Mr. Christie insisted that the so-called ARC tunnel (as in Access to the Region’s Core) would cost billions more than the federal government’s estimate of about $8.7 billion, and that New Jersey would have to pay for 70 percent of the project’s cost. So he abruptly cancelled the state’s participation and effectively killed the idea of replacing the antiquated, century-old tunnel that Amtrak and New Jersey Transit currently use.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office recently released a report that indicates that the governor’s posturing was more about politics than it was about accountability. The GAO calculated that the new tunnel would have cost between $9.8 billion and $12.4 billion. Not exactly chump change, but less than Mr. Christie’s estimate of $14 billion or more. The GAO also found that New Jersey would have had to pay about 14 percent—not 70 percent—of the cost.

Mr. Christie’s position may have warmed the hearts of the tea party crowd, but as the federal report makes clear, the governor acted foolishly. The New York-New Jersey metropolitan region depends on efficient public transportation, so it is imperative that both states invest in projects like the ARC tunnel. As commuters know all too well, rail congestion under the Hudson is a daily occurrence. Thanks to Mr. Christie’s short-sighted position, things will not get better any time soon.

A century ago, builders, planners and politicians had the vision and foresight to link together the region with a fantastic array of tunnels, bridges, rail projects and—somewhat later—highways. A good deal of this infrastructure desperately needs replacement or renovations for the 21^st century.

The ARC project would have been a step in the right direction. But politics, not planning, prevailed.

Probably the only train Chris Christie ever liked. (Wikimedia Commons)

It was the shot heard 'round the Hudson, the anti-spending measure that arguably made New Jersey Governor Chris Christie a national conservative star: Killing the ARC Tunnel.

The move was unprecedented, reversing decades of Robert Moses-inspired shovels-in-the-ground unstoppability for public works. And now it appears to have been little more than a political gambit. The Times has gotten a copy of a new Government Accountability Office report showing that Governor Christie grossly exaggerated the costs his state would bear if it went ahead with the multi-billion project to create a new rail connection between Manhattan and Secaucus.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

The governor's office said the report supports its case for cancelling what was once the largest public infrastructure project in the country, even now as it admits for the first time that its calculations included work done by the Port Authority, the bi-state agency whose primary job it is to undertake exactly these sorts of projects. Supporters of the project were less sanguine, of course.

“The bottom line is that the G.A.O. report simply bears out what we said in the fall of 2010 and say to this day: the ARC project was a very, very bad deal for New Jersey,” he added, using the acronym for the project, known as Access to the Region’s Core.

Martin E. Robins, the founding director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University and an early director of the ARC project, criticized the governor. “In hindsight, it’s apparent that he had a highly important political objective: to cannibalize the project so he could find an alternate way of keeping the transportation trust fund program moving, and he went ahead and did it,” he said.

Options for creating a new connection are dwindling. Last week, MTA chief Joe Lhota shot down a proposal to connect the 7-Train with Secaucus that had been floated by the Bloomberg administration. That leaves only a proposal from Amtrak, part of a high-speed rail program, that is still decades away. It will not even begin before ARC was expected to be completed.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

When Governor Chris Christie killed the ARC Tunnel, the nation's largest single infrastructure project ever undertaken, he doomed thousands of Garden State residents to longer commutes for the forseeable future. But because the nixing of the project also means the abandonment of a new New Jersey Transit station, the MTA has decided to accelerate plans to spruce up Penn Station for its Long Island Railroad riders, according to The Journal.

This will not be the grand new station many riders would hope for, as is currently planned for Amtrak at the neighboring Farley Post Office, future home of Moyn* Station. Instead, the MTA is looking at interim fixes,  such as improved signage and wayfinding and perhaps some improvements to the dingy warren of passageways created by Robert Moses a half-century ago.

"It's a facility that's showing its age," LIRR President Helena Williams said. "It's cluttered visually, functionally."

The railroad plans to issue a solicitation early next year for designers to study the problems at Penn Station and come up with proposals for fixing them. Ms. Williams said she expects that process to take less than a year. Then it'll be up to the LIRR to figure out how to implement them, she said.

The plan could take a while, in part because it requires the three rail operators to sign off on any new plans.

This is only the latest change to a hodge-podge of concourses and causeways--New Jersery Transit had the most recent renovation, in 2004, and Amtrak and the LIRR have been largely untouched since the '90s. Yet these differing designs and riot of signs and fonts and colors are part of the problem, and fixing up only one set does not seem like the best solution. What Penn Station really needs is a unified design, as is made clear in an excellent series on signage that Slate produced last year, including the below video.

Yet one imagines getting all three ral operator to agree on what actually to do would be harder than getting Moynihan Station built.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

In the confusion following the disappearance of the ARC Tunnel last month, the biggest question seemed to be what would happen to the $3 billion the federal government had set aside for the trans-Hudson train tunnel, by certain measures the largest transportation project ever undertaken. Local politicians, including Mayor Bloomberg as well as the outgoing and incoming governors of New York, were desperate to keep the money in the metro area, and it seems the city has cooked up a way to do just that: extend the 7 train under the Hudson to New Jersey.

This may sound crazy, but it also makes a bit of sense, as WNYC's Andrea Bernstein pointed out when she broke the news on the project:

Unlike the ARC tunnel, an extension of the number 7 would start at 11th Avenue and go west, avoiding the costly proposition of boring a tunnel under Manhattan to Herald Square. It would also instantly take riders to Grand Central station, a holy grail of the ARC project. But it would not necessarily have the same capacity as the ARC, because trains wouldn't be arriving on several Manahttan platforms, as commuter trains do, but not subways. And New Jersey transit riders, who were projected to save an average of 45 minutes on their commute times to Manhattan, would have to switch trains, potentially eliminating much of that time savings.

Well, they can thank New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for that, the man responsible for killing the ARC Tunnel--arguably on political grounds.

Because of its planned path, the new tunnel is projected to cost $5.3 billion, compared to its predecessor's initial estimate of $8.7 billion--though that amount was later projected to be as high as $10 billion to $15 billion. Furthermore, as The Times reports, the project would hopefully provide enough money for the highly sought-after 10th Avenue stop on the 7 train extension, an effort that was recently left for dead.

Still, the Bloomberg administration cautions that these plans are beyond tentative--that sounds familiar--with the Times making mention of a four-page draft, which sounds more like a napkin sketch than a set of blueprints. After all, public approvals alone could take years. And while even Governor Christie said he was interested in the plan, he, and everyone outside of City Hall, said this was the first they had heard of it. The Times is even reporting now that no one at the MTA even knew about the proposal until it leaked out yesterday.

Has the train already left the station, or is it just building steam?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

"I'd rather take that money and fix Wisconsin's roads and bridges," Scott Walker is quoted as saying. Kinda like Chris Christie has proposed--for political reasons as much as practical ones, it seems. Especially now that Bernstein's colleauge Matt Schuerman (an Observer alum) is reporting that a Jersey democratic assembleyman has received 400 documents from the Christie administration, all of which suggest the ARC Tunnel is actually still on budget.

Christie is expected to make his final decision on the project tomorrow. It should be interesting to see whether he'll get on board or not.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

When The Star-Ledger broke the news last month that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was considering killing the $8.7 billion rail project, it led to weeks of hand-wringing speculation. When he confirmed the decision two weeks ago, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood rushed up from Washington to try and get the governor to reconsider. Christie said he would think about it, after a few weeks of review, but insisted he would not put the state's taxpayers at risk, as the project had been expected to go at least billions of dollars over budget based on the governor's projections.

The Jersey paper is once again reporting that Christie has made up his mind, and will likely announce that he is standing firm on his original intention to kill the project and rededicate the state's $2.7 billion investment to highway construction--a slap in the face to mass transit advocates.

Is this simply another savvy move by the governor to get the attention of LaHood and convince him to kick in more than the $3 billion the feds have already committed? Without more outside funding, the project appears all but dead. Or is Christie simply playing politics, as some critics have suggested, stubbornly making some larger point about government spending, fiscal responsibility and transit ambivalance. Perhaps he has higher office in mind.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

The most obvious example is the new $104 MetroCards. But in case you missed it, part of the reason for such a fair hike is that the state has raided dedicated MTA funds yet again, grabbing $16 million on top of the $113 million it took last year. This is at the same time that drivers may not have to pony up as much, if anything, to help the MTA with its sinking budget.

In an even greater sign of continuing car-centrism, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has made good on rumors that he would cancel the ARC (Access to the Region's Core) Tunnel, which would have vastly improved train service into Manhattan for our friends across the Hudson. The $2.7 billion will instead be spent on roadwork throughout the state.

This of course overlooks the fact that Jersey has now sacrificed $3 billion dollars in federal funding for an $8.7 billion project that was to be the most expensive transportation job undertaken in our nation's history. Not to mention this would have taken far more drivers off the road than will be served by bigger highways. Maybe the solution to the MTA's woes really is raising bridge and tunnel tolls...

But the problems are much deeper and more fundamental than continued transit ambivalence -- though that also remains a problem with the political overclass. "I think there's a lot of windshield perspective at play," Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, told The Observer. "And by that I mean a lot of politicians and decisionmakers are drivers -- or are driven -- and don't have a real prospective on what the average New Yorker faces every day."

The bigger issue is putting transit first -- or last, depending on your perspective -- when it comes to budget cuts. Christie touched on this, along with his car-first mentality, when he told the press that he would sooner cut the project than cut into education or public safety funding. It's a fair point, but one not everyone, and certainly not transit advocates, agrees with.

But this is nothing new, as Gene Russianoff, attorney for the Straphangers Campaign and dean of the region's riders, has been watching transit get the axe for decades. "It's been the reality as long as I can remember," Mr. Russianoff said. "The desperate situation we're in just makes the bad choices starker." He points to the triple whammy of not only rising prices but falling service and greater need borne out by the recession.

White finds the actions of politicians reprehensible and ignorant. "Look at what happened to the city in the '70s," he said. "Everyone forgets the economic and social impacts of mass transit because they tend not to be felt until later on. It's too easy, and we have to hold them accountable." He urges people to visit his group's Rider Rebellion Web site if they want to start doing so.

But maybe there's nothing we can do about it. The Times' Economix blog had a post that caught the Desk's eye yesterday about household spending in 2009, i.e. during the height of the recession. According to statistics from the Department of Labor, the only consumer expenditure to rise last year was healthcare. And the one that fell the most? Transportation -- even outstripping housing.

Maybe we can't help giving mass transit short shrift. Maybe it's just in our DNA.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo