As the ARC Tunnel Doomsday clock reaches 11 p.m., one New Jersey state representative claims that Gov. Chris Christie’s attempts at killing the project are simply wrong. NJ State Assembly Transportation Chair John Wisniewski announced today that a review of New Jersey Transit planning documents show that the ARC Tunnel is currently on track to cost $8.7 billion and that he could find no evidence of cost overruns in the projections from June onward.
“The documents provided by the governor’s own administration fail to provide any justification for the governor’s claim of billions in cost overruns on the tunnel project,” Wisniewski said in a statement today. “That claim seems as though it was simply pulled out of thin air by the governor. The governor is risking New Jersey’s economic future with numbers that, at least according to these documents, have no basis in reality. Over-the-top sound bites by Gov. Christie aside, the fact is the OPRA documents include reports dated July 30, Aug. 24 and Oct. 5. All of the reports include the following statement: ‘The overall project remains within budget.’ The next sentence in each report indicates the total project budget is $8.7 billion.”
Wisniewski, who might have more to say, doesn’t seem to account for the fact that, seven years ago, this project was budged at under $5 billion, but for now, it’s not clear from where Christie’s claims of cost overruns of up to $5 billion originate. The OPRA documents are available online right here.
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*Sigh* The project was originally projected to cost about one third the current budget. The overruns have already happened.
Is that the Sept. 2003 estimate Ben cites in his most recent article as not including “real estate costs, escalation or contingency planning,” or a different one?
First, it’s an older one. Second, if the costs today are higher than the projected costs of 2003 not including escalations, then there have been escalations.
There’s another, albeit quaint alternative. Reconnect the tracks to the waterfront, put the trains on a ferry, and then they can complete the trip at Hudson Yards. And there’ll still be money left to repair all those dinky little bridges used by 20 cars a day that dot the NJ landscape!
The OPRA documents are pretty interesting (though there’s a lot of duplicate information). Some folks might be interested in an e-mail which basically summarizes NJ Transit’s “official line” on why connecting to Penn can’t work, etc.
It’s at page 69 of the third of six document packets.
The official explanation is so full of hogwash that you have to wonder whether the person who came up with it has a fully functional brain. The LIRR added stairs and escalators in the 1990s; apparently, the station’s old design was not a problem then. The station capacity issue is utterly trivial by the standard of any Tokyo-area commuter line; the mainline, elevated Tokyo Station has 10 tracks, and has about three times the passenger traffic of Penn. And surgically removed from the rebuttal to Clift’s idea is the fact due to George Haikalis that nearly 50% of the lower concourse is used for back offices and concessions.
Granted, expecting an American transportation planner to have a clue about how trains work in Japan and Europe is like expecting one to know how trains work on Epsilon Eridani – the level of knowledge is about equal. The solution is to fire all the people who don’t know how competent countries build rail for incompetence and replace them with people who do.