There has been a tremendous uproar over the decision by New Jersey governor Chris Christie to kill the rail tunnel that was to be built under the Hudson River. The project would more than double the capacity to run trains from New Jersey into Manhattan. It is supposed to reduce congestion and create thousands of jobs. The problem is that the cost projections for the tunnel just keep rising. They were at $5 billion four years ago when the project began to be planned; they rose to 8-9 billion dollars when design work started and they are now at 11-14 billion dollars. That is almost a tripling of the cost in five years. Since New Jersey pays at least on third of these costs, that means a rise in expected expenditures for that state of about $2 billion just in the year or so since Christie took office. For Christie, this is just too much.
Christie agreed today to reconsider his decision if the US DOT can come up with some crative solution. My guess is that solution will be federal funding for the project. That way, instead of New Jersey paying for the overruns, all of us will.
The truth is that Christie is onto something here that is the dirty secret of most mass transit construction. For many years, I was involved with the construction of large subway, bridge and rail facilities in the New York metropolitan area. The one constant was that costs always rose from initial estimates and often by astronomical numbers. When ideas were presented that would save enormous amounts of costs, they were just shuffled aside. For example, the New York Transit Authority is currently building a new subway on Second Avenue in Manhattan. This project has been on the drawing boards since the 1960's and construction of part of it actually began in the 1970's. Now it is going finally going ahead in full. The problem, however, is that construction under busy Second Avenue is extremely expensive--billions and billions expensive. One of the most innovative subway design engineers of the recent past, Irwin Toporoff, came up with an alternative to the current design. Toporoff suggested that the subway line be put into a tunnel buried under the East River, a few blocks east of the current site. Subway entrances would have moving sidewalks to get the passengers to the stations. Since there are no buildings in the river and very few utility lines that would need to be moved, the cost of such a line was estimated to be about one-quarter of the current projection for the subway line. In other words, the savings would amount to billions. Indeed, Toporoff suggested that the subway tunnels be built in prefabricated sections and then sunk to the bottom of the river, a process that would have resulted in even further savings.
What happened to this innovative idea? It was rejected without much consideration on the grounds that the approval would be needed from the US Army Corps of Engineers since the East River is a navigable waterway. Of course, no one bothered to ask the Corps of Engineers if it would approve such a plan. Instead, the billions were just spent on the current plan.
There have been many similar ideas that just get shunted away.
Until the process of major construction is streamlined, it may well be that Christie is correct. He deserves kudos for having the gumption to actually say no to the blank check that these projects have gotten in recent years. I'm betting that with a little ingenuity and a lot of work, changes can be made that will bring the cost of the project back down to reasonable levels.
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