The Hudson Tunnel Project: Exploring public opinion support for public funding mechanisms for critical infrastructure

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2018.04.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Intrinsic case study of public funding options for Hudson Tunnel Project.

  • Attitudes on new tunnel funding via a state bond issue or user’s fee are analyzed.

  • Public decision-making process on transit funding is both cognitive and affective.

Introduction

In the late 19th century business and political leaders recognized that rapidly growing New York City had to be linked, whether over or under the Hudson River, to its western neighbor, New Jersey. By 1890 water ferries were bringing 80 million passengers per year across the mile-plus-wide Hudson River; by 1900 that number was 90 million passengers, or about 250,000 a day. Jill Jonnes’s Conquering Gotham tells the story of building New York City’s original Pennsylvania Station, opened in 1910 along with its feeder tunnels, the North River Tunnels. Jonnes documents the political, economic, and health and safety concerns associated with ferry traffic, including collisions, capsizings, whether due to inclement weather or otherwise and other hazardous transportation problems causing injuries and deaths (Jonnes, 2007). To this day, the safe use of ferries remains a challenge for maritime risk analysts across the globe (Sven et al., 2002, Talley, 2002) as well as in New York Harbor (Mele, 2016, Wilson, 2017).

This set of circumstances generated three Hudson River tunnel projects: The Uptown Hudson Tubes, put into service in February 1908; the Downtown Hudson Tubes, put into service in July 1909; and, of interest here, the North River Tunnels, which opened for service in tandem with the original New York City Pennsylvania Station on November 27, 1910. The Uptown Hudson Tubes currently carry Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PATH) passenger trains on short runs entering New York City at Greenwich Village’s Christopher Street Station (running up to Pennsylvania Station at 33rd Street) and, on the New Jersey side, terminating at Hoboken Terminal and Pennsylvania Station in Newark. The Downtown Hudson Tubes currently carry PATH passenger trains on short runs between the World Trade Center station in lower Manhattan, also terminating on the New Jersey side at Hoboken and Newark.

The North River Tunnels carry long-run Amtrak and New Jersey Transit (NJ TRANSIT) passenger trains, with New Jersey-side entrances in Weehawken and terminating at Pennsylvania Station in mid-town Manhattan. While all three sets of tunnels sustained damages as the result of the storm surges from 2012’s Hurricane-cum-Superstorm Sandy, because of their critical role in transporting long-run passengers between New York and New Jersey specifically, and, more generally, along the Northeast Corridor between Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., it is the North River Tunnels that constitute the intrinsic case study for this quantitative public opinion analysis of the willingness to pay for critical infrastructure expansion.

The two North River Tunnel train tubes remained reliable parts of the infrastructure until 2012 when so-called Superstorm Sandy struck the region killing over 100 people and causing over $50 billion damage (Jordan, 2013, Mantell et al., 2013). A September 2014 engineering study of the damage (Structural Assessment of the Amtrak Under River Tunnels in NYC Inundated by Super Storm Sandy, conducted and authored by HNTB Corporation) noted, at page 4:

Chloride and sulfate infiltration has caused and continues to cause damage to the tunnel structures. In addition to damage from chlorides and sulfates, the filling of the tunnels with sea water resulted in an unprecedented combination of loads and stresses on the tunnel structure. Structural analyses were performed to quantify the increase in weight and internal pressure from the inundation and to assess the effects of the elevated stress levels on the tunnel lining and components, and in particular the tunnel bolts.

HNTB’s estimated the total cost for repair of both of the North River Tunnels in 2014 dollars at over a third of a billion dollars, i.e., approximately $354,900,000. At that time, HNTB suggested that “the phasing of repair/replacement work” be conducted “as soon as possible” and could be accomplished “while minimizing disruptions to passenger service” (HNTB, 2014, at pg. 52).

The Gateway Program, currently in the planning and design phase, is a comprehensive program of strategic rail infrastructure improvements designed to improve current services and create new capacity that will allow the doubling of passenger trains running under the Hudson River. The program will increase track, tunnel, bridge, and station capacity, eventually creating four mainline tracks between Newark, NJ, and Penn Station, New York, including a new, two-track Hudson River tunnel.

Amtrak, 2017a

By late 2015, news reports on the Gateway Program, which included a new two-track additional tunnel to supplement the North River tubes, indicated that the North River “tunnels [will] have to be shut down for one year each to be gutted and Amtrak officials are racing the clock to get new tunnels built before that happens” (Higgs, 2015). By late 2017, Amtrak reported that

the high level of rail traffic under the Hudson River, about 450 trains and 200,000 passenger trips per weekday, means that taking one of the two tubes out of service for necessary repairs would reduce total capacity for Amtrak and NJT from 24 trains per hour to about 6 per hour, in the peak direction.

Amtrak, 2017b

A reduction from 24 to 6 trains per hour, i.e., a 75% peak direction reduction in Amtrak and NJ TRANSIT Hudson River crossing capacity would constitute nothing less than a transportation infrastructure crisis (Brazil et al., 2017), likely generating the loss of inter-state jobs due to greatly expanded difficulties in between-state commuting, as well as increasing the health and safety risks associated with increased driving and air pollution emissions.

At the close of their fiscal year 2016, Amtrak reported that 22 stations nationwide had ridership (i.e., boardings plus alightings) greater than 500,000 persons per year. Eleven of those 22 stations are on the corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C.; at the top of the list with 10.4, 5.1, and 4.3 million in ridership were, respectively, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Amtrak, 2017c). By dint of sheer ridership numbers, the importance of expanding passenger train capacity under the Hudson River cannot be overstated (McGeehan, 2014).

Expanding that infrastructure capacity, however, is not all that simple. Indeed, Amtrak presents a ready summary of the broader funding issue on a website entitled “Northeast Corridor Projects, The Gateway Program,” where they candidly state they do not know how much it is going to cost:

The Gateway Program is in the planning and design phase and a reliable program cost estimate has not yet been developed. Amtrak has directed more than $300 million, mostly from federal sources, to the Gateway Program since 2012. This includes approximately $74 million for planning and pre-construction work and $235 million to the Hudson Yards concrete casing from federal Sandy Resiliency funding under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013.

Amtrak, 2017a

The Gateway Program includes our case study focus, the Hudson Tunnel Project, as well as the Portal Bridge Replacement Project, and the Hudson Yards Right-of-Way Preservation Project. On the webpage within the Gateway Program website dedicated to the tunnel project, Amtrak details that only preliminary planning work has been funded and is underway:

Full funding for the environmental planning work and preliminary engineering of the Hudson Tunnel Project has been provided by Amtrak, the Port Authority, and NJ TRANSIT totaling $86.5 million.

Amtrak, 2017d

In addition to Amtrak’s public engagement website, NJ TRANSIT has its own Hudson Tunnel Project dedicated to public engagement with the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which it is jointly preparing with the Federal Railroad Administration (NJ TRANSIT, 2017a). At that site, the public can view the Scoping Document for the EIS, along with a “Library” of project-relevant documents. Under the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for this site, there are two references to funding, the FAQs, “How much will the Hudson Tunnel Project cost?” and “Where will the funding come from?” (NJ TRANSIT, 2017b). To the former, the answer given aligns with Amtrak’s basic message of it’s going to cost a lot of money, but we don’t really know how much: “The estimated cost of the Hudson Tunnel Project… would be $12.9 billion, in dollars escalated to the midpoint years of construction and rehabilitation… This estimated cost will continue to be refined as engineering and design continues.” To the latter, probing sources of funding, the answer is “The funding sources for the Hudson Tunnel Project are still being determined and will include a combination of federal, state, local, and possibly private funding” (ibid).

The “funding sources for the Hudson Tunnel Project” constitute our area of inquiry; we are deeply concerned about the funding and implementation of this critical infrastructure project, particularly noting the assumption across all relevant public discussions that the State of New Jersey will need to pay a share of these enormous estimates. With that in mind, and noting the absence of previous systematic state-wide analyses (Pulipati et al., 2017), this article explores New Jersey statewide public opinion support for and/or opposition to funding the Hudson Tunnel Project. That this is a current and pressing issue for New Jersey citizens is evident from this excerpt from a December 2017 regional newspaper, which sets up the contrast between two funding mechanisms, which lies at the heart of our effort:

This won’t sit well: NJ Transit proposes new fare increases: Agency would hit New York-bound commuters with per-trip surcharge for years to come, raising $1.9 billion to finance tunnel construction.

New York-bound rail commuters would pay increasingly more per trip over the next two decades to finance [New Jersey’s] share of construction costs for the new $12.9 billion Hudson river rail tunnels under a plan by NJ Transit.

A Wednesday letter from NJ Transit to the federal Department of Transportation outlines the plan, under which city rail commuters would pay a 90-cent per-trip surcharge to fund the tunnel project starting in 2020.

The surcharge would jump to $1.70 in 2028, and to $2.20 in 2038. The fee would generate 41.9 billion for NJ Transit’s share of the project, according to the letter.

Democratic Gov.-elect Phil Murphy… immediately took issue with the decision to raise fares. “I’d like to know whether there were alternatives that did not involves further fare hikes and if so why they were not pursued?”

In contrast, New York would provide $1.75 billion, but would not hit its riders with a surcharge. Instead, the state’s share would be financed with a Federal Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement loan that New York would repay over 35 years.

Higgs, 2017

Section snippets

Research questions, data, and methods

Driven by our concern for understanding how the New Jersey public will respond to potential funding mechanisms for the state’s share of the overall cost of the Hudson River tunnel crossing capacity expansion, we posited three main research questions. Focusing on the costliest part of the Gateway Program-the building of a new two-track tunnel under the Hudson River-we developed a questionnaire to collect original statewide data to explore three research questions:

  • 1.

    Importance, absolute and

Analyses and findings

All statistical analyses for this article were conducted using the survey [SVY] set of commands built into Stata MP, v.15.1, which incorporates the sampling design and survey weights. The individual respondent was treated as the primary sampling unit, stratified by New Jersey’s 21 counties grouped into five regions: urban, suburban, exurban, Jersey Shore, and the Philadelphia/southern New Jersey area.

Discussion

We started this endeavor with three research questions; the core findings from the first two were discussed above at Sections 3.1 and 3.2. To briefly recap, one-way frequency analyses of the weighted preference data showed: In the abstract, absolute terms, 83% of respondents reported that the tunnels were net-important (i.e., either “very” or “somewhat); however, when placed in a relative context by engaging comparison with six other issues New Jersey likely faces over the next five years, and

Conclusions

Assuming no serious failure of the North River Tunnels and no concerted effort to build support for the Hudson Tunnel Project, our expectation is that public interest will decline as other policy issues come to the forefront. If elected officials and rail organizations believe that the development and solidification of public support for the Hudson Tunnel Project is needed, then the current level of public discourse needs to be increased and the current level of understanding of the key factors

Acknowledgments

This publication was supported with funding from Rutgers University, Center for Advanced Infrastructure & Transportation, under Grant no. DTRT13-G-UTC28 from the U.S. Department of Transportation-Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology. The findings of this article reflect the views of the authors, who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the information presented herein. This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation,

Human subjects participant protections

The survey that provided the data for this research was reviewed and approved by the Rutgers University-New Brunswick Arts and Sciences Institutional Review Board on February 1, 2016, under protocol number E16-425.

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