The project seems interesting, but they truly have to get some European rail engineers on board, because it seems like this project, like the other commenter is saying, is falling flat because it's not innovative. They're using oldschool thinking for this, and don't realize how to properly do it. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing seeing the USA build more rail infrastructure, but I'm afraid that they're making some key mistakes that will keep the system from reaching its full potential
well, that's all very well, but you have to work with the New York City and surrounding infrastructure--that you have. Without doubt, the whole thinkgcould be re-imagined, but think what it would cost! And the disruption within Manhattan would be unthinkable. Good god, look how many years it took just to get the money together to build a new rail tunnel--one two-way tunnel--between Manhattan and Jersey--a tunnel that has desperately needed replacing for 50 years!
But your assuming the main purpose of this is improving infrastructure. This is a political project designed to suck billions of dollars from across the entire country to exclusively benefit NY commuters. NY and NJ politicians have delayed this project for decades with demands that NY and NJ shouldn’t have to pay for it. And the reason for the astronomical costs is the union contracts. Union workers can expect $90 and hour for base wage plus overtime plus fully paid benefits. This plus the regulations and local kickbacks is why this will cost $2.25 Billion (2.07 Billion Euros) for each kilometer! All of this provides huge pools of money under the control of local politicians from which to siphon campaign funds “donations” to their trust funds and foundations.
@@harrisonc985 yeh I think the only way of merging both systems would actually be transferring their control to the Port Authority. A lot of work would have to be done and I think it could take about a century to pull off, considering the fact this is New York where talking about
@@electro_sykes The states would never agree to it. It would be ALOT easier to extend the PATH directly to Atlantic Terminal because PATH is already under the juristiction of the port authority. Even better, they could make the path run all the way to jamaica on one end and then to EWR on the other end of the system. it would allow much easier access to both airports without having to mess with the subways. It would more convinient for tourism and it puts pressure off the subways allowing space for them to upgrade. another added benefit is the reduction of bussess and ubers traveling between the airports for transfers easing up some car traffic.
@harrisonc985 port authority wouldn't do that either becuase it wouldn't benefit thier bottom line. They wouldn't gain much as a system by extending thier system that far. They only did the air train in jfk bcuz it gave them functionality in the airport and profit outside if it
The gateway program is huge but it is not inovative at all and this lack of innovation is making the costs escalate out of control and the sad part is the new tunnels will not move much more than what is traveling today, because it does not connect to anything more than Penn Station. It plans to double train capacity as in the number of trains. And the plan is designed to fix a lot of the capacity and old infrastructure between Penn and NJ. But this plan is not innovative nor will it fix problems of the lack of through-running between NJ, NY and CT. London, Paris, and so many other cities build tunnels that connect major destinations and go beyond the core. NJT has done a study under ARC that says 36% of NJT riders want access to Grand Central. This plan will not do that. Instead, they will expand Penn Station as if this is 1890 not 2024. Nobody builds stub-end terminals anymore and the project will require tearing down a block south of Penn Station using public tax dollars to purchase the land. The costs have gotten out of control. If the design were truly revolutionary it would use fewer tracks and link to Grand Central and allow trains from NJ to travel to and from Metro North and LIRR territory. The gateway program is not a program that is using new ideas - its using old ones (stub-end terminals) and it really needs to be rethought.
Thank you for sharing your insights on the Gateway Program! It's definitely important to consider all aspects when it comes to such massive infrastructure projects.
Private money built the original tunnels 100 years ago with no trouble at all. Now, 100 years later, with computers, lasers, new techniques and new materials suddenly everything is impossible without $16 billion from the taxpayers and even then it will be so very difficult.
well, remember that the capital for those projects was provided by the owners of the railroads that used those facilities. So they were not public works at all. The railroads need not have failed in the manner they did if the private automobile had not been oversold to the American public, leading to the ruin of most urban centers in the US among other serious complications. Thank God, though, many people and places are finding their way back to urban life, and public transportation is popular in places where it's available and adds meaningfully to quality of life.
Private money built the original tunnels to gain a competitive advantage over several other private passenger rail operators who, like the PRR itself until 1910, could only get New York-bound passengers as far as the opposite bank of the Hudson River and then onto boats or the then-recently-opened Hudson tubes, now known as PATH. In other words there was short term profit to be had by building it. Suffice it to say that a century of public funding for the infrastructure that makes car and air transport viable has changed the game just a bit. But sure, if it makes you happy, let’s pretend everything else is just as it was 115 years ago and the need to fund public works publicly is a moral failing. Fine. Even given that, no one is stepping up to fund this with private money, and the fact remains the alternatives (cars for short trips, planes for longer ones) cannot absorb the 200,000 travelers who move through the North River Tunnels daily without descending into chaos.
Great point @de-fault_de-fault! Let's not forget when the tunnels were built, the railroads didn't have outdated regulations holding them back, and the government wasn't using taxpayer dollars to build airports and highways, so the railroads weren't being unfairly held back. Unlike today, where the passenger railroads of today get barely enough funding to operate because "they're too expensive" while we spend billions more on less efficent highways and airports.
When it made landfall about 40 miles south it was but then quickly weakened. I lived close to the city in jersey and i was without power for like 13 days!
The project is very needed, even more so with NYCs congestion pricing. It's unfortunate that it's taking so long. What I really don't understand is how a new Port Authority Bus Terminal is costing 10B and this is 16B. How is it that a bus terminal is costing 10B?!?!? The rail from Penn continues under Manhattan for the LIRR, Amtrak, and NJT to use the Sunnyside yard. Why wasn't there ever an additional station considered around Park Ave South providing access to that part of Manhattan? I also think the #7 line should extended into NJ. I used to think that Metro North's west of the Hudson lines (from Port Jervis & Spring Valley) should divert and run across the new Tappon Zee, loop and join the Hudson line into GST. If Gateway gets built there is probably not a need for that anymore.
Because the city and state is notoriously corrupt and loves to over-spend on everything. Like they will have to allocate probably 200mil just to art for the project. Also part of the problem is the Unions. their pensions alone are in the 6 figure range. They work half as hard as alot of retail workers and get payyed twice as much with twice the sick days.
many decades overdue. If the influence of the petroleum industry and Robert Moses hadn't diverted our eyes from the necessity of public transportation, every one of these projects would have begun to be addressed right after WWII. Instead, infrastructure that was already aging and falling apart because of neglect during the Depression was allowed to continue to deteriorate for another three generations. Frankly, I'm surprised we haven't had an infrastructure-related disaster-movie type scenario unfold in New York long before how. If it had been left up to Donald Trump and his vengefulness toward New York for voting against him, these projects would never have gone anywhere
why are you blaming trump? You might as well blame it on every leader before him because they’ve had 40 years to replace that swinging bridge. To ley it on one person, you’d have to blame that one NJ governor from the early 90s who raided the state’s pension fund then loaned money to pay it back creating a budget deficit deathspiral that is only now 30 years later being closed up making the state unable to pay for a new bridge. Also there used to be alot more ship traffic on the hackensack river before the 2000s hense the need for the swinging bridge in the first place. I agree though that Robert Moses was a terrible guy. what he did to penn station was a tragedy.
True, it's primarily designed for people-moving, but freight will also be moved just as more efficiently as Amtrak and NJT services will by this upgrade. It's only an afterthought though.
With 4 tunnels and no service from 12:30am to 5am on NJT, they could easily use it for high priority freight going in and out of manhattan in those hours. which will be great because the tolls for comercial trucking across the hudson are ludicrous!
2 things they need to do getting rid of the crossing and dealing with the freight trains make a 2 line for them or make into electrician freight trains. That's the only thing they need to make to high-speed rail.
Freight movements do not involve Penn Station and historically never have. The tunnel clearances on both sides are too small and passenger traffic too dense.
The new tunnel will actually be slower than the old one since it's circuitous and serpentine. It will also be expensive to maintain due to the curves built to close tolerances that must be constantly maintained. That's deliberate, and it's the reason we can't develop an upgraded passenger rail system with high-speed rail till the "deliberateness" among our transportation administrators - particularly in the private sector and those colluding on the public side - can be brought to heel.
Are they intending to create sufficiently tall tunnels so that they can eventually accommodate double-stack train cars? Such as Amtrak's Superliner cars, mainly used west of Chicago. What's really needed is for the entire U.S. railroad system, especially the N.E. corridor, to be re-engineered to be able to handle double-stack passenger & freight cars. It would be hugely inefficient to create 2 new Hudson River train tunnels that are too small for that.
Not much in the way of commercial product moves through this really small area actually ... I think none actually as all of that is reserved for Staten Island. Having said that the biggest problem is one of speed as to get from New York to say, Richmond Virginia the most important Inland Port along the Eastern Seaboard takes forever let alone going from New York to Washington DC. A direct line from New York to Richmond non-stop is what is needed and not just "leaving New York" only to go to Philadelphia then Baltimore. That is something for commuter rail to handle not Amtrak. Amtrak has in fact become a huge success in the USA over the past 30 Years but #irony_again not along the Northeast Corridor which still overwhelmingly uses cars, trucks and vans to "make it happen"(allow the Region to even exist as economic units.) Given Uber, Lyft, Turo and possibly full on driverless vehicles and "highway congestion" could plunge in the USA. In the meantime however and given crazy high oil prices Railroads are most definitely critical infrastructure upon the USA especially given all the Wars going on everywhere quite suddenly.
LOL - 'Hurricane' Sandy 'damaged' the tunnels (that had somehow survived worse storms) and tunnel boring machines are 'new' technology (they've been around for about a century).
How convenient for them that when they wanted a huge project that will fund unions for decades, tunnels that had never been flooded in over 100 years suddenly got flooded….
Kind of weird to put trump up on the screen at the moment you say the govt passed funding for the project when the trump admin blocked the project from going through. Disingenuous approach here.
There used to be tracks on the lower level of the GWB but they got rid of them for more lanes. Most stupidest thing ever since I-95 becomes 3 lanes each direction in the Bronx.
one Christmas I took the bus from NYC to Boston. It took a little less than three hours. Amazing what can be done absent the crappy infrastruction railroads have to deal with. Of course, I have no doubt the bus driver was going over 70mph on the highways, but still..
@@josephzastocki2815 The GWB was only _designed_ to accommodate subway tracks on its lower level if one was added. That capability was never advanced as there was no call to expand the subway across state lines.
@@robertewalt7789And broken drawbridges. The Rail corridor from Waterbury Connecticut to Hartford Connecticut might make an actual plausible High-Speed rail line to Boston, but Connecticut is at the forefront of nimbyism. Another possibility is to connect Long Island to Rhode Island via a bridge or tunnel
@@edjohnson9989 the entire north east corridor was built with no public money. All railroads were. Why is it required to be subsidized now to be successful? If it was so great, private lenders would be lining up to fund it and actually get a return on their investment. How great do you think it would be if 100% of the funding came out of the fare box, genius?
@@edjohnson9989Public transportation is strangers travelling together according to a timetable, published in advance, and may or may not require public money to sustain it. The real reason that this project requires public money is that it is a public good, for both freight and passengers, not a private good. In other words it benefits society as a whole. Users benefit in an obvious way; non-users benefit from reduced road traffic congestion, lower pollution levels, less deterioration of road pavements etc. Without public money, this project wouldn’t happen and that would be to the detriment of people and businesses.
Not sure why taxpayers from the rest of the country need to pay for this. This looks like a NJ/NY/CT issue and should be paid by them or private investors. Probably half the money will fund democrats running in elections there
