(The following article by Tom Hester Jr. appeared in the Trenton Times on March4.)
TRENTON, N.J. — The state’s plan to spend $2.58 billion in the coming fiscal year on transportation projects focuses mostly on repairing and improving existing service, again leaving several major local projects unfunded.
But while the proposal for the budget year starting July 1 doesn’t include money for the $45 million plan to rebuild the Trenton Train Station, work to rebuild the station is expected to begin next year, NJ Transit officials said.
The federal government has approved $14 million for the long-proposed project, and that money will be used on the project’s first phase. NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington said the first phase will involve revamping the station’s Walnut Street entrance.
“That’s a station that should have been overhauled years ago,” Warrington said.
Warrington said he foresees including enough money in NJ Transit’s 2004-05 capital budget to complete the project.
State and city officials described the station, also used by 10 Amtrak routes and a SEPTA line, as bland, especially for a state capitol. With a weekday average ridership of 4,600 passengers, it’s the sixth busiest Amtrak station.
Plans call for increasing its size from 19,000 to 40,000 square feet, including a new level with office and retail space. Parking, architectural, landscaping and information display improvements also are planned.
The $2.58 billion spending plan, which needs legislative approval, includes $1.3 billion for the state and $1.2 billion for NJ Transit, an independent state agency. It proposes spending $290 million on bridge repairs, $222 million for rail infrastructure, $183 million for safety and roadway preservation and $172 million for new locomotives and rail cars.
“Preserving roads and bridges may not be glamourous, but it gets the job done,” said state Transportation Commissioner Jack Lettiere. “It means reliability for our customers.”
Lettiere said the state had to leave unfunded $2 billion in new projects, “not for a lack of will, not for a lack of time and effort, but for a lack of money,” he said.
In addition to the Trenton station, among the long-discussed local projects still unfunded by NJ Transit are a $125 million plan to restore commuter rail service from Ewing’s West Trenton station to Bridgewater, a $500 million plan to build the Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex commuter rail line and a plan to extend the Southern New Jersey light-rail line from the Trenton station to the State House. The light-rail extension’s cost hasn’t been determined.
Warrington – as he has since coming to NJ Transit last year – said he has to “be realistic and manage expectations” because almost every community wants new transit service, but existing needs remain unmet.
“We have people who can’t find a parking space today and people who perhaps can’t find a seat on a train or a bus,” Warrington said.
NJ Transit plans to add 30,000 train seats by spending $172 million to buy 100 bilevel passenger cars and 33 diesel locomotives that can pull longer trains.
Warrington said improving access to New York’s Penn Station remains a priority. The agency wants to double the 100,000 commuters it takes daily into Manhattan.
“It’s the railroad equivalent of rolling a marble through a garden hose,” Warrington said of squeezing 25 trains per hour into the two existing single-track tunnels under the Hudson River. “That marble will soon become a golf ball and soon after that a baseball.”
In October, NJ Transit’s board approved a $4.9 million environmental impact study on a new commuter rail tunnel under the Hudson River. The project, which could cost as much as $5 billion, will be completed in “bite-size increments” during the next decade, Warrington said.
Of the $2.58 billion, about $1.1 billion would come from the state’s Transportation Trust Fund, which will expire in 2004.
Gov. James E. McGreevey recently appointed a special commission that will recommend how to continue financing transportation projects.