Transit group mulls over proposals to ease traffic at NYC transport hub

New York

A US$29 billion plan to build a new train tunnel under the Hudson River to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan should be even more ambitious and allow trains to roll through the station from New Jersey to Long Island, an influential transit-advocacy group said Wednesday.

The group, the Regional Plan Association, also called for the Gateway tunnel project to include expanding Penn Station an additional block south to 30th Street, a move that would require taking several occupied buildings.

The recommendations came in the midst of eight weeks of emergency repairs to the tracks at Penn Station, a season that New York governor Andrew Cuomo had projected to be a "summer of hell". The complicated commute has gone more smoothly than expected, but the association warned that "public transportation across the Hudson River is in crisis".

The group's suggestions for addressing that problem include building a terminal for intercity buses beneath the Jacob K Javits Centre on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A second terminal that would accommodate long-distance buses would alleviate overcrowding at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street, the organisation said. The Port Authority's long-term capital plan calls for replacing the main bus terminal but does not include a second terminal under the Javits Centre.

The ideas on improving travel across the Hudson are part of the latest update to the association's sweeping regional plan, the fourth edition of which is scheduled to be released this fall. The association is a non-partisan research group that has helped to shape transportation in the New York metropolitan region for decades.

Its suggestions are not entirely new. The planners of the Gateway project have considered expanding Penn Station to the south and extending the tunnels across Manhattan and have not ruled out either idea.

Thomas K Wright, the president of the association, said the group did not have detailed estimates of the costs of these projects. But he said the extension of the Gateway tunnels across Manhattan and under the East River to Queens could cost about US$7 billion. That would push the total cost of Gateway, half of which is expected to be provided by the federal government, well past US$35 billion.

Alluding to the Trump administration, Mr Wright said the planners of Gateway had been "having trouble getting the money that we need from the feds already". Still, he said, he believed that the recommendations would be cost-effective solutions to dealing with the overcrowding on trains and buses. Running trains through Manhattan between Long Island and New Jersey would increase the potential capacity on trains crossing the Hudson by about 40 per cent, he said.

Under this proposal, those trains that are now operated by the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit would essentially combine territories, picking up passengers both east and west of Manhattan. Neither the Long Island Rail Road nor New Jersey Transit has suggested such a proposal. Mr Wright said he did not know how much a bus terminal in the basement of the Javits Centre would cost. But he said building it would allow the Port Authority to save billions of dollars by rehabilitating rather than replacing the main bus terminal in the next 25 years.

It also would free up some room for more commuter buses at the main terminal, which has been operating at full capacity for years, he said. Intercity buses, similar to those operated by Greyhound and Trailways, take up about one-fifth of the gates in the main terminal, he said.

Mr Wright said the association focused on travel across the Hudson first because it had reached a crisis level. "We are living on borrowed time on the links between New York and New Jersey," he said, citing the existing rail tunnel that was damaged by Hurricane Sandy as the most critical problem.

On the brighter side, he said that all of the recent troubles with commuter trains and subways had attracted the attention of the governors of New York and New Jersey and other public officials. Those incidents have "opened up the eyes of public officials and political leaders to these sorts of problems," he said.

But some elected officials rejected the association's recommendation to build a second bus terminal under the Javits Centre. Two Democratic state senators in New Jersey, Loretta Weinberg and Robert Gordon, called the idea "flawed, premature, unrealistic and New York-centric". With the Port Authority projecting that the number of commuters riding buses into Manhattan from New Jersey could increase by 50 per cent in the next 25 years, building a new main terminal near the existing one is "a necessity", they said in a joint statement. NYTIMES