(Newhouse News Service circulated the following story by Joe Malinconico on July 1.)
JERSEY CITY, N.J. — In a move that may affect generations of commuters, New Jersey transportation officials have set aside plans to extend a proposed new Hudson River rail tunnel to Grand Central Terminal on Manhattan’s East Side.
Instead, NJ Transit has decided to focus simply on getting a new train tunnel built to New York Penn Station.
That alone is a colossal undertaking estimated to cost as much as $5 billion, a project officials say is essential for the state to prevent its already strained rail system from becoming overwhelmed by the growing numbers of commuters to Midtown Manhattan.
Rail advocates and watchdog groups expressed disappointment that a $4.9 million environmental impact study authorized by NJ Transit last month June will not explore the link to Grand Central Terminal.
“What was originally promised is now being put on the back burner,” said Al Papp, a director with the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers. “Our expectations have been dashed.”
NJ Transit officials said they opted to take a more pragmatic approach, otherwise they said they might jeopardize the progress on the tunnel by making the project too ambitious.
Connecting the tracks from the new tunnel to Grand Central would have increased the price by billions of dollars, drastically complicated the construction work and prolonged the job by years, officials said.
Moreover, New York transportation agencies have resisted NJ Transit’s attempts to build a link to Grand Central Terminal, particularly because the agency wants to build a new link that would bring Long Island Rail Road trains to that station, officials said.
“Our main objective is to increase tunnel capacity under the river,” said NJ Transit’s chief planner, Richard Roberts. “All this talk about where we go on the other side is irrelevant unless we get the access across the river.
“We should not get caught up in a big study for a project we can’t build within the time-frame and we can’t afford to build.”
Even without the Grand Central Terminal connection, the new tunnel will not be completed until 2015 at the earliest, a schedule that depends upon New Jersey prevailing in the highly competitive battle for federal funding and on the massive construction work going smoothly.
The existing tunnel from New Jersey to Midtown Manhattan, which is used by Amtrak and NJ Transit, was built in 1910 with one track for each direction. It carries about 19 trains per hour each way during rush hour. That number will increase to 25 by the end of this year.
Sometime in the next decade that tunnel will not have enough capacity to handle the demand for commuter trains between New Jersey and Midtown, officials said.
In the mid-1990s, NJ Transit, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Metropolitan Transit Authority got together to study ways to resolve the capacity crunch.
The project, called Access to the Region’s Core, originally looked at 137 possibilities, then narrowed the field to about 15 and eventually to three options that included building a new tunnel, next to the current one.
All three options remained under consideration until this year.
Alternative P would end at Penn Station at a new lower level. Alternative S would go to the south side of Penn Station and then through to the Sunnyside rail maintenance and storage yard in Queens. Alternative G would go through Penn Station and end at Grand Central Terminal.
But the environmental study commissioned last month does not call for an analysis of Alternative G.
For New Jersey commuters headed to jobs on Manhattan’s East Side, Alternative G could eliminate overcrowded subway cars or a long walk.
“I used to make that commute,” Papp said. “I ended up walking because I was tired of being shoved and bumped and having people step on my shoes on the subway.”
NJ Transit officials said they do not have updated data on how many of their customers are headed to jobs on the East Side.
Roberts, the agency’s planner, said connection to the East Side may become less critical in coming decades because New York City has made redeveloping its West Side, from 31st Street to 41st Street, its main priority.
But, Papp said, research done about a decade ago showed a higher percentage of New Jersey commuters worked within walking distance of Grand Central Terminal than from New York Penn Station.
“It would be nice if they could do Alternative G,” said Janine Bauer, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a watchdog group. “But this is a less than ideal world. The tunnel itself is still important to the majority of the riders.”
“It’s still a great project, it’s just that the optimal result is going to elude us,” said Martin Robins, executive director of Rutgers University’s Transportation Policy Institute.