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New Jersey Paper Speaks Out Against Dead End ARC Alignment
Thursday, January 07, 2010
North New Jersey’s The Record ran a piece by Editorial page editor Alfred Doblin on December 21 of last year which offers a refreshing corrective to New Jersey Transit’s new interstate rail tunnels, planned to run under the Hudson River.
It’s no secret that NARP—along with a number of other groups, including the Lackawanna Coalition and the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club—has been a vocal opponent of this project, also known as the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC). Not because there is not a need for the tunnels. Rather, it is because the need to expand the rail capacity of the region is so dire; the New York City region remains one of the nation’s most congested train, automotive, and air transit hubs, and solutions are desperately needed. And with more than $9 billion in Metropolitan Transit Authority, New Jersey state, and federal funds needed to bring this project to completion, the stakes are too high to settle for not-good-enough.
Doblin does an excellent job of explaining why the ARC, as presently conceived, is not the solution (bold added):
The new tunnel under the river makes sense. Bringing more New Jersey commuters into Manhattan makes sense. Building a deep-tunnel train station a block from Pennsylvania Station and just footsteps from an existing PATH station makes no sense to the commuters who – well, commute.
...
New Jersey commuters will end up where they always have. NJ Transit cannot take its trains to Grand Central because it would have to bore below a massive tunnel supplying water to Manhattan. Until an additional water tunnel is operational, there will be no NJ Transit trains to Grand Central. This should be the deal-breaker for the project as planned. It makes little sense to expend billions and billions of dollars for a less-than-perfect solution.
...
The Hudson River tunnel project is monumental. But if it isn’t done right, it’s a monument to excess. The advocates for building it now, regardless of where it terminates, are not the everyday people who have to travel back and forth on the trains. Exactly where are the thousands of new commuters going to go after they arrive at 34th Street? Can all those new commuters be absorbed into the existing subway infrastructure at 34th Street? Not likely. It should be Grand Central or bust.
NJ Transit continues to award contracts—two and counting so far, adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars—and the window to correct the flaw of the deep cavern terminal is closing. Transit advocates will have to hope that Governor-elect Chris Christie is paying attention to the voices of reason.
—Sean Jeans-Gail
Learn more about NARP’s proposed fix for the ARC project.
Posted by NARP
Tags: arc, hudson river, mta, new jersey, new york, nj transit,©2010 National Association of Railroad Passengers | » NARP website
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