Gateway: Vital Impact, Staggering Cost, Glacial Timeline
The Slipping Schedule and Skyrocketing Pricetag of Greater New York’s Biggest Infrastructure Project
The Effective Transit Alliance applauds that the Amtrak Gateway Program is moving forward. Still, we remain disheartened by the high cost estimate and long construction lead time.
Gateway promises to be a vital investment in greater New York's transit infrastructure that would allow more frequent and reliable rail service between New York and New Jersey. The federal government just announced a almost $7 billion grant for Its largest component, the Hudson Tunnel Project, which would add a new two-track rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Subsequent projects estimated to cost over $10 billion would increase the number of tracks between Secaucus and New York City from two to four.
Staggering Costs
The Hudson Tunnel Project is now estimated to cost a staggering $16 billion: $14 billion to build the new tunnels and $2 billion to rehabilitate the existing ones. The new crossing is a complex project, but that cost is simply many times higher than those for similar projects, both in the United States and abroad. The new tunnel is currently projected to cost $5 billion per mile. By comparison, the tunnels for the first phase of New York's Second Avenue Subway—already one of the world's most expensive transit projects—only cost around $700 million per mile in 2022 dollars, a full order of magnitude cheaper. Meanwhile, the tunnels for the Los Angeles Purple Line's third phase will cost approximately $440 million per mile; the project received federal funding during the Trump Administration, and construction is ongoing.
The comparison to projects in international peer cities is starker yet. Stockholm's Citybanan commuter rail tunnel cost around $430 million per mile. Unlike the Hudson Tunnel Project, the Citybanan project included two new enroute stations. The tunnels for London's massive new Crossrail system—which passes under the Thames twice—only cost around $500 million per mile. The Fehmarnbelt crossing, which will link Germany and Denmark with a four-lane highway and two railroad tracks, is on pace to cost around $1 billion per mile.
That the Hudson Tunnel Project passes under a river is not sufficient to explain this much of a premium. Per mile, the new Hudson crossing is to cost seven times the price of the Second Avenue Subway tunnels, which were built in a very similar political environment just miles away. We also note that the Second Avenue Subway’s depth below grade elevated its cost. Other agencies have built technically similar underwater tubes for substantially less than $1 billion per mile. The Transbay Tube linking San Francisco and Oakland cost around $210 million per mile in 2022 dollars, just 50% more than contemporary BART tunnels bored under land. Furthermore, the Channel Tunnel between the United Kingdom and France only cost around $500 million per mile.
How far does a dollar go? Cost control problems mean that the Hudson Tunnel Project, as proposed, will require more funding to build the same length of tunnel as comparable projects.
Glacial Timeline
The currently projected timeline of the Hudson Tunnel Project is now 11 years to dig a 2.75 mile tunnel with two tubes. Just like with the projected costs, this timeline severely exceeds that of similar projects in other cities. By comparison, the Channel Tunnel, which spans a far longer 31 miles—at the time the longest underwater tunnel in the world, only took around six years to complete. The Gotthard Base Tunnel, which spans 35 miles underneath the Alps, took 18 years to complete, and this was after extensive unexpected delays and a partial collapse during construction. These are construction rates 21 and 7 times faster than the Gateway tunnel project, respectively.
Avoiding temporarily losing NJ–Penn connectivity altogether
Our concerns about the timeframe go beyond efficiency alone. In 2014, Amtrak claimed that the existing Hudson River tunnels, which were heavily damaged during Hurricane Sandy, would need to be shut down for rebuilding within twenty years. Given that the new tunnel is currently projected to open in 2035, options to accelerate the rehabilitation of the existing tunnels need to be explored. Notably, Amtrak limits weekend New Jersey-New York rail service to the amount it can run through a single tube of the North River tunnel, yet it only had construction crews at work 3% of the weekends from 2016 to 2020.
How to move forward
The Gateway Program needs to refocus around improving value for money. Gateway leadership can almost certainly start applying lessons from the Transit Costs Project right now. Funding the Hudson Tunnel Project has taken years of political wrangling; almost 13 years have passed since its predecessor project Access to the Region’s Core was canceled. Unlocking all of the new tunnel’s capacity requires more work to expand the railway from its New Jersey portal to Newark from two tracks to four. This set of projects, which would all be above ground and away from built-up areas, is to cost well over $1 billion/mile, while many other comparable projects cost around 1/10 that. We are not pushing for austerity; we want more money spent better on transit overall. At the same time, the New York region has immense transit needs, and they cannot be met when projects cost many times what they do in other cities.
At this level of expenditure, the New York region must be more ambitious about what it achieves. At the high end of the cost range of the rest of the world, completion of a four-track railroad from the west end of the Hudson Tunnel Project to Newark would cost around $1 billion; this endeavor is projected to cost over $10 billion. Furthermore, even modest cost reforms would unlock additional tunnels beyond the Hudson Tunnel Project’s current scope. For example, there are highly impactful projects that could come from extending Gateway in either direction. On the New Jersey side, for example, a new station around Bergenline Avenue would create a transit link to Midtown for some of the densest communities in the United States. On the New York side, extending tunnels to connect to Grand Central Terminal would provide New Jersey residents direct access to the East Side, just as Grand Central Madison will do for Long Island residents. Moreover, electrification and other improvements to the outlying portions of the network would maximize the capacity, utility, and impact of these new tunnels.
More broadly, the region needs to interrogate how it plans its transportation projects, and ask why investments like Gateway lurch towards the starting line without sufficiently clear long-term visions. Infrastructure planning should center the principle of organization before electronics before concrete. While the case for the Hudson Tunnel Project and a four-track railroad from New York to Newark is clear, the accompanying service plan is a mere sketch that promises to continue the commuter rail status quo, rather than use this massive investment as an opportunity to transform how the region connects.
Advanced planning should be the cornerstone for improving transit in greater New York. The only way that the region can sustain an ongoing series of transit improvements, both large and small, is through inter-agency coordination, coordinated operations and capital planning, and improved procurement practices. Through true, transformational planning, New York and New Jersey can achieve the future transit network they need in ways that are dramatically more timely, more efficient, and more cost effective.