(The following story by Errol A. Cockfield Jr. appeared on the Newsday website on May 6.)
NEW YORK — Gov. George Pataki announced yesterday that he and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg favor a plan to build a new rail tunnel under the East River to provide direct access to lower Manhattan from Kennedy Airport and Long Island.
Though he didn’t rule out a second alternative of using the existing Montague tunnel, which now serves the M, N and R subway trains, Pataki made it clear that he supports building an entirely new tube, which he said would cost $6 billion and could be finished in 10 years. Commuters would have to change at Jamaica to connect with the new downtown link.
“The new tunnel would carry as many as 100,000 Long Island commuters to lower Manhattan 15 minutes faster than existing rail services,” Pataki said, in a luncheon speech in lower Manhattan before the Association for a Better New York. “And it would provide airport passengers [from New York City] with the long-desired one-seat ride to JFK in just 36 minutes.”
Transit insiders have said the tunnel will actually cost a billion more, but the governor’s office has disputed that figure.
While touting his plan to the audience of prominent business and civic leaders, the governor offered few details of how such a major investment would be financed. He said $560 million would come from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but said only that a “significant” portion of the funding would come from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He said he hopes to access the still-available portions of $21 billion in federal Sept. 11 recovery money and that he will seek assistance from business leaders to find other sources of funding.
These estimates are too vague, said David Dyssegaard Kallick, a senior fellow at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a Manhattan think tank. “I think it’s outrageous to be putting out a 6 billion-dollar project without saying how it’s going to be financed,” Kallick said.
Business leaders in lower Manhattan have long advocated a direct link to downtown, arguing that it would improve the financial district’s global profile and tap into the Long Island labor pool. The plan has caused concern among transportation advocates, however, who fear it could threaten funding for other needed projects.
“The ridership projections are very weak and very questionable,” said Beverly Dolinsky, executive director of the LIRR Commuters Council, a riders’ group. “I cannot believe you will have all these people who want to go downtown. Using that as the rationale for this project just doesn’t make sense.”
Of the 87,460 Long Island commuters who travel to Penn Station each morning, about 13 percent continue traveling downtown.
And, Dolinsky said, she is worried that MTA funding for the project might supersede other important projects, including connecting the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal, adding a third track to the railroad’s main line and upgrading signal systems.
“You have places out in eastern Long Island where you still have someone with a [signal] pole,” she said. “I think those are higher priorities for the Long Island Rail Road.”
(Staff writers Indrani Sen, Joshua Robin and Joie Tyrrell contributed to this story.)