Gateway: Vital Impact, Staggering Cost, Glacial Timeline
The New Jersey portal of the current North River Tunnel. Image: Amtrak
The Effective Transit Alliance is disheartened by the increasing cost estimates and slipping completion dates of Amtrak's Gateway Project.
Gateway promises to be a vital investment in greater New York's transit infrastructure that would allow for more frequent and reliable rail service between New York and New Jersey. Its largest component, the Hudson Tunnel Project, would add a new two-track rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Subsequent projects would increase the number of tracks between Secaucus and New York City from two to four, and also replace a decaying, unreliable drawbridge with a pair of modern, fixed counterparts.
Staggering Costs
The currently projected cost of the Hudson Tunnel Project, however, is now estimated at a staggering $16 billion: $14 billion to build the new tunnels and $2 billion to rehabilitate the existing ones. Gateway may be a complex project, but these costs are simply many times higher than those for similar projects in other cities, both across 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, and unlike Gateway, 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.
The underwater context of the Hudson Tunnel Project is not sufficient to explain this much of a premium over the Second Avenue Subway tunnels, which were built in a very similar political environment just miles away. 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.
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 two 2.75 mile tunnels. 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, the existing tunnels may need to be closed before the new tunnels are opened. This would be a disaster, severely limiting not only regional trains between New Jersey and New York, but also intercity trains along the busy Northeast Corridor.
Even before the current round of projected cost and timeline increases, there were reasons to be concerned about Gateway’s price tag. The looming disaster of potentially losing a Hudson River tube, however, has up until now largely outweighed concerns about efficiency. Vitally important projects sometimes require emergency action. Now, with the project’s ability to avoid a tunnel closure no longer a sure thing, the scales shift dramatically.
What to Do Instead
The Hudson Tunnel Project needs to refocus around value for money. This is not about austerity; we want more money spent better on transit overall, not less. 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 in return. 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 completing 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.