I’ve lived in this area about half of my adult life. Taken the train to NYC many times. But, I had no friggin idea how bad the tunnels are. And I really have always wondered why there are no lights. Now I know … it’s pitch black for a reason. Holy shit, this is a frightful read. Maybe Ms Freud and I should take the bus.
The Most Awful Transit Center in America Could Get Unimaginably Worse
Commuters exit Penn Station.
To get to New York’s Penn Station, every northbound Amtrak passenger makes the last leg of their journey, through tunnels beneath the Hudson River, in the dark. Trust me: They should be glad. One day this autumn, an Acela pulls into Newark, N.J., and a railway spokesman escorts me onto the rear engine car, where we stand and take in the view facing backward. As we descend into one of the Hudson tunnels—there are two, both 107 years old, finished in the same year the Wright brothers built their first airplane factory—a supervisor flips on the rear headlights, illuminating the ghastly tubes.
Our train (unsurprisingly) is operating at reduced speed because of an electrical glitch, which just gives us more time to gawk at the damage. There are eerie, nearly fluorescent white stains on the tunnel walls that look like they were painted by a giant with a roller brush. The pale swaths are remnants of the salt water that inundated the passages five years ago, during Hurricane Sandy. Sulfates and chlorides have been eating away at the concrete ever since, exposing reinforcement bars underneath. “Keep your eyes peeled,” says Craig Schulz, the affable Amtrakspokesman, “and you’ll see some of these areas where there is literally just crumbling concrete.”
As we emerge into the bowels of Penn Station, Schulz points to wooden flood doors above the tunnel entrances. They were installed during World War II to hold back the river if the tubes were torpedoed by a Nazi submarine. In the gloom, the doors look a full century older than their vintage. They seem more suited for a dungeon than a modern rail system like this one—the Northeast Corridor, which runs from Boston to Washington, D.C., serving an area that generates a fifth of U.S. gross domestic product. Before we step off the train, Schulz repeats Amtrak’s mantra: The storm-ravaged tunnels are safe, for now, but the railroad doesn’t know how long it will be able to keep them in service.
I’d been assigned to write a story about Pennsylvania Station, but I wanted to get a caboose-eye view of the decaying tunnels leading up to it, because the only imaginable way the station could be any worse is if it were underwater.
Penn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined. More than 200,000 people also use the subway stops that connect to Penn through harshly lit, low-ceilinged subterranean corridors. Locals race through the place; out-of-towners proceed more anxiously, baffled by the layout of what is truly not one station but three: Amtrak shares the space with the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit. All who schlep through the complex are united by a powerful urge to leave. “Everybody just wants to get the hell out of there,” says Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.
There are too many people in Penn Station because there are too many trains—more than 1,300 arrivals and departures every weekday, twice the number from four decades ago. With so much traffic, small problems routinely compound into big ones; a 10-minute delay for one train backs up dozens more, and then tens of thousands of people are kept from their destinations. Every late train bleeds the economy: Executives miss board meetings, tourists don’t spend, hourly workers get a smaller paycheck.
In the last year, Penn Station’s troubles have ripened into gruesome new forms. In April, a rumor spread through the commuter crowds that shots had been fired. People dropped briefcases, phones, and heels in the pandemonium, which spread in part because the station has no coordinated public address system. Alexander Hardy, a Bronx-based writer who was headed to Washington, D.C., watched the stampede, which left 16 people injured, from behind the counter of a Dunkin’ Donuts, where he hid with half a dozen others. “I’m texting my friends to ask what the hell’s happening,” he says. Finally, Amtrak gave the all-clear; there hadn’t been a shooting after all. Hardy stepped out of the doughnut shop. A woman, separated from her child, was screaming. Hardy took a bus to the capital. A few weeks later, a sewage pipe spewed waste onto a heavily trafficked concourse—an honest-to-God shitstorm. “I’m like, ‘Literally, it’s raining in Penn Station,’ ” recalls Marigo Mihalos, a booking agent from New Jersey who witnessed the fecal deluge on her way to work.
After two trains derailed in Penn Station last spring, the railway said it would reduce service by 20 percent during peak hours for eight weeks to do repairs, forcing many commuters to take buses and ferries. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told his constituents to brace for the “summer of hell.” As the station festers, civic groups and preservationists are renewing their call for elected officials to move Madison Square Garden (non-New Yorkers may not be aware that a 21,000-seat stadium is located directly above Penn Station) and build a new space, cavernous and sunlit. But nothing in the station’s political history or the present-day debate suggests cause for hope.
As the gateway to America’s largest city, Penn Station should inspire awe, as train stations do in London, Paris, Tokyo, and other competently managed metropolises. Instead, it embodies a particular kind of American failure—the inability to maintain roads, rails, ports, and other necessary conduits.
Forgenerations, the officials connected to Penn Station have been blind to, or unable to deliver on, the idea that improving the station would more than pay for itself. (One estimate, from the Business Roundtable, says that a dollar invested in infrastructure yields as much as $3 in economic growth.) In the final days of 2017, the situation reached perhaps its bleakest point yet, when the Trump administration signaled its disinterest in coming to the rescue: The president will not honor an Obama-era commitment to New York and New Jersey to foot half the cost of a new tunnel, dumping planners back at square one.
Penn Station is a debacle reaching across time. Its past is a slow-motion disaster of inaction and canceled reforms, its present an ongoing disgrace. And its future could be truly catastrophic, in the form of a tunnel failure that pinches shut one of the most vital economic arteries in America.
On a hot Saturday in June, Penn is lousy with people trying to exit the city. Outside a McDonald’s that has never known sunlight or fresh air, the sweaty throngs give strange looks to a bearded man in shorts who appears to be remaining in the station voluntarily. His name is Justin Rivers, and he leads $35 tours called Remnants of Penn Station. A dozen or so takers appear for this, his second tour of the day. The first one, Rivers tells the group, ran 20 minutes long because guests couldn’t stop asking questions about the summer of hell. “People are just really interested,” Rivers says. “Penn Station has been in the press almost daily because it’s falling apart.”
His tourgoers are among the many New Yorkers—and others with an interest in urban planning—who know that today’s decrepit facility sits beneath what used to be a gorgeous hall, inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla. It was demolished in the 1960s, to the dismay of preservationists. Rivers leads his flock through modern-day Penn, pointing out vestiges of the old place: an original staircase leading down to the tracks; a Long Island Rail Road waiting room; a ghostly, red-lettered sign for the long-gone Pennsylvania Railroad.
As he dodges homeless people and glassy-eyed tallboy vendors, Rivers, who’s also written an off-Broadway play about the original station’s demise, tells the story of Alexander Cassatt, the visionary railroad president who began construction on both Penn and the Hudson tunnels at the turn of the last century. He died before the building opened in 1910, to a crowd of 100,000. In its early days, Penn was the kind of place you might go without a ticket to glimpse stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford boarding the Orange Blossom Special to Florida or the Chicago-bound Broadway Limited.
But after World War II, the once-powerful rail companies withered as the government built the interstate highways and subsidized air travel. In 1970 the successor to Pennsylvania Railroad declared bankruptcy, and soon the station and its tunnels became the property of Amtrak, the new federal railroad. Perennially underfunded, Amtrak didn’t—and still doesn’t—have much cash to spend on either Penn Station or the tunnels. Instead, says Daniel Baer, senior vice president of the engineering and consulting firm WSP USA, the railroad tends to fix things only when they’re already broken. “Amtrak is in a situation where they’re constantly chasing their tail,” he says.
The addition of New Jersey Transit trains in the 1990s was both an economic boon to the region—I bought a house in Maplewood, N.J., in 1996 so I could ride the new Midtown Direct to work—and the beginning of Penn Station’s transformation from mere malodorous eyesore to Hieronymus Bosch-grade hellhole. With Jersey commuters swarming the place, farsighted politicians presented grand visions for upgrading it. They all failed.
Vision 1: In the late 1990s, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised $350 million to replace Penn with a new station in the building right next to it, an historic post office. (“My dad always said, ‘Only in New York could you knock down a magnificent Beaux Arts masterpiece only to find another one by the same architect across the street,’ ” remembers Maura Moynihan, his daughter.) The effort fell apart after Sept. 11.
Vision 2: In 2008, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was on the verge of pushing through a multibillion-dollar plan to relocate MSG and renovate Penn into a cathedral-like space. It collapsed with the rest of Spitzer’s political career when he was caught patronizing prostitutes and resigned.
Vision 3: In 2009, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine put together a fully funded $8.7 billion project for new tunnels—Access to the Region’s Core, or the biblical-sounding ARC. But in a case of extreme political myopia, Corzine’s successor, the White House-eyeing Chris Christie, canceled the plan to keep gasoline taxes low.
Christie’s folly became clear in October 2012. Hurricane Sandy struck the region with 80-mile-an-hour winds, and the water off New York rose higher than at any time in the city’s recorded history. The Hudson River surged over the banks of Manhattan, poured into a submerged railyard, and flooded Penn Station’s venerable tunnels. A few days later, Amtrak pumped out 13 million gallons of seawater from those tubes and two that run beneath the East River. But chemicals had penetrated the walls and begun gnawing away at concrete and power systems that dated to the time of the Orange Blossom Special.
Even after Sandy, a post-ARC construction effort called the Gateway Program languished. At a hearing in Trenton in 2015, Stephen Gardner, an Amtrak vice president, tried to stoke some urgency among legislators by brandishing a fearsome-looking hunk of wire from the tunnels’ malfunctioning electrical system. “Mr. Chairman, this is a portion of the feeder cable that failed,” he said. “These are 1930s-vintage, lead-lined, oil-filled, paper-insulated copper cables, and they do a pretty amazing job. As you can see here, they are quite an antique, and we rely on them every day.” Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, a local urban policy group, attended the hearing. He was stunned: “I mentioned to Steve afterwards, ‘Jesus, that looks like a set piece from the old Bride of Frankenstein movie.’ He kind of laughed and said, ‘Actually, I think it’s older than that.’ ”
The same month, one of New Jersey’s Democratic senators, Cory Booker, rode through one of the tunnels in a special Amtrak observation car, equipped with floodlights. Booker was shocked to see cracks in the walls. “It was incredibly eye-opening,” he says in an interview, adding that Amtrak officials told him if there were another storm as strong as Sandy, the tunnels might not survive.
In the era of climate change, hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent. Sandy, as bad as it was, only flooded the Hudson tunnels halfway. A storm that completely inundated the chambers could cause them to crack up from the inside, taking out lighting, radio, and ventilation systems. If the walls were weakened enough, the worst-case scenario could occur: total collapse. In some areas, the tunnels sit just below the riverbed, and William Ryan, a special research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, says there is less sediment there than there used to be. Ryan spent years, starting in the late 1980s, mapping the bottom of the Hudson using echo sounding and reflection profiling. His team found that the 1960s creation of Battery Park City—an expansion of Manhattan island into the Hudson, using landfill from the excavation of the World Trade Center site—altered the way the river flows. As a result, a good part of the silt protecting the train tunnels has been carried off.
The most likely tunnel-disaster scenario, however, requires no storms at all. Amtrak says that within seven years, one of them is likely to have been so weakened by Sandy’s aftereffects that it will have to be taken out of service for at least 18 months’ worth of repairs. “There will come a time when the reliability of the tunnels starts to decay,” says Charles “Wick” Moorman, the co-CEO of Amtrak until the end of 2017. “The curve, once it starts, may be fairly sharp. We’ll just have to see. Nobody knows. This is a great science experiment. Kids playing with chemicals.”
If Amtrak and New Jersey Transit have to rely on a single Hudson tunnel, they could operate just six trains an hour, rather than the current 24. It’s hard to overstate the economic impact that would have on New York City. “The summer of hell?” Booker asks. “To me, that would be a warm day at the beach compared to the hellfire we would be in if one of those tunnels had to be taken out of service.”
Accordingto the Partnership for New York City, a group that represents its business community, some 30 percent of Manhattan’s workforce lives west of the Hudson. These commuters could try to cram onto the Port Authority’s PATH trains, which carry 292,000 commuters a day through different Hudson tunnels, but they’re already near capacity. There are always ferries. But does a region that has prided itself on being ahead of the rest of the world truly want to see the large-scale return of a mode of transportation from the 19th century?
Others could drive to work, but the trans-Hudson bridges and tunnels available to cars already have punishing rush-hour delays. Imagine the backups, road rage, and pollution if tens of thousands of additional commuters had to use them.
CommonGood, a bipartisan government-reform organization, estimates that 50,000 more automobiles crossing the Hudson each day would sap productivity by $2.3 billion per year. And that’s nothing compared with the biggest number of them all. The Northeast Corridor Commission, a panel created by Congress in 2008, projects that the U.S. economy would lose $100 million per day—$36.5 billion a year—if the entire train route from Boston to Washington ever shut down.
2015 the governors of New York and New Jersey agreed to a deal on Gateway: The states would pay half the cost of building new tunnels to Penn, and the Obama administration pledged that the federal government would cover the other half. That year and the next, Donald Trump campaigned as the guy who would rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, promising a $1 trillion plan to repair roads, bridges, tunnels, the electrical grid, and more. It was possible to think that Penn Station might be saved.
But after Trump was elected, the New York City native dashed those hopes. He eliminated billions in funding for Gateway-related projects in his 2018 budget. And in the waning days of 2017, Trump made it official: His administration would not abide by the Obama-era commitment to pay for half of the new tunnels. K. Jane Williams, deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, sent a curtly worded letter to New York and New Jersey officials that snidely made the deal sound made-up. “We consider it unhelpful to reference a nonexistent ‘agreement’ rather than directly address the responsibility for funding a local project where 9 out of 10 passengers are local transit riders,” she wrote. In the Trump administration’s view, Penn Station’s issues are a distinctly local concern. It’s true that in the Trump era, nothing is ever certain, and the Gateway corpse could reawaken. But it seems unlikely that the current political cast will succeed where so many of their predecessors have failed.
Meanwhile, across the street from the station, work has begun on the renovation of the James A. Farley Post Office building—the Beaux Arts masterpiece Senator Moynihan eyed in the 1990s. Separate from the Gateway project, it’s being converted into a new entrance hall for Amtrak and LIRR trains (and a glassy shopping center) and is scheduled to open in 2020. In August, Cuomo, who’s widely seen as considering a bid for the presidency, held a triumphant press conference at the site that had the feel of a political rally. “At a time when there is confusion in this country, and there is anger in this country, and there’s anxiety and despair, New York is headed in the only direction we know, which is going forward!” he said, slicing the air with his right hand.
But the $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall, as it will be known, isn’t likely to significantly reduce congestion, according to NYU’s Moss. Amtrak and LIRR passengers will still be able to access the train complex from the existing Penn Station, which is a block closer to the center of Manhattan. (The Cuomo administration says the impact will be greater.) Moss is among those who scoff at the idea of prettying the upper-level train station experience when what lies beneath is a such mess. “We don’t need a transit temple,” he says. “We need to focus on the tunnels and getting more tracks into Manhattan.”
I don’t frequent Penn Station as much as I used to. My wife and I sold our house in New Jersey in 2016 and moved into Manhattan, just before the commute got infernal. Of course, now we have to deal with the subways. Have you heard? They’re falling apart, too. —With Elise Young
https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek
Good LORD I’m glad I don’t live in a place like that.
You are going to DIE unless you take your Mac10 with you.
Government.
“In the era of climate change, hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent.”
A blatant LIE or the author is just plain stupid.
The IPCC in their Assessment Reports (AR’s) refute that LIE.
For further info:
Dr. Richard Lindzen has made a statement, via Climate Depot, that sums up what many of us think, and why AR5 SPM is a credibility train wreck:
” I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.
Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans. However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability. Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.
Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about. It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.”
Regardless of whether or not global warming will cause more hurricanes (or even exists) NYC is in the Atlantic seaboard hurricane path, and WILL eventually get hit by a hurricane of cat 3 or more. It is just a matter of time. People knew that New Orleans was in the path of Caribbean hurricanes, and did nothing to maintain the levees. Look what happened in Katrina.
Why rebuild the same place. Time to relocate. Its just a horseshit financial center. Move it elsewhere. Inland out of the way of hurricanes maybe. Cleveland is a shithole. Move it all there.
Plenty of open land in Detroit. Infrastructure is there – roads, airports, rail. Why any company of paper pushers would want to be located in NYC is beyond me.
I’m guessing both…
When you get there you’ll face this: http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/01/08/nyc-garbage-piles-up/
Urban life….AH, the sights (garbage), the sounds (police cars), the smells (the garbage), the Rodents(Mice, Rats), the Insects (Cockroaches)……………..
Utopia
Don’t you just love all the diversity with all the glorious ” People of color ” Stucky this calls for constant situation awareness .Stay alert or even better ….Stay away .
Like , I give a shit about New York ???
Like … I give a shit what you give a shit about???
I gotta say Stucky, why the fuck did you move to Manhattan? NYC is a shit hole. Why would a reasonable guy live in such a cesspool of crime and congestion?
I can tell you what’s going to happen to NYC – it’s already dysfunctional, but very soon the infrastructure is going to collapse. The area wasn’t suppose to have that many people. All the tax money (and money robbed from Albany) has not gone to improve the infrastructure. NYC could easily become like Puerto Rico.
While it’s was -14 in Minneapolis – we have none of those problems. Looking back, I was very lucky that in 1971, out of Penn State, I couldn’t get at job in PA, NJ, NY.
Amtrak is a kleptocracy run for government workers, mostly incompetent, so of course it doesn’t have any money except what it gets from taxpayers. New York, wealthiest city in the world, could pay for its own infrastructure 100 times over, but prefers to come begging to the Federal government. Screw them, and hurrah for Trump.
Funny how this is one of those functions that people expect governments to do. This is what people THINK they pay taxes for. Yet, after they get done paying for all the social services, the insane pay/benefits packages for the employees that are supposed to maintain these things, and the expenses involved in being a sanctuary city, theres nothing left for the actual basic functions of government.
Yes, the future of NYC is known, only the timing is unknown…And when the financial district moves out of NYC, which it will eventually due to taxes and other costs, NYC will just be an even more diverse version of Detroit…’Escape from New York’ wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual!
Dutchy
I do NOT live in NY. I still live in Joisey (almost as bad). I’m traveling through Manhattan on my way to Long Island to purchase a vehicle.
Wash your hands – you may get AIDS from a doorknob – in NYC.
Take the ferry out of Weehawkin (and don’t forget to visit the historical site commemorating Aaron Burr’s dueling victory over Alexander Hamilton). I would even take the ferry from Belfort or the Atlantic Highlands (which are clearly out of your way if you live in central jersey) before I would take the train.
Thanks to Lincolns war, we’re all slaves now.
Good article overall, climate change nonsense notwithstanding.
As a native NYer (b. 1946) long gone who remembers the Penn Station of yore, a time when one didn’t have to run the gauntlet of derelicts who might bite your ankle and give you AIDS, all I can think of is “Cry, the Beloved Country”. NYC (Manhattan in particular) was once a wonderful place to live and grow up, believe it or not. Now? TS has it right, more’s the pity!
It was even better before WW2, highly civilized, full of colorful characters from artists to gamblers, diversity totally under control…Alas Babylon!
Like the concern a community has over asking for a new traffic light at a now busy intersection and government officials ignore the problem, until someone dies at the intersection, then a light goes on and then up.
This is like that, times 430,000. Almost half a million people use this disaster waiting to happen a day?
This could be a great disaster movie in real life.
Exactly what politicians will do – wait for the disaster to happen, then they will save us.
With what? The cost of replacing these tunnels and other crumbling infrastructure (at NYC labor and procurement rates) will be hundreds of billions….
Those transit workers … the ones that do repair work …. average $110/ per HOUR. Heard that on 77WABC this AM.
Its not just fucked up that they wait for a disaster in which people are hurt/killed before doing anything, its also a lot more expensive. However much these repairs and upgrades will cost, they will be orders of magnitude higher to do AFTER said disaster than they would be now. Just the cleanup and lawsuits alone will add billions to the price tag. Plus, when you are able to plan potential service outages in advance and make preparations for them, the economic impact is reduced.
But, this being government, and NYC’s in particular, we all know how this will go.
When I read stuff like this and articles about the Amtrak derailment south of Tacoma, I almost believe I’m reading chapters from Atlas Shrugged. In Ayn Rand’s novel, the railroad symbolized society with the incompetent, corrupt government controlling the rails and almost none of the employees giving a shit.
Sounds like now.
Exactly..
A story of decay and poverty that lies at the heart of the so-called “American” (sic) dream. This is where delusions of “full spectrum dominance” infused with the hubris of go-along idiots crash against the reality of a has been empire living off other folk’s credit and very little more borrowed time. The wake up is coming and it guarantees that war bloated USSA will one day pay the terrible price for believing its own myopic BS. To all intents and purposes USSA already has more in common with India that probably any other “democratic” nation on the planet.
Didn’t you survive the Chatham Police? The train to NYC is no threat to you. If anyone fucks with you, just go epic beard man on them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pimrJXErWgk
If only New York City and its Jersey suburbs could find a source of funds to fix their infrastructure. It is a baffling mystery where such funds could be found in the area. Baffling I tell you!
Exactly, Yancy. Here’s an area that “generates a fifth of US gross domestic product” (which is mostly the result of Moneychangers, yeah, that’s a pretty gross product). And they can’t pony up the funds to maintain their train set; of course, the top financial wizards generating all this product don’t ride the trains anyway- and would much rather have the US taxpayer foot the bill. So round up the usual suspects: Climate change! Trumps fault! Amtrak underfunded! Same shite, different day.
(((Every single time)))
Yes I am a proud Native New Yorker. Adirondack Park that is. Us up here want nothing to do with that cesspool 400 miles to our south. Not even to visit. If it just floated out to sea and somehow joined Calif. We would not miss it. But only if it takes the idiot governor with it. Oh and Schumer to. My transit into work has zero traffic lights and zero stop signs. Also…..there are no dark complexion faces to see along the way.
We just visited Troy, and it is a dumping ground for diversity from every 3d world hellhole on the planet, so (((they))) will get to you eventually.
With all due respect, sir, you ain’t a native NYer; that applies to those born in NYC (Manhattan in particular). That’s what’s understood by the rest of the world, folks who know nothing of the boons from which you write. Nothing against y’all, you understand, but go hunt some coons and recognize that for most, you’re a well-intentioned rube. I left my beloved native place to become the same far, far away from there, never forgetting, however, the wonder that was NYC way back when.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1rH_iaZkv0
Monte. Just a little sarcasm.
There is ONE sentence in this thing that nobody has caught. But it says it all.:
“But after World War II, the once-powerful rail companies withered as the government built the interstate highways and subsidized air travel. In 1970 the successor to Pennsylvania Railroad declared bankruptcy, and soon the station and its tunnels became the property of Amtrak, the new federal railroad. ”
You see, PRIVATE Enterprise built that railroad AND that station.
Government killed the railroads and they are killing the station. And this numnut says that MORE government will save it? What a fucking moran.
Please read Walter Block on private infrastructure.
BTW, I rode on the French TGV a few years ago and it was pretty disgusting. Fast, though, but I give it a few years before socialism slows it to 30 km.
Good catch. I noticed that, but it didn’t really sink in until I read your comment. That really is the most important sentence in this piece. It really says it all. Like everything else government touches, you get less for more. Or, in this case, nothing. And just wait, the LAST people who will be blamed for the inevitable disaster are the people responsible for it.
@Anon
Well said, sir! Argentina (my home country) once had a wonderful railroad infrastructure system, but it was killed by nationalization and the truckers’ union. We’ve yet to recover. The railroad station in the capital is a dump, the area trains something out of India, and here in the interior, well…
It is too late to fix this issue. Let the tunnels die. Any attempt to fix it will, in my opinion, fail.
I read the estimated cost of a new tunnel is $13 billion. So, it is really probably $30 billion. And it will take years to do. And the other two tunnels will likely fail or need severe overhaul before the new tunnel comes on line, at a cost of who knows how much. The process should have begun decades ago. But repairmen, train drivers, etc., sucking up $110 an hour would be making $150 an hour if fares had been increased to accrue for new tunnels.
The population and business needs to relocate. It is that simple. The paradigm of untold thousands of folks transiting through those tunnels is now unsustainable.
If people want to live like rats, traversing an endless maze, that is their choice. But they need to pay for that privilege themselves. Trump was right to tell them to get fucked.
Those rats can pay, endlessly, or move. Not my problem. Nor the problem of anyone who does not live there. Unless you have to pick up a car. I suggest taking a bus over. Those tunnels sound like death traps.
I just did the calcs. Using my $30 billion guess, and using the figures that are available that 200,000 people use the tunnels each day, and making the reasonable assumption that they are repeat users, and take the vast majority of the trips, then you can say this: to upgrade or add the tunnels will benefit 200,000 people, and really no one else.
The expenditure amounts to $150,000 per person benefitted. That is obscene. It is ridiculous. It is a transfer payment from everyone else to them. Govt expenditure of that magnitude should benefit more than a select group of the population.
Let them pay it themselves, at say around an additional $15000 a year in fares. User pays seems fair.
Or better yet, let them move to the other side of the damn tunnel.
I used to ride the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor trains from New Brunswick to NY Penn. I called it the Orient Express because all the H1B visa techies would get on at Edison and MetroPark. After 9/11 you’d walk around that place and see armed soldiers and the cops in their riot gear roaming around the platforms. Made it feel like you were in East Germany. Show me your papers!
I was always amazed that some terrorist didn’t try to ignite something in those tunnels. There was no bag check when you got on the train. I guess they decided why waste the effort? It’s only a matter of time before they collapse due to neglect.
I’m glad I got out of that NJ hell hole. We moved this year to North Carolina. Lots of tax refugees down here. You know, all the people that were making money, paying taxes and decided that NJ offered nothing more than more taxes and a sanctuary state. Raising the gas tax was the last straw for me. That was the only cheap thing in NJ. Come down here Stucky. You’ll never go back and your wallet will love you.