What One Really Expensive Tunnel Means to U.S. Train Travel
The New York metro area now includes four states, a dozen cities with more than 100,000 residents, and more than a dozen metropolitan planning organizations. That balkanization makes regional services expensive, inefficient and highly variable from one town to the next.
What happens when what’s broken isn’t an escalator but two train tunnels that carry 80,000 people a day into the heart of Manhattan?
That question has cast a shadow over New York since October 2014, when Amtrak announced that Superstorm Sandy had permanently damaged the North River Tunnels, which connect Penn Station to Newark, the North Jersey suburbs and all points south. The tunnels would need to close for a year or more. Closing even one tube would require service cuts of 75 percent, an event that would leave tens of thousands of commuters hassled and rerouted, if not totally stranded.
The only solution seems to be a new, extremely expensive tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey. Proposed by Amtrak as part of a package including a half-dozen other regional Northeast Corridor improvements, the tunnel is known as the Gateway Project. In complexity, scale and cost, it is unique. Yet as a crucial reconstruction project, Gateway may presage similar needs in other U.S. cities — and reveal, in hurried completion or idle failure, the insufficiencies of the American system for building infrastructure.
“Our transportation policy is primarily geared towards maintaining what we already have,” says Stephen Gardner, Amtrak’s vice president for business development in the Northeast Corridor. “What we’re looking at here — and what we’re looking at up and down the Northeast Corridor — is the complete renewal and rebuilding of core infrastructure which is at the end of its useful life.” It is one of the first cases, he suggests, of a turning point for a whole generation of infrastructure.
Senior Manager - Financial Planning & Analysis at Amtrak
8 年Yes. They are open for business, but they had only the minimum of repairs performed to re-open safely. They are in need of major shut-downs and overhauls to extend their useful life. Right now there isn't time to do this, but if anything happens and there aren't new tunnels in place, then I would recommend going into business as a ferry boat operator...
Principal of Innovation, Research and Development
8 年Hi Kirstin - Interesting article - Question: Are the North River tunnels currently being used, even though they are "permanently damaged?"