(The following article by Judy Rife was posted on the Times Herald-Record website on February 26.)
NEW YORK — The state of New Jersey had one of those “It’s a great day for New Jersey” moments on Monday – in New York.
On Monday, Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from New York, endorsed New Jersey’s No. 1 transportation priority, the $6 billion project known as Access to the Region’s Core. Moreover, he promised to fight for the federal money to make it happen.
ARC calls for building a second rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York, and a new station beneath 34th Street. The tunnel and the station would supplement Amtrak’s century-old tunnel and cramped Pennsylvania Station – giving commuters from Orange and Rockland counties a one-seat ride to Midtown, and NJ Transit room to grow.
Schumer called ARC “the gift of time,” because the estimates shave 10 to 15 minutes from the average commute.
In the days since, the region’s transportation cognoscenti have been pinching themselves. Suddenly, ARC has been transformed from pie-in-the-sky to shovel-in-the-ground.
“I now believe it will be built,” said Martin Robins, director of the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University and an adviser to generations of New Jersey politicians, including Gov. Jon Corzine.
Ready to deliver
Why does an endorsement from a New York senator warrant such a leap of faith?
Consider.
First, Schumer actually is in a position to deliver the bacon. He sits on the Senate Banking Committee, a coveted seat for both New York and New Jersey senators, since it passes on appropriations for public transportation. It’s no accident that Corzine, in appointing Robert Menendez to succeed him in the Senate, also steered him into his vacant seat on the Banking Committee.
Second, Schumer really thinks ARC is a regional project that will benefit New York as much as the bridge-and-tunnel crowd – and perhaps more when the city’s economic development plan for the West Side kicks in. It’s a breakthrough in thinking that is bound to influence city and state politicians and agencies, including Iris Weinshall, the city’s transportation commissioner and the senator’s wife.
“Schumer’s endorsement was huge – capital letters, boldface type, exclamation marks,” said Floyd Lapp, an adjunct professor of urban planning at Columbia and a former transportation director in New York’s Department of City Planning.
“It’s a terrific bistate project, and it should rank as one of New York’s Top Four, along with the Second Avenue subway, East Side access and the Seventh Avenue subway. The problem for New Jersey, for ARC, has always been getting New York’s attention, cutting through New York’s myopia.”
Schumer did that in spades when he stood beside George Warrington, the executive director of NJ Transit, and talked about a one-seat ride to Midtown from Orange and Rockland counties through New Jersey.
And where did they do this? At the Metro-North station in Pearl River, a stone’s throw from the Tappan Zee corridor where the railroad wants to build a competing rail line to Grand Central Terminal.
“Warrington standing with Schumer was a great coup for NJ Transit,” said Jeff Zupan, the transportation expert at Regional Plan Association.
Unceasing demand
Metro-North walked away from ARC years ago and left the project to the Port Authority and NJ Transit. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has now pledged $1 billion toward ARC and is selling it as hard as Warrington because its own bridges, tunnels and bus terminal are at or near capacity.
“In just the past five years, west-of-Hudson rail travel (to Penn Station) has grown 40 percent,” said Warrington from Schumer’s side. “Yet, demand will only continue as 72 percent of the regional suburban household growth in the next 20 years will take place to the west of the Hudson, including Rockland and Orange counties. That’s three times more growth than Long Island, Westchester and suburban Connecticut combined.”
Robins, who worked at NJ Transit and the Port Authority for many years, credits Warrington for keeping NJ Transit focused on the future in the tumultuous aftermath of 9/11. When Warrington returned to NJ Transit in mid-2002 following a stint at Amtrak, the PATH system was still in shambles and the agency was struggling to deliver tens of thousands of displaced commuters to Penn Station.
The opening of the Secaucus transfer had been postponed until the Port Authority could restore PATH service to the World Trade Center, but NJ Transit proceeded to open its new concourse at Penn Station and to add new service from Montclair to Midtown.
Warrington immediately decided to go forward with ARC and to purchase bilevel cars to increase the capacity of its trains to Penn Station. By the time PATH reopened and Secaucus opened in 2003, there was a sense of permanency about the shift in commuting patterns to Midtown.
Now, of course, NJ Transit is barely staying ahead of demand for service to Penn Station. Six months ago, when ARC’s future was still uncertain, Warrington jumped at the chance to become the primary tenant at Moynihan Station after Amtrak backed out and New York was casting around for somebody, anybody, to save the project.
Moynihan will not only give NJ Transit a high profile in a city showpiece but also extend its platforms from Penn Station – where there simply aren’t enough elevators, staircases and escalators to get the hordes off the train and out to the street in short order.
Still the matter of money
“Moynihan was a smart thing to do,” said Zupan, who was NJ Transit’s planning director in the 1980s. “With ARC, it will make NJ Transit a major player and, eventually, the additional access and the additional capacity will result in a quantum leap in service – to the benefit of the entire region.”
Robins, however, points out there is “a bright side and a dark side” to NJ Transit’s seeming trajectory after 25 years of toiling to build a commuter rail system from the leavings of bankrupt freight lines.
The bright side is that New Jersey politicians of both parties, in Trenton and in Washington, have been able to remain in remarkable agreement about NJ Transit’s agenda as they have come and gone over the years.
In contrast, there’s no guarantee New York’s next governor will champion Gov. George Pataki’s plan to connect Lower Manhattan and Kennedy International Airport. Pataki proposed the link as part of his 9/11 legacy, and Corzine’s interim successor, Richard Codey, was quick to signal New Jersey wouldn’t veto New York’s bid for more bucks for the project from the Port Authority – providing the governor endorsed ARC. Corzine, of course, will now expect New York’s next governor to honor Pataki’s endorsement.
The dark side is the money. NJ Transit, which relies on the state’s Transportation Trust Fund for half of its capital budget, is so overextended that it has been forced to use the money to cover operating deficits and interest payments.
Now the trust fund is broke, the state is awash in red ink and Robins is an anxious as the next person about how Corzine will propose to fix it when he presents his first budget on March 21. Can New Jersey really afford to keep its gasoline taxes the second lowest in the country with so much at stake?
“We still have a great deal to do,” said Robins. “That’s why New Jersey is so restless. We’re only in the middle of a 40- to 50-year plan to connect and expand our commuter rail system.”