even if Amtrak were a totally private company it still would need help from the government.
I must end this blog by saying that it will be at least another decade before any tunnel might be finished and the one to Macy’s Basement would not be the answer!
That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike
