New York|Groundbreaking Set for New Jersey Transit Tunnel Under Hudson
Groundbreaking Set for New Jersey Transit Tunnel Under Hudson
By Patrick McGeehan
New Jersey officials have been planning the next train tunnel under the Hudson River for so long that it is already on its third name. This month, work is scheduled to begin on the Mass Transit Tunnel — formerly known as the Trans-Hudson Express and, before that, Access to the Region's Core — more than 15 years after it was conceived.
A ceremonial groundbreaking was set for Monday alongside a highway in North Bergen, N.J., the site of the first small piece of what could be the biggest transit project in the country. The tunnel, which is expected to take eight years to complete, bears a current price tag of $8.7 billion. That is about $6 billion less than the so-called Big Dig highway tunnel in Boston cost but about $6 billion more than the project's original price.
By getting started this month, the tunnel project will qualify for $130 million in federal money from the economic stimulus package President Obama signed in mid-February. The project's planners, who estimate that it will create more than 5,600 construction jobs, are hoping to receive an additional $3 billion in federal money.
"In addition to creating thousands of jobs and promoting mobility and regional competitiveness in the global economy for decades to come, the Mass Transit Tunnel will provide enormous environmental benefits by taking thousands of cars off the road," said New Jersey's governor, Jon S. Corzine, who has been one of the project's most ardent champions.
The project, however, does have environmental costs, and would "destroy between 19 to 25 acres of wetlands and open waters and approximately 112 acres of upland natural areas including 1.7 acres of forest," according to a decision from the Federal Transit Administration.
The Hudson tunnel was designed to help ease the jam-packed rides that rail commuters from the west have long endured. New Jersey Transit, which runs as many as 23 trains an hour through a century-old tunnel into Pennsylvania Station in New York, has said that it is nearing maximum capacity. The riders of those trains share Penn Station with passengers of the Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak.
The solution, elected officials, labor unions and business groups agree, is to bore a second tunnel through the Hudson Palisades, under the river and into the bedrock of Manhattan. That tunnel would bring trains from the suburbs of North Jersey and would end in a bilevel station to be built about 180 feet below 34th Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues.
That station, dubbed the Penn Station Expansion, was originally designed to connect to Penn Station so that Amtrak and New Jersey Transit would have another route in and out of New York. But the project's planners threw out that idea when they decided that they needed to cut much deeper under the city.
Politically, the planners at New Jersey Transit are taking a path of less resistance in their quest to pull off a giant public works project in another state. One reason they chose to dig deeper was to avoid the tracks the Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to lay down on the West Side for the extension of the No. 7 subway line. They also abandoned plans to extend the station under Macy's flagship store on the north side of 34th Street after Macy's executives protested.
Now Macy's is endorsing the project, as are New Jersey's two United States senators and several influential organizations, including the Regional Plan Association and the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority.
But the project's sponsors have not placated all critics.
Some mass transit advocates have insisted that the tunnel connect to either Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal, or both, to be useful to many of the commuters. Others have argued that the proposed station, 18 stories below ground, will be too difficult to evacuate in a fire or other emergency.
Residents of some towns along New Jersey Transit's rail lines, like Summit, have complained about being rerouted from Penn Station to the new station. And some property owners in the city have sounded off about the prospect of losing their land because an out-of-state transit agency has designs on it. New Jersey Transit plans to obtain more than a dozen pieces of property in Manhattan as sites for station entrances, air shafts and fan plants. It estimated that those acquisitions were worth about $29 million and would eliminate 178 jobs in the city.
Among them, according to project documents, would be seven positions at the Blarney Rock Pub on West 33rd Street near Madison Square Garden. Tom Dwyer, whose family has run the Blarney Rock for 40 years, sent an e-mail message last year to the project's planners pleading with them to take a neighboring sex shop called Peep World instead. He said he had been told that that building was less suitable because of some adjacent windows.
"Windows!!" Mr. Dwyer wrote. "The engineers can cut through solid rock a hundred feet under ground and under water but they can't deal with some windows."
New Jersey Transit has begun the process of selecting companies to tunnel under Manhattan, work that is scheduled to begin next year.