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New York City’s Infrastructure Is a Mess. Who Is to Pay?
Bloomberg News/Businessweek ran an extensive piece about the potentially disastrous condition of Penn Station in New York City and the perilous state of the two Hudson River tunnels that feed it. The tunnels are over 100 years old. The construction fill from the original World Trade Center that was used to create new land changed the course of the Hudson in such a way as to erode the river bed above the tunnels. Hurricane Sandy partly filled the tunnels with salty water, and the salt deposits are eating away at the elderly concrete.
The tunnels now carry far more people than they were ever envisioned to carry into the busiest single train station in the United States, so closing them for repairs would congest commuter traffic horribly, and projects to construct newer tunnels to supplement these aging ones have never come to fruition. So the author of the piece, Devin Leonard, details in his article:
As the gateway to America’s largest city, Penn Station should inspire awe, as train stations do in London, Paris, Tokyo, and other competently managed metropolises. Instead, it embodies a particular kind of American failure—the inability to maintain roads, rails, ports, and other necessary conduits. For generations, the officials connected to Penn Station have been blind to, or unable to deliver on, the idea that improving the station would more than pay for itself. (One estimate, from the Business Roundtable, says that a dollar invested in infrastructure yields as much as $3 in economic growth.) In the final days of 2017, the situation reached perhaps its bleakest point yet, when the Trump administration signaled its disinterest in coming to the rescue: The president will not honor an Obama-era commitment to New York and New Jersey to foot half the cost of a new tunnel, dumping planners back at square one. [emphasis mine]
Mr. Leonard concludes his piece with a repetition of what I have highlighted above. The question ultimately is, who will pay? Or rather, who should pay? As Mr. Leonard details at length in the article, New York City itself, New York State, and New Jersey have all had ample opportunities to fix Penn Station and the tunnels over the last 30 years, and yet they have never done so.
Penn Station is a debacle reaching across time. Its past is a slow-motion disaster of inaction and canceled reforms, its present an ongoing disgrace. And its future could be truly catastrophic, in the form of a tunnel failure that pinches shut one of the most vital economic arteries in America.
Of course, Amtrak somehow owns the station and the tunnels, and (pardoning the pun) Amtrak’s track record of repairs and self-improvement is hardly inspiring. Amtrak is a creature of the federal government, a Frankenstein’s Monster of its own creation. By that argument, the US Government should really be on the hook for fixing the station and the tunnels. Yet the tunnels are primarily used only by those working and living in and around New York City. Commuters to and from New Jersey, Amtrak riders coming to or leaving the city, and of course tourists are the chief customers. Should they not pay for what they are using? It seems that, at least in part, New Jersey commuters have contributed to the system’s overgrowth and overuse.
The addition of New Jersey Transit trains in the 1990s was both an economic boon to the region—I bought a house in Maplewood, N.J., in 1996 so I could ride the new Midtown Direct to work—and the beginning of Penn Station’s transformation from mere malodorous eyesore to Hieronymus Bosch-grade hellhole. With Jersey commuters swarming the place, farsighted politicians presented grand visions for upgrading it. They all failed.
It should be obvious that Mr. Leonard has no great fondness for the station (and I do admire his colorful metaphors for it). What follows in his article is a listing of all the major proposals to fix it, going back to a 1990 proposal from the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan. National catastrophe (9/11), political scandal (Eliot Spitzer’s fondness for hookers, John Corzine’s own corrupt administration), or political calculation (New Jersey Governor Christie’s canceling of funding) managed to kill every attempt, and now the Trump administration has killed an agreement that the Obama administration has made too.
But really, who should pay for it, if the situation is as dire as Mr. Leonard claims? New York City is moving ahead on a new station annex, the one originally championed by Moynihan, but is the station as vital as the tunnels that feed it?
But the $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall, as it will be known, isn’t likely to significantly reduce congestion, according to NYU’s Moss. Amtrak and LIRR passengers will still be able to access the train complex from the existing Penn Station, which is a block closer to the center of Manhattan. (The Cuomo administration says the impact will be greater.) Moss is among those who scoff at the idea of prettying the upper-level train station experience when what lies beneath is a such mess. “We don’t need a transit temple,” he says. “We need to focus on the tunnels and getting more tracks into Manhattan.”
While I’m not generally sympathetic to libertarian arguments about private roads, there are always exceptions. This, I would argue, is a major one. Rather than wheedling federal handouts to fix a tunnel of primarily local significance, why cannot New York and New Jersey simply sell tunnel rights to a private corporation, and let them finance it, construct it, and collect tolls, fees, and taxes from it?
Amtrak has been around, zombie-like, longer than I’ve been alive and to nobody’s benefit except in the Atlantic northeast, since politicians ultimately control its routes and rights of way. So, it should be kept away from any tunnel project as one would keep away a smallpox carrier. Let the private sector take over this mess, and let those who use it also pay for it, instead of spreading the pain amongst the US at large, or the entire tax bases of New York and New Jersey.
If more tracks are needed for Manhattan, then get the government out of the business of building them, for it is apparent that they are incompetent to do so.
Published in Economics
Actually, the current incarnation of Penn Station is the ‘wonderful post-War train station’. The original Pennsylvania Station was an ornate Beaux Arts building demolished in 1963.
The taxpayers paid lots of good money to get rid of this.
Original Pennsylvania Station
So I’m someone who doesn’t live in a big metro area, but out of curiosity has ridden MTA trains. My last trip to New York was at the end of a vacation that started in Frankfurt, then London. I had ridden the commuter trains in both areas before testing New York.
As you might expect, New York didn’t compare favorably. As an outsider looking in, and using toll roads in the Chicago area, the Miami area, and New York, the systems in New York and Chicago don’t compare favorably.
Partly it’s because the infrastructure is older. But also it’s because the organizational structure put in place is corrupt. But not in the way it was 100 years ago. One hundred years ago, officials almost blatantly accepted direct bribes. Now the bribes are indirect, and legal. And less efficient.
It seems to me the old way they ran things meant more things got done.
The tri-state area of New York City can afford to fix this. They just don’t have the political will. So they’ll have to wait for a Giuliani type mayor or state governor before things happen.
Toll roads, or at least a user-fee/per-mile charge of some kind (report your odometer annually and mail a check) are inevitable with the rise of Electric vehicles and hybrids. The gas tax is not a sufficient or equitable funding source for highways as vehicles convert off of liquid fuel.
To be fair. The NY subway, gritty as it is, does a darned good job. They have about 650 miles of track and about 6500 cars. Who knows how many switches. They will take you to within a couple blocks of anyplace in NYC you want to go – and even where you wouldn’t want to go – 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That is several orders of magnitude beyond what the Frankfurt system is trying to do. The London Metro is a better comparison, and that’s not half the size and doesn’t run 24/7 like NY subways.
That was the argument for fuel taxes, and it’s a pretty good reason. Now most states divert the fuel taxes to the general fund and claim they need tolls to pay these bills. It’s [expletive].
If the private owners built it from scratch with their funds, without use of eminent domain, more power to them. Otherwise it’s just a shell game with the general public as the mark.
I’d support a mileage-based fee using the odometer at vehicle registration time as a replacement for fuel taxes. But I’m not too worried in the meantime. Pure electric vehicles will never really be economically viable without subsidies due to the simple physics of chemical energy density (batteries vs fuel in a tank) and the exorbitant cost (and scarcity) of lightweight magnetic materials.
Hybrids, on the other hand, have a bright future once the auto industry gives up on the traditional powertrain components (transmission, differentials) and adopts induction-based wheel motors. But they’ll still have fuel tanks, and contribute to fuel taxes.
The old way got things done, because the guys doing the jobs where expected to get things done. Did you know that Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris took more than 100 years to complete, and almost another 90 years in finishing touches? The grand-children of the masons who laid the foundations completed the structure. This is the diminishing timelines of western culture, diminishing results, diminishing culture. (not saying western culture peaked in 1250, but the power of the church was nearly at its peak then) Or the Panama Canal – Victorians built it, with much simpler technology than whats available today, yet no project of similar scope has even been attempted in 100 years. (the canal opened in 1914)
Big government love stagnation. The more things stay the same, the lower the expectations of the population. If you showed Yorkers (Yorkites?) diagrams or 3 d renderings of Penn Station 3.0 – they’d be ecstatic about it. Its bureaucrats hate construction projects because they have measurable metrics to measure job performance. Is it done yet? Is it on budget? These are the kinda questions that can get a guy fired. So they schedule construction projects over multi-year time lines, so they’ll be promoted or on a new assignment before anyone’s incompetence is discovered. Its also why these projects get bungled, because nobody stays with it, to complete it, there isnt a consistent leadership of the project.
Its why they prefer social engineering projects over civil engineering. Are the Poor dying in the streets? No, excellent job, I get a bonus! and why NASA has never taken another Kennedy Lunar challenge, with both a budget and a deadline, there are very easy metrics which even the idiots in congress can measure job performance, and again, failure may result in being fired.
Australian / Spanish consortium. I was living in Sydney when they did the deal, and I wish the same group had done Sydney’s M2, because that road costs an arm and a leg and is pretty much complete crap. Other than it passes through a “national park” (owned and operated by the State of New South Wales for some reason) and there are so many cockatoos (so many!) that you can hear them inside your car, traveling as close to highway speeds as NSW will allow (110 kph).
I don’t know. France built a highway 1000 feet *over* the Loire Valley, China and UAE have built islands, and the Soviets radiated a bunch of lakes and diverted lakes. The political will isn’t common, but it’s not nonexistent. And there’s only one Panama Canal (and its excellent palindrome).
Thanks for the correction. I was looking for corroboration and turned up short. Good to have accurate information.
I actually wasn’t comparing Frankfurt’s (or London’s) subway system, though I also did some subway riding when I was in NY. I took the commuter rail from London (Waterloo) to Southampton, Frankfurt (main Hbf) to Darmstadt, and Stamford, CT to NYC (Grand Central Station).
The MTA train was slower, and there was a lot of side by side rolling, indicating the train tracks weren’t maintained as well. I took the express train, not the milk run.
What means “political will”?
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I think you know (I checked your posts, and English seems to be your primary language).
But in case you don’t, Google it, and you’ll find some good definitiions.
The more I hear that phrase, the less I think I understand it. I had never thought to google it. Here’s the first thing that came up on DuckDuckGo (from quora.com):
This, of course, is complete nonsense. I don’t want to know what political will refers to. I want to know what it is.
One of the things that increasingly comes to mine when I hear the phrase is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. But again, even though there may be some connection, that doesn’t explain what it is.
You do know English.
You know what I meant, and so did everyone else. I just hit one of your pet peeves, and you decided to be obtuse at first, and then contentious.
It’s an ok debate to have (perhaps in a separate thread) but the way you brought the issue up is annoying.
Oh, and Leni Riefenstahl? Triumph of the Will? Your distaste for the phrase seems pretty strong to bring up Nazi propaganda.
Meanwhile, we still don’t know what “political will” means.
We? Speak for yourself.
When I find somebody who is willing and able to explain it, I will be sure not to include him/her in such a blanket statement.