Sen. Schumer is good for bringing home the bacon.& I'm happy to see the Hudson Yards tunnel box staring actual construction/demolition now.
The recent tiff between Gov. Christie (NJ) and Senator Rand Paul (KY) which started with Sen Paul taking a swipe at NJ over the Hurricane Sandy relief funds. Christie pretty much smacked down Sen. Paul. All part of the early jostling (really early) for the 2016 Republican nomination. While entertaining from the bleacher seats, has nothing to do with the Gateway project or the tunnel box construction.
No. Re-authorization bill can authorize all sorts of stuff, but an authorization bill cannot be used to appropriate in general. Without appropriation all the authorization in the world is not worth a hill of beans, and does not result in receiving any funding. Congress traditionally has never appropriated all the money that it authorized for Amtrak.
As both an AU member and as a moderator, I request that this discussion be confined to matters relating to Amtrak and/or trains or NYP only. I request that politics remain out of the conversation.
Extending the No. 7 train to Secaucus NJ is a valid concept, but will take a decade or two of studies, debate, politics, and figuring who pays for it before anything substantial happens. The MTA has a full plate with a huge backlog of system modernization & flood mitigation projects and the Second Avenue Subway follow-on phases. The paragraph in the article that caught my eye:
Really? Seriously?
The artcile in the Daily News by Jerry Gottesman and Steven Spinola raises some issues worthy of discussion. The article in question can be found at:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/extend-7-train-secaucus-article-1.1504464
It has been stated by some that there would be a funding conflict between any further extension of #7 with all that is already on the plate of MTA. From a funding angle this is not necessarily so. In all likelihood any extension of #7 to Secaucus will not involve any funding from MTA. The funding will come from somewhere else just like the funding for the current #7 extension. It was not from the MTA budget but from the city budget. MTA had basically said it can't be done until Bloomberg gave them a pile of cash and said - go do it, if you want to keep that money. So in principle there is little conflict as far as source of money goes between SAS and ESA etc. and whatever happens at the Hudson end of #7. In all likelihood funding for such a venture would involve the PANYNJ since it is their bailiwick - indeed one of their missions - to provide trans-Hudson transportation links.
But that discussion involving only #7 extension belongs in a different thread.
However, the primary thing that is proposed in that article actually places it squarely within the scope of this thread. The thing proposed is a combined tunnel with four segments, two of which are used for Amtrak/NJT and two for #7, similar to how the 63rd Street tunnel is set up. However there are technical issues with that. EPA and Army Corp of Engineers have summarily rejected the tunneling method that was used for the 63rd St. tunnel for use in case of Hudson because of the amount of buried environmentally hazardous stuff that sits in the river bed that no one wants to stir up. So using the cut, drop tunnel segments and cover method is out.
Given that it has to be a bored tunnel, the difficulty of boring a huge diameter tunnel large enough to encompass four tracks in 2x2 configuration presents its own challenges and cost elements which probably surpasses what it would cost to just bore four separate tunnels. The one with civil engineering in their professional expertise list here, is PRR60. maybe he can give us his perspective on this.
Anyway the implicit danger in what is proposed is that it will inevitably lead to possibly another 6 additional years of studies before anything can happen. At present the #7 proposal pretty much reuses the ARC EIS in toto for most of the Hudson tunnel alignment. The Gateway alignment is relatively well understood though still requires an EIS. And the two can proceed independent of each other on different time lines. This proposal mixes both up and puts a completely new and additional thing that must be studied starting from scratch.
It is almost like if I was trying to delay everything by many years while appearing to be well intentioned, I'd do something like this.
This was done for one of the Underground lines in London nearly 100 years ago. I'm having trouble remembering which one... ah yes, the City and South London (now the City branch of the Northern line) in the 1920s. And talk about having stuff above the tunnel... they had a *lot* of stuff on top of that tube.
Why move when there's such a lot of office space? High demand == lower rents.
The answer to that is that there are more costs associated with being someplace than "just" rent. Long-standing comments about movie ticket prices aside, a lot of things at least seem to be more expensive in New York than elsewhere, though I cannot speak from any meaningful experience how far this extends from Manhattan.
Gateway maps I have seen show the Alignment using ARC's path until Palisades Avenue... Has this been changed?I am sure that all this office space and condo and rents in New York discussion has something to do with Gateway Project
What really needs to happen now is quick progress on the EIS for the Gateway alignment. Gateway does not use the ARC alignment. This I have been told by a guy from PB which is part of a consortium that is helping with the preparatory paperwork for both the Gateway and the #7 to Secaucus proposals. This is as I understand partly because the Gateway proposal uses a higher gradient than the ARC proposal and hence a slightly shorter tunnel under the river.
50 years. OK, probably not really, but a lot of these have taken waaaay too long.
1. If PB is involved with both, what do they think is the most beneficial for New Jersey citizens?
