New tunnels under the Hudson

Commuting time may be shortened

By FRITZ MAYER

NORTH BERGAN, NJ — With much fanfare and speech making, politicians on June 9 marked the official groundbreaking of what is being described as the biggest transportation project in the nation, the Mass Transit Tunnel (MTT). The project, which will not be completed until 2017 at the earliest, will involve digging two new tunnels beneath the Palisades cliffs along the Hudson River, under the river, to a new train station buried some 175 feet beneath the streets of Manhattan and Penn Station.

The interest for this area is that the new tunnel will shorten the train trip from Port Jervis, NY to the city, which is currently about three hours, by at least 15 minutes. That’s because travelers who ride the Main/Bergen County line, also known as the Port Jervis line, must change trains in Secaucus before entering the city. With the new tunnels there will be, for the first time, a direct run into Manhattan from the Port Jervis line.

Michael Burke, a spokesman for New Jersey Transit (NJT), one of the organizations paying for the tunnel, said there will also be additional time saved because the many delays that are now experienced will be greatly reduced.

Planning for the project began in 1992, but with bureaucracies from two states, New York City and the federal government all involved in the $8.7 billion project, groundbreaking was a very long time coming.

In January, the federal government kicked in $130 million in stimulus funds and has also pledged to foot $3 billion of the bill. The rest of the money is coming from NJT, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority.

NJT says the new tunnels are needed because the only existing train tunnels between New Jersey and New York City, which were finished in 1910, are now working at full capacity running about 23 trains per hour during peak travel times. Officials want to increase that to 48 trains per peak hour. Expressed another way, the existing lines now handle 45 million passenger miles per year; with new tunnels capacity will increase to 90 million passenger miles per year.

Passengers who arrive at the new station will have direct access to several of the city’s subway lines.

Original plans had called for the line to have a spur that would have run from the new station to Grand Central Station on the east side of the city. But those plans were dropped because city officials refused to allow new tunneling near an existing 90-year-old water tunnel. But that tunnel is now being replaced, so the spur may come up for consideration again.

While local politicians are all sold on the need for the new lines and the new station, not everyone in the area agrees. One blogger on a local New Jersey news site expressed the view that travelling up 175 feet on escalators to reach street level will seriously cut into any time saved by not having to change trains in Secaucus.