PATH’s fancy new station is closed most weekend until early 2015. (Photo via @PATHTrain)
For the past month — and for the next 10 — PATH train riders trying to get to and from Jersey City have faced a very inconvenient weekend shutdown. Trains are not running through the Downtown Hudson Tubes, and the Port Authority, after announcing the work a week before the first weekend diversion, has Port Authority fingered Sandy repairs and signal system upgrades as the drivers of the work. But now questions are swirling around PATH’s ability to deliver the signal system upgrades on time, and while weekend shutdowns are expected to wrap on time in early 2015, the threat of more will loom over frustrated riders for the foreseeable future.
Ted Mann first reported on this development late on Thursday:
The PATH rail system may not install a new crash-prevention system by December 2015 after all, a person involved in the project said, even though the federal deadline was one reason that officials gave just weeks ago for shutting down weekend service between Jersey City and the World Trade Center for a year.
In announcing the work on the World Trade Center tunnels last month, PATH officials said they could meet the deadline, which would make it one of the few commuter railroads in the country to do so. Installing the system, known as positive train control, took on greater urgency for railroads after a Metro-North Railroad derailment last year killed four people.
But subsequent consultation with Siemens Rail Automation, the company performing the work, has made it clear that the goal was overly ambitious, said the person familiar with the matter. Project officials think the full system will be installed on fewer than half of the PATH system’s seven sections by the end of 2015, the person said.
According to Mann’s report, Port Authority officials feel that the initial timeline — somewhere between 2016-2018 is a much more realistic expectation for this project. The signal program is a CBTC installation with positive train control that rail agencies are expected to install before the end of 2015. In New York, though, none of the region’s agencies expect to meet that deadline as Metro-North and the LIRR have already said they can’t fulfill the mandate while this latest news pushes PATH’s compliance beyond 2015 as well.
In response to the piece in the Journal, a PATH spokesman reiterated the agency’s plans to meet their federal obligations. “PATH will have an operational positive train control system that meets federal mandates by the December 2015 deadline,” Ron Marsico said. Still, nearly all of Mann’s sources said PATH officials privately do not believe the 21 months remaining gives the agency enough time to complete the work. To do so could also add approximately $60 million to the project’s final price tag, and it’s not clear if the money is there to speed things up.
Meanwhile, Jersey City officials are seeking solutions. The Port Authority will try out a ferry from the waterfront to the World Financial Center, but it won’t be free. The easiest solution — run PATH trains to midtown but without the long delay at Hoboken — is staring the Port Authority in the face, but no one’s bothered to try this yet. And so anyone trying to travel between Manhattan and Jersey City will just have to hold their breaths and hope that this extended timeline doesn’t lead to years of sporadic weekend outages. The next 10 months is plenty.
13 comments
I have season tickets to the New York Red Bulls soccer team out in Harrison, NJ (right next to the PATH) and I have completely given up on the PATH this season. I’m more than happy to pay the extra $2.50 and take NJ Transit. It’s improved the speed of my commute to-and-from games and it has spared me a lot of hassles. They had 17,000 at the home opener last Saturday and the journey back on the PATH train was absolutely abysmal, from what I was told.
Yes, the ride back on the PATH is abysmal. I used to take it to/from hockey games at The Prudential Center but gave up on it all together. We sat at Newark-Penn for almost half an hour one evening before beginning the slow lumbering ride into the city.
Almost grateful I don’t have Bears or Nets games in Newark anymore.
Still think they could’ve handled this better
PATH’s current signal system is very old and very limited in terms of capacity. So the more people they have to move, involving more trains, the slower the ride.
No, actually Ted Mann has it wrong. What’s really happening is that someone in Jersey City offended Governor Christie, so his aides are having PATH shut down on weekends for a train traffic study.
I was the first to crack that one on SAS when the news was broken.
I am puzzled. I assume that “positive train control”, at bottom, means that if a train goes through a red light, it is automatically stopped. I would imagine that the PATH, like other subway systems, has had that feature for years. If so, are they not already compliant with the federal mandate?
I also understand that the PATH wants to install CBTC to enable the system to carry more passengers, by letting trains get closer to one another, etc. And I can see that CBTC would need its own method of automatically stopping a train, to replace the existing one.
What I don’t understand is why the Port Authority is blaming all this on the feds, or Hurricane Sandy. They have had intentions of installing CBTC for years now. The new cars they received in recent years were purchased with this in mind. If they can’t keep the railroad running on the weekend, it ain’t Obama’s fault. Or Christie’s
They may have originally planned to install CBTC, but did they originally plan for it to be complete before 2015?
PTC is more than just preventing running red signals, it also provides overspeed protection and roadway worker protection.
Positive train control is much more than that!
What you described
Is ATP (automatic train protection).
Positive train control is the principle of having a train actively subordinated, at all times, to a central control system that, in turns, know the position, speed and acceleration.
It is a much more sophisticated and broader in scope system than ATP.
Aren’t the crews completely obsolete then?
Mostly, yes. You only need some secondary upgrades like fine-grain alignment capabilities at low speed and automated start/stop and door operating, and crews are no longer needed to operate trains.
Part of the issue is that the shutdown affects only a small part of the system. Only two stations are closed on the weekends, and only two segments of track. They may be able to finish PTC in the tunnel between the World Trade Center and Exchange Place with the shutdown, but the idea that shutting down a small portion of the system on the weekends was intended to make it possible for the entire system to be PTC compliant was obvious bullshit from the beginning. We shall see if the Port Authority makes an audacious attempt to shut down the 6th Avenue line of the PATH on weekends in 2015–I would not be surprised. But, more likely, it’s retaliation not for Fulop’s failure to endorse Christie/endorsement of Buono (would be too obvious/easy at this point) but because Jersey City is currently suing the Port Authority for about $500 million in back taxes it owes the city.
Thanks for reporting on the appalling mess that the PATH train is subjecting us to on weekends. There’s not enough press on this, but at least you’re saying something.
As for the idea of running JSQ-33rd PATH trains to midtown without a layover at Hoboken, I’m not holding my breath, but that’s not the biggest issue. The last few times I’ve been on the JSQ-HOB-33rd trains, they seem to have shortened the HOB layover time considerably vs. a few years ago. Now the trains are able to get turned around and get out of HOB in just a couple of minutes; in years past, it seemed like it took forever. The bigger issue is that the trains can be very crowded; PATH has not noticeably increased the frequency of JSQ-HOB-33rd trains to compensate for the lack of WTC trains. Every 10 minutes just isn’t often enough. They should be running at least every six minutes throughout most of the day on Saturdays.
Furthermore, the NWK-JSQ shuttle isn’t running frequently enough, and for the last two Sundays has been brutally slashed to every 30 minutes for supposed signal repairs with very little advance notice.