The new land rush is about residential projects. Development on the Hudson can be good, but it’s got to represent “smart growth” that complements rather than damages this great resource.

This means concentrating development in city and town centers, ideally within a half-mile of train and bus stations so people can walk and bicycle for many of their trips and use public transportation if they have to commute to their jobs or other distant destination. This is a major new thrust of Metro-North, working in partnership with the Paterson administration, and Scenic Hudson is supporting this.

Also, I have hopes for revived West Shore Line service.

You would definitely be justified in feeling skeptical, and overall, I agree that the money for the Stewart rail link would be much better spent on connecting these air passengers to other airports or wherever their final destinations may take them. For that reason, I’ve added the $600,000,000 project to my Spreadsheet o’Boondoggles.

it would open up the entire Lower Hudson Valley to development all along the corridor that runs on both sides of the Hudson up to Stewart.

That’s exactly the problem. Sprawl is sprawl regardless of how you call it. The additional residents along the east side of the Hudson might commute to Manhattan by train, but they’ll live in large, detached houses, which require more energy to heat, and run errands using cars, consuming more gas and increasing pollution and carbon emissions. The additional businesses will come with ample free parking as per zoning laws, and have most of their workers and customers arrive by car, as the rail links will be inconvenient to anyone who doesn’t live on the Hudson Line.

On the west side of the Hudson it’ll be even worse. There’s a railroad running down to Hoboken, but it’s not used for passenger service. Even if it is, the connection to New York City and even most of Bergen and Hudson Counties will remain difficult, so even more trips will involve cars.

A better solution than expanding Stewart is to draw traffic away from the three airports through high-speed rail. At the speeds proposed for the California high-speed rail project, a train can get from Penn Station to Chicago Union Station in four and a half hours, which is quite competitive with airlines, considering that the train stations are located right at their cities’ centers, and that trains require about an hour less for check-in and security.

You touch upon a better solution in your comment, and it’s one I’ve mentioned before. Stewart should be accessible to people who live in Westchester, the Hudson Valley and Northern Jersey. That way, the airport can siphon people away from the over-crowded conditions at LGA, EWR and JFK. If the regions’ expanding as you accurately say it is, then focusing on a centralized Manhattan starting point is folly as well.

The recent events at Stewart aside, this airport provides a viable transit alternative to help ease the (increasing, and dangerous) congestion from LGA, NWK and JFK. If that weren’t the case, the Port Authority would not be planning for investments there over the long term. A direct rail link would not only provide time and energy saving alternatives to reaching Stewart, but it would open up the entire Lower Hudson Valley to development all along the corridor that runs on both sides of the Hudson up to Stewart.

It’s a win-win situation in my mind.

I’m not in favor of a new rail connection to Stewart, but it’s a shame that this period of airline contraction will probably nix other, more needed, rail-airport connectors as well.