A massive $9 billion construction project is almost underway that will bore a tunnel under Rtes. 1&9 in New Jersey, under the Hudson, and linking Jersey train riders the PATH, New Jersey Transit, and 14 subway lines.
Some time next month, the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) project will see the first under-the-Hudson rail tunnels in over a century start to be built, reports the Star Ledger. The project, including a station that stretches from 8th to 6th Avenue, should be completed in 2017.
Here’s why this matters to Jersey riders.
The existing tunnels, which enter the Palisades just a quarter mile north of the new tubes’ route, reached capacity earlier this decade, creating a bottleneck for the NJ Transit and Amtrak trains that travel to and from Penn Station along the Northeast Corridor, the most congested stretch of track in the nation.
That translates into slower service and frequent delays. During peak travel periods, 23 trains pass through the old tunnels each hour, hardly enough at a time when NJ Transit sets ridership records each year.
“It’s basically a capacity issue,” said Zoe Baldwin, the New Jersey advocate for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, another advocacy group. “We’re just unable to run more trains.”
When the new tunnels are completed, NJ Transit and Amtrak will increase the number of trains crossing the river to 34 per hour during peak periods. That number will gradually rise to a maximum 48 per hour by 2030, when ridership is projected to be nearly 60 percent higher than it is today.
Central to the tunnel plan are these massive boring machines, which can burrow about 30 feet a day through nasty Palisades bedrock.
By the time the digging is done, workers will have cut through more than 8 miles of the underground, excavating an estimated 2 million cubic yards of rock, soil and silt — enough material, Donatelli says, to fill Giants Stadium.
Some of that material will form the base of a new 82-acre rail yard in Kearny. More will be used to line embankments for new tracks that will run alongside the Northeast Corridor from Secaucus to the tunnels in North Bergen. Leftovers will be sent to approved dump sites.
All of it will be hauled by trucks. Day in and day out, dump trucks will head to and from Kearny and Secaucus. In Manhattan, where the most rock and soil will be excavated, an estimated 255 trucks per day — 10 to 11 per hour — will head to New Jersey and back through the Lincoln Tunnel.
So, in short, this is good for train riders, and bad for the poor saps stuck in Lincoln Tunnel traffic over the next eight years.
Thanks to JerseyJim for the link.
I’m waaay out here in Seattle, but this dead-end tunnel strikes me as so wrong somehow. Shouldn’t there be the opportunity to connect to GCT and to allow for through services from Long Island, Metro North and the Northeast Corridor? What happens when those centuryold tunnels into Penn Station need repaired and replaced (which they do/will)? Maybe someone from back there can sort this our for me? Seems to me to be a potentially US$10B misadenture.