Your Upcoming Delays Were Avoidable

It has come to this: Amtrak’s plan for repairing Sandy-compromised tunnels under the Hudson River is to hope a brand new tunnel can be built by 2024.

“Some people also believe in little green men,” one senior Democratic congressional staffer said. He was not joking in the least.

The mood was similarly dark among regional planners and transportation lobbyists, who did not wish to speak on the record for fear of dissipating what little good will they have among the region’s elected officials. “We will have to move all of Manhattan across the Hudson” one drily commented. The news is “super-bad. Super-duper bad. Or to use tech parlance, Uber-bad,” emailed another.

The current tunnel is slowly disintegrating, meaning ever-slower and more frustrating commutes. Amtrak announced yesterday it will have to completely close each of the two tubes under the Hudson and East rivers to conduct repairs, crippling New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad trains.

So Amtrak is hoping a new rail tunnel will be built before that happens. But there is no funding for a new rail tunnel, no engineering study, no environmental review. Washington hosts a congress that is actively hostile to large infrastructure projects, and is likely to get more so after next month’s elections.

And the last time a tunnel under the Hudson was attempted, gathering together the money, wherewithal, and permissions took a quarter century. Then NJ Gov. Chris Christie pulled the plug while the tunnel was under construction. But more on that in a moment.

Let’s review. Amtrak owns two tubes under the Hudson, built at the turn of the last century for the Pennsylvania Railroad system. For quite some time, the tunnels, which carry both Northeast corridor and NJ Transit trains, almost half a million trips per day, have been operating at capacity.

This is not good for the region’s economy, which relies on getting goods and people in and out of New York City. Especially since some of the fastest growing counties in our region are in Northern New Jersey. Especially since it’s unwise to have no redundancy in a rail system that the whole regional economy relies upon.

Did I say the tunnels are old? They are old. So in 2012 when Sandy’s waters flooded in, swamping the system’s signal system and its concrete walls, they did not react well. The tubes were closed for days, turning one-hour commutes into morning-length marathons. A foretaste of what might be coming.

But they were reopened. And though both waters and memories of delays receded, the flood waters’ lasting corrosive effects did not. Signaling systems have been compromised. The concrete is eroding. Bits are falling onto the tracks. According to an engineering report released by Amtrak this week, the tunnels are not in danger of collapsing. But the report recommended “full closure” of the Hudson River tunnels, “on a 24/7 accelerated schedule,” for at least a year, “as soon as possible.”

Because even taking one tube out of service across the Hudson would reduce capacity to a quarter of current levels, Amtrak has decided “as soon as possible” means when there’s a new tunnel built.

Now, you may be asking at this point, what happened to the last tunnel? The one that would have been complete in 2018, just a little over three years from now? What happened was…Governor Chris Christie.

When he took over as Governor, the NJ Transportation Trust Fund, which pays for roads and bridges and transit, was empty. Christie did not want to raise the gas tax, even though New Jersey has the lowest gas tax in the nation.

So Christie needed funds. And the trans-Hudson transit tunnel, known by the decidedly clumsy name “Access to the Region’s Core,” or ARC, had tied up almost $3 billion of New Jersey transportation funds, and $3 billion of Port Authority Funds. At the Port Authority, David Wildstein – the man who brought you days of snarled traffic at the George Washington Bridge to teach a political lesson to a recalcitrant Mayor – got the money for ARC transferred to a rusting hulk of a bridge, the Pulaski Skyway. Which solved the gas tax problem, but left New Jersey vulnerable to a malfunction in its century-old rail tunnel under the Hudson.

In October of 2010, Christie decreed ARC’s death. “This decision is final. There is no opportunity for reconsideration on my part. I am done, we are moving on.”

This was just as the tea-party was gathering force across the country. But Christie, in New Jersey, was first to articulate the argument that spending big pots of money on transit infrastructure wasn’t worth the debt. Economists, planners, the U.S. Transportation secretary all strenuously objected, to no avail.

Christie had started a trend. Republicans Governors in Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio would soon send billions of dollars for rail projects back to Washington. In the ensuing years, President Obama kept proposing big infrastructure projects. Congress kept rejecting them.

Amtrak is particularly unpopular among Republicans. One of their most senior members, Rep. John Mica has called it a “soviet-style bureaucracy.”

And even when thousands were living in the dark, flooded out of their homes after Sandy, it took an unprecedented ninety-one days for Congress to pass a Sandy-aid package. Gov. Christie himself took the GOP to task. “There’s only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims: The House majority and their speaker John Boenher,” Christie snarled at the time.

But on Thursday, a day after the report was released, Christie, who was campaigning in Arizona, had had little to say.  Neither did his counterpart on the New York side of the Hudson.

“I haven’t seen the Amtrak report, so I can’t really comment on it,” NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters. Twenty-four hours after Amtrak released its report, even Senator Charles Schumer, a champion for rail, hadn't issued a statement.  His office promised, vaguely, to seek funding with greater urgency.

The silence is deafening. But if Amtrak is suggesting a plan so unbelievable that it has rail supporters comparing it to believing in little green men, it suggests it might be time for a Plan B.

But no one appears to have a clue about what that might be.