Nation's biggest mass transit construction project in generations will begin next month

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Sunday, May 03, 2009

BY MARK MUELLER

Star-Ledger Staff

Sometime next month, the nation's biggest mass transit construction project in generations will begin, modestly, in North Bergen, where earth-moving machines will carve out an underpass beneath busy Routes 1&9.

The work will mark the start of an eight-year, $8.7 billion effort to build the first rail tunnels under the Hudson River in a century and the first link of any kind between New Jersey and Manhattan since the lower deck of the George Washington Bridge opened in 1962.

Known as Access to the Region's Core, or ARC, it is an undertaking nearly as immense as the construction of the two Gilded Age tunnels the new tubes will augment. It will employ thousands of people, many working deep underground in round-the-clock shifts.

Tunnel-boring machines longer than football fields will chew through the hard rock of the New Jersey Palisades and slog through toothpaste-like silt 100 feet beneath the Hudson's surface.

In Manhattan, the tunnels will end deep below 34th Street in a new two-tiered station stretching more than four-tenths of a mile, from Sixth to Eighth avenue, giving passengers access to 14 subway lines, PATH trains and the Long Island Rail Road.

When it is completed in 2017, its planners and backers say, the project will ease the commute for hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans, speeding service, creating more transfer-free trips and encouraging drivers to abandon jammed roads in favor of trains.

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Planners say, the tunnels will spur investment in Manhattan, creating an estimated 44,000 jobs. Many of those employees will come from New Jersey, Zupan says, citing studies that show 89 percent of new growth in the city draws workers from the west.

"People in New Jersey get access to higher-paying jobs in New York, and New York can tap into a highly skilled work force in New Jersey," Zupan said. "For each of the two states, it's a real synergy."

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The existing tunnels ... reached capacity earlier this decade.

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That translates into slower service and frequent delays.

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"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."

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Work on many of the project's various segments will take place at the same time, with construction expected to reach its busiest phase in 2012.

It is certain to be a test of organization and choreography.

"You'll have materials coming out of shafts and materials going into shafts, so you've got to take a systems approach," Flanagan said. "There's 100 things going on at once."

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.

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Zupan of the Regional Plan Association said the possibility of additional costs in the years ahead might seem hard to swallow, but he argued the expense should be measured in terms of the tunnels' life span.

"Once you build it, you'll probably have it not for 100 years but 200 years," Zupan said. "After all, the existing tunnels are 100 years old, and there's no sign we're going to shut them down. So the fact that it cost $1billion or $2billion more in 2009 is going to be pretty inconsequential when someone looks at it in 2109."

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index....xml&coll=1

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

7 pages to the story and no pictures.

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The paper version has pics...

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Artist's rendering of proposed underground train platform at Penn Station in New York for NJ Transit trains coming in from the proposed new Trans-Hudson tunnel, also known as the Access to the Region's Core Tunnel project.

[Danno 1,228]

Who wants to bet that the projected costs that the plan was sold on will be at least double?

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Who wants to bet that the projected costs that the plan was sold on will be at least double?

If it were up to people like you, they'd have never built the existing tunnels either

[catknit 144]

Am I blind - I don't see PATH anywhere??? Tons of people go into the city that way....that being said - Rt 1&9 good luck getting anywhere.

[Ban Hammer 14,573]

Who wants to bet that the projected costs that the plan was sold on will be at least double?

big dig, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig_(Boston,_Massachusetts)

Edited May 3, 2009 by charles!

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Who wants to bet that the projected costs that the plan was sold on will be at least double?

big dig, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig_(Boston,_Massachusetts)

I hope it goes better than the Big Dig.

[Heracles 417]

$8 billion for a few tunnels. Gotta love the unions up there.

Probably a good reason why NYC is so run down when compared to most other similar cities I have been too.