Amtrak, Others Critique Planned Rail Tunnel Under the Hudson

We've received a bit of feedback about a story this week on the Access to the Region's Core project, a $7.6 billion (at least) pair of New Jersey Transit rail tunnels slated for under the Hudson River—mostly criticisms of the project as currently planned.

The route of the tunnels has drawn criticism from many transportation advocates and some elected officials, particularly over the failure of the project to connect to tracks in Pennsylvania Station and the lack of a connection with Grand Central. Advocates have also criticized the depth of the station platforms under 34th Street, which would be about 150 feet below the street and require high-speed escalators to reach the top, though New Jersey Transit has dismissed the alternatives as far too costly.

Part of an e-mail from George Haikalis, of the Regional Rail Working Group:

In the planning stage for ARC, when MTA was a full partner, the current deep cavern station plan was compared with a plan for a direct connection to existing tracks and platforms at Penn Station that then continued with a new tunnel link to existing tracks and platforms on the Lower Level of Grand Central Terminal. In the 31-page planning study, the only publicly available document from the ARC Study, the Grand Central option would cost the less to build and operate and would attract more passengers and divert more motorists. This plan was dropped when NY's Governor George Pataki realized that this plan helped New Jersey more than New York.

But like dangling candy before a bunch of kids and then pulling it away, transit advocates are not satisfied to let what FTA Administrator James Simpson termed "the most important project in the country" be trivialized by interstate rivalry. After all, the interstate clause of the U.S. Constitution could be invoked by Simpson to attach a string to his $3 billion grant--that the two states must advance a plan that links the two busiest railway stations in the nation.

Also of note, we got a look at a letter Amtrak submitted earlier this year offering some criticism of the project as currently planned. While the rail carrier supports the project overall, it has concerns that the project will not adequately expand regional rail capacity as the area and ridership grow given its lack of a connection to the Penn Station tracks. From the letter to New Jersey Transit:

[The project's] failure to construct two short connections into Penn Station in Manhattan from the proposed ARC tunnels constitutes, from Amtrak's perspective, a breech in long established goals to expand Northeast Corridor operational capability. ... Amtrak has real concerns that the existing NEC [Northeast Corridor] trans-Hudson rail tunnels will prove inadequate to sustain operations in the future.