The Port Authority’s capital plan for the next 10 years includes no money to build the critically needed Gateway rail tunnels or upgrade or replace the overcrowded Port Authority Bus Terminal, but it does include $1.5 billion to provide Manhattan residents with a low-cost, one-seat ride on a new PATH line to Newark Airport. The political deal-making took precedence over policy needs for too long at the Port Authority, which is the subject of at least six separate federal and state investigations.
Gov. Chris Christie pushed Port Authority commissioners 20 months ago to make sure its $27.6 billion capital plan for the next decade included the $1.5 billion PATH extension that United Airlines wanted to carry passengers and workers to its Newark Airport hub. United, which employs 13,000 workers in the region and carries 24 million of the 35 million passengers who fly in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport each year, would be the biggest beneficiary of the PATH extension, a five-year project on which construction is scheduled to begin in 2018.
United repaid the favor to Christie by agreeing to provide flights to Atlantic City Airport–which Christie convinced the Port Authority to take over–as part of the his administration’s master plan to bring national convention business to the resort’s casinos, an effort that was undercut by the closure of four of the city’s 12 casinos this year.
“I’m just not sure that a PATH extension to Newark Airport should take priority over other needs, given the transportation funding crisis that we are facing,” Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman John Wisniewski (D-Middlesex) said. “You can get on a train in Manhattan and get to Newark Airport now. We have other much more pressing needs to which that $1.5 billion could be devoted.”
Port Authority Commissioner Kenneth Lipper has already publicly called for the bistate agency to reevaluate its capital priorities–including the PATH airport extension–to find money to upgrade or replace the Port Authority Bus Terminal, whose 500,000 daily bus riders are repeatedly subjected to overcrowding and delays. The agency’s plans to upgrade the bus terminal took a severe hit Wednesday when its proposal for a $230 million federal grant for a new bus storage facility was rejected.
No funding has been identified for the new Gateway rail tunnels that must be built in the next 10 years because the two 104-year-old rail tunnels that carry 250,000 NJ Transit and Amtrak riders under the Hudson each day will have to be closed for a year each to repair damage from superstorm Sandy. When that happens, rail service will be cut from 24 trains an hour during rush hour to just six, creating a metropolitan transit crisis.
Mark J. Magyar/www.njspotlight.Com
