ARC Tunnel

Could high-speed rail plans keep some iteration of the ARC Tunnel alive?

The ARC Tunnel just won’t die. Even though New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie killed it dead, even though the feds are now asking for $271 million and a full accounting of expenses, the idea of another cross-Hudson rail crossing is one that won’t stay dead. For the region, of course, that is a positive development even if it might be another two decades before ARC Jr. can start servicing the city.

We join this story now in progress. Shortly after Christie officially pulled the plug on the ARC Tunnel, various advocacy groups and politicians continued to push for a sensible transit policy, and the effort seemed to coalesce around comments Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican in line to chair the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the wake of James Oberstar’s defeat. While most Republicans do not look favorably upon the northeast, Mica is a supporter of high-speed rail and urged the Obama Administration to reexamine its plans for HSR.

In effect, as a comment in Progressive Railroading noted, Mica has advocated for a consolidation of the plans around the profitable and popular Northeast Corridor route. “I am a strong advocate of high-speed rail, but it has to be where it makes sense,” he said. “The administration squandered the money, giving it to dozens and dozens of projects that were marginal at best to spend on slow-speed trains to nowhere.”

In a sense, if America is serious about starting a high-speed rail network while simultaneously improving travel along the Northeast Corridor, focusing federal efforts in the northeast makes sense. Other states have, as Yonah Freemark recently explored in depth, been lukewarm or downright unreceptive toward Obama’s HSR plans, and if the northeast can be the staging crowd, albeit an expensive one, who are we reject the dollars?

Yesterday, Amtrak through a wrinkle into the scheming as they let word drop that they are interested in reviving ARC as a possible high-speed rail tunnel. “We’re looking into common project opportunities with NJ Transit,” Amtrak Spokesman Cliff Cole said. “We’re not sure if there are even any opportunities that would work but we’ve been asked to sit down and talk with them and we’ve begun that process.”

Other Amtrak officials spoke of their efforts as a salvage mission. “A partnershipwould be the immediate strategy to get two tracks as soon as possible,” Al Engel, Amtrak Vice President of High Speed Rail said. “We’re beginning to explore what value there is in the ARC work that can be salvaged.”

New Jersey Transit characterized these talks as very preliminary, and Gov. Christie reiterated his stance on the ARC Tunnel. “To repeat yet again, the ARC Tunnel project is over,” his statement said. “While no new conversations have taken place between Amtrak and NJ Transit, the Governor previously tasked both DOT Commissioner James Simpson and NJ Transit Executive Director James Weinstein to work with the pertinent partners to explore fiscally viable alternatives for a trans-Hudson tunnel. As such, we will continue to explore solutions to the trans-Hudson transportation challenge.”

Still, there’s a chance that something resembling the ARC Tunnel could pop up again sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, sooner is all relative. Although it’s going to take New Jersey up to a year to shutdown work on the ARC Tunnel, Amtrak doesn’t believe the second generation of the ARC project would see revenue service until 2030 later. The government would have to conduct environmental studies and design work before securing funding, and transit activists are going to work to ensure that the next ARC Tunnel does not suffer from the dead-end, deep-cavern design flaw that plagued the version Christie killed.

These developments though do present something of a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The National Association of Railroad Passengers has continued to call for a new trans-Hudson rail tunnel. Even if we have to wait 20 years, the ball can still be rolling on this vital infrastructure policy. A sensible pattern of federal investment and a willingness to cooperate from New Jersey could keep ARC hopes alive in some form or another.

Deep-cavern ARC station, we hardly knew ye. (Click to enlarge)

It’s now been over 48 hours since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced the end of the ARC Tunnel project, and the reactions are still coming fast and furious. Let’s dive in.

New York pols put in call for unused billions for MTA support

We’ll start with the juicy stuff. Since Christie sacrificed $3 billion in federal financing when he torpedoed the tunnel, the feds have some money to spend. Not missing a beat, New York and the MTA are jumping into the fray. With a $10 billion hole in its capital budget and perennial operating deficits, the MTA is going to make a play for some of the money, and both Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer have called upon more federal contributions to both the Second Ave. Subway and the East Side Access project. “We will certainly stake our claim,” MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder said.

Putting the Port Authority dollars to use

The other $3 billion contribution — this one from the Port Authority — is now sitting unused as well, and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign has a solution: Spend some of the money on improving cross-Hudson bus service. Here’s their thinking:

According to ARC’s final Environmental Impact Statement, the project would have shifted daily 11,530 trans-Hudson bus trips and 31,590 trans-Hudson car trips to rail by 2030. Assuming an average bus capacity of 35 passengers, more than 1,230 additional buses will be needed to meet that demand in the absence of ARC. Another 473 buses will be needed to accommodate the baseline projected increase of 16,538 bus trips that would occur even with the tunnel. That’s another 1,703 buses needed by 2030 to accommodate this growth in cross-Hudson trips.

Currently, NJ Transit has a total of 2,125 buses statewide. If half of new trips are on NJ Transit buses (with the other half on private carriers), the agency would have to increase its existing bus fleet by at least 850 buses, or 40%. That’s a major investment.

And with the Lincoln Tunnel’s Express Bus Lane and the Port Authority Bus Terminal (PABT) already at or near capacity, there’s just no way for the existing infrastructure to accommodate 1,703 more buses. As the ARC project’s final environmental impact statement points out, “bus service levels would remain the same as existing conditions… due to capacity limitations at PABT.” In other words, drastic improvements are necessary to allow more buses to enter Manhattan. Luckily, the Port Authority is already considering plans to increase bus capacity through the Lincoln Tunnel and at the PABT.

The real issue, as TSTC notes, is access through the tunnels. Since New Jersey isn’t expanding tunnel capacity any time soon, buses must have a true dedicated access lane into and out of the Lincoln Tunnel. Until that happens, buses will be slowed by the same traffic that makes crossing the Hudson River so infuriating.

Pointing a finger a Gov. Christie but also Ray LaHood

Meanwhile, as project supporters try to make sense of the politics behind Christie’s decision, many see inconsistencies in his insistence on toeing the line when it came to cost overruns. As Mobilizing the Region explores, Christie has been more than willing to eschew financial responsibility on road projects.

In fact, shortly before canceling the ARC Tunnel, his administration borrowed $2 billion to pay for a misguided turnpike-widening project. Similar to the ARC project, the turnpike-widening plan has seen its cost go from $1.4 billion in 2004 to $3.6 billion in 2009, but Christie has bee notably silent on those cost overruns and budgetary projections.

Mark J. Magyar expands on this finger-pointing and explores the ARC Tunnel’s demise on both a state and national level. The Rutgers professor is more than willing to blame many prominent state officials for the ARC debacle, and he lays out the case in exquisite detail.

Finally, Ray LaHood enters the picture too. On both the DOT Fastlane blog and in the opinion pages of The Star-Ledger, the Secretary of Transportation lays into Christie. He says:

Against the backdrop of these enduring legacies, Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to terminate America’s largest transportation project was particularly disappointing. Unfortunately, his choice comes with profound consequences for New Jersey, the New York metropolitan region and our nation as a whole.

Tens of thousands of jobs that the tunnel would have created will be lost. Future New Jerseyans will face shrinking property values, suffocating road traffic, interminable train delays and increasing air pollution. A $3.358 billion federal investment in the region’s economic future will move elsewhere.

Yet, as Andrea Bernstein writes at Transportation Nation, this call from LaHood is too little, too late. The feds too are complacent in the death of a project they touted. “There was,” she wrote, “a substantive debate to be had here [on the planning and impact of the tunnel], one that is now lost to the sands of time…because neither party released full details until after a decision had been made.”

It’s barely been 24 hours since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie killed the ARC Tunnel, and already the fallout is loud and divisive. New Jersey’s Democratic Senate representatives are slamming Christie for what they see as a national play for headlines while some New Jersey-based activists are blaming New York for its unwillingness to help fund an interstate project. Let’s dive in.

Christie defends his decision

After announcing his decision to kill ARC via a press release, Christie held forth for twenty minutes with members of the press. If you’d like to watch him dance around the issue, he’s made the videos available for all to see.

Basically, as I’ve mentioned before, Christie’s decision came down to the illusion of money. He wanted to, he said, find “a way to work around the unacceptable level of risk and cost that was being asked to be borne by the taxpayers of the state of New Jersey.” He still claims that the feds were putting forth total project costs as high as $13.8 billion even though Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood disputed that total last week, and he claimed that divorcing the Portal Bridge South from the ARC Tunnel funding scheme wasn’t possible.

Christie’s excuses ran deep. When discussing the cost-saving measure of connecting the tunnel to Penn Station instead of the deep cavern beneath 34th Street, he said that his idea didn’t address the real problem. “Even if that aspect of the project was successfully implemented,” he said, “it would not provide a means for covering current cost overruns nor the contingencies necessary to conclude a funding agreement with the FTA, and I’ll get back to that in a second. Simply put, it wouldn’t hold taxpayers harmless in New Jersey for cost increases and cost overruns that have already emerged, and could continue to be even greater as the project moved forward over the next eight years.”

Ultimately, Christie’s 20-minute statement was a national show of economic force designed to say all the right things in an appeal to voters looking for fiscal responsibility. “I cannot place upon the citizens of the State of New Jersey an open-ended letter of credit,” he said, later adding, “This is how we got ourselves into the third highest debt load in America. This is how we got ourselves in to the awful fiscal mess that we’re in, and often during the campaign, I would say that if I were elected I would make the hard decisions that were necessary in order to return our state to fiscal health.”

He didn’t make mention of any future plans to study cheaper alternatives or ways to improve transit access from New Jersey to New York City. We’ll just have to keep waiting for that.

LaHood, Lautenberg respond

Following Christie’s press conference, both New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Secretary LaHood issued statements in response to the development. Lautenberg’s was more vehement than LaHood’s.

Says Lautenberg:

“The Governor was given a deal from the federal government on Sunday that put no extra imposition on the state of New Jersey for its obligation to the ARC Tunnel project, and the Governor refused it. It was clear from the beginning that Governor Christie planned to kill the ARC Tunnel no matter what. In doing so, the Governor has once again put politics over performance.

“This is a tragic day in New Jersey’s history. Two weeks ago, Governor Christie made the biggest public policy blunder in New Jersey’s history. Today he repeated it. Today he killed the prospect for improving New Jersey’s economy and creating thousands of new jobs. He increased the amount of toxic fumes that will be discharged from idling cars stuck in traffic, and he took away an opportunity for New Jersey housing values to go up.

“I was a CEO and I know you need to be at work to do your job, and Governor Christie is out stumping in other states and not doing his job at home. While the Governor is on political missions in Indiana, California, Ohio and other states, he is ducking the needs of people in New Jersey. In just nine months of being in office, the Governor has bungled the opportunity to score $400 million dollars for our students and now he has lost over $6 billion in transportation funding.

“New Jersey Transit is coming off one of the worst summers for delays in recent memory. 1,400 delays were recorded this summer, and just this week a minor derailment caused hour-long delays for thousands of commuters. Delays and derailments are only going to get worse on our aging infrastructure and thanks to the Governor, New Jersey commuters shouldn’t count on new rail service options for decades to come.

“The Governor has put politics before performance, and it is the people of New Jersey who will pay the high price.”

In a “Truths and Myths” section of the press release, Lautenberg starts to get a little sloppy with the facts. He disputes the idea that Christie is “killing the tunnel because the state cannot afford it” and instead claims thats Christie torpedoed the project only to “move $1.25 billion in New Jersey Turnpike Authority funds dedicated to the ARC Tunnel to the state’s Transportation Trust Fund.” The reality is a mix of the two.

LaHood chose a more diplomatic approach. “I am extremely disappointed in Gov. Christie’s decision to abandon the ARC tunnel project, which is a devastating blow to thousands of workers, millions of commuters and the state’s economic future,” he said. “The governor’s decision to stop work on this project means commuters — who would have saved 45 minutes each day thanks to the ARC tunnel — will instead see no end to traffic congestion and ever-longer wait times on train platforms. Our team has worked hard over the last several weeks to present Governor Christie with workable solutions to bring the ARC tunnel to life.”

Looking at New York

Meanwhile, Mary Forsberg points her finger at our side of the river. In an Op-Ed for The Times, Forsberg questions why New York wasn’t willing to help fund the ARC Tunnel. “Where, specifically, is New York’s contribution to the effort? Original estimates put the project’s cost at $8.7 billion, with New Jersey chipping in $2.7 billion and the federal government and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey each contributing $3 billion,” she writes. “In other words, New Jersey would have to shell out more than its fair share for the tunnel project, while New York, which stands to gain in a number of big ways, would pay nothing.”

Forsberg, the director of research at the New Jersey Policy Perspective, calls upon New Jersey to rais its gas tax, but she also cites the tax revenue disparities between New York and New Jersey due to the tax credits granted to commuters. Because New York is in a comparatively better tax position, she urges the Empire State to help out the Garden State in realizing a project that benefits both. “To match New Jersey’s contribution, New York should dedicate the billions of dollars of income taxes that it annually collects from New Jersey residents toward construction of the tunnel. That way each party would have a quarter in the kitty,” she writes.

The state though already fronts numerous costs borne by commuters. We do not enforce a commuter tax and pay for all of the services — police, fire, transportation, etc. — that accrue as a result of the numerous people who commute into the city each day. Some would argue that we already pay our fair share of costs, but Forsberg’s argument is not without merit.

Updated (2:00 p.m.): As I reported this morning, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has indeed killed the ARC Tunnel. His office sent out a statement on the decision to cancel the ARC Tunnel a few minutes ago. Captioned “Christie Administration enforces budget discipline and protects New Jersey taxpayer dollars,” the release says that “New Jersey can’t afford ARC project and shutdown continues.” It reads:

Today, Governor Chris Christie accepted the recommendation of NJ Transit Executive Director Jim Weinstein to continue the orderly and expeditious shutdown of the ARC Project. Despite intense negotiations with federal and state participants, no agreement was reached on terms that would assure New Jersey’s taxpayers would not pay more than $2.7 billion for a completed Trans Hudson Express ARC project.

Federal cost estimates range from $9.8 billion to $12.7 billion. In addition this range does not include $775 million that New Jersey would be required to spend to build the Portal Bridge South, an integral part the ARC project.

On October 8, 2010, Governor agreed to an additional two week review of the ARC project at the request of US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood.

A memorandum from the ARC Project Executive Committee is attached to this release.

The memo — embedded below — from James Weinstein, New Jersey Transit’s executive director explains the negotiations between the state and the feds and the final decision to cancel the project. “At a time when New Jersey’s economy is under extreme stress and the financial strength of the state is at a low point, the taxpayers are in no position to bear the open-ended cost for this project that would be required to obtain a Full Funding Grant Agreement from the FTA,” Weinstein wrote.

The document does highlight though how the feds tried to keep a handle on the costs, but it’s hard to say if New Jersey heard them out in good faith. Included among the proposals were plans to build the ARC Tunnel in phases to reduce the scope and lower the near-term costs; finance the program through Federal Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing loans; secure a public private partnership; or change the location of the terminal in Manhattan. “Simply,” Weinstein wrote, these proposals “would not hold New Jersey taxpayers harmless from cost increases and overruns that have already emerged and may continue to emerge as the project is constructed.”

In a statement, the Regional Plan Association criticized Christie’s move. “Unfortunately it does not appear as though the Governor gave responsible or serious consideration to any proposals to phase the project, reduce project costs, introduce private funding or accept additional funds from the federal government to help cover overruns, including options that would defer any additional cost to the state until after the project was generating substantial economic and tax benefits,” the organization said. “This lends lending credence to the argument that the State wants to divert already-committed ARC monies to other one-shot uses to plug the ailing Transportation Trust Fund, which runs out of funding in mid-2011.”

New Jersey Future offered up a similar take. “The ARC tunnel project is the best solution to the need for new capacity on New Jersey’s rail network under the Hudson River,” Executive Director Peter Kasabach said. “It was the result of 20 years of planning, designing and negotiations, and represented an unprecedented commitment of funds by the federal government. While fiscal prudence is imperative in these lean times, killing the tunnel is not prudent, fiscally or otherwise. The capacity constraints faced by New Jersey Transit are real and will need to be addressed – and when they are, New Jersey will likely pay a price far heavier than the ARC tunnel.”

This is an unfortunately short-sighted decision by Christie, who plans to use some of the money earmarked for ARC to replenish the state’s Transportation Trust Fund. The tunnel would have generated significant property value — and thus real estate tax — increases that could have been used to pay off the debt accrued by building the tunnel. Furthermore, the state is sacrificing $500 million already spent on the project and $6 billion in guaranteed funding from the Port Authority and the feds. Countless jobs won’t be created.

Still, New Jersey Transit vows to forge ahead with the state’s rail capacity crisis. It says it will “pursue[] alternate, affordable solutions to the trans-Hudson transportation challenge.” While Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic already has some ideas for the Garden State, how long will we wait until the state can find a project that is well-designed, and cost-efficient while doubling capacity as the ARC did?

10.26.10 Memo

Despite an obvious need, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is set to pull the plug on the ARC Tunnel. (Image via Infrastructurist.

For New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the future of the ARC Tunnel is all about money. He fears the project will come in well overbudget; he wants more guaranteed federal money for this massive infrastructure investment; and he’s not going to let it go forward until he gets his dollars. Later today, according to numerous reports, Christie will announce that he and the feds are at a funding impasse, and he will again kill the project.

“It’s all about the money,” Christie said yesterday, and the past two week’s politicking is a sure sign of that. Christie first called the project into question in early September when he ordered a review of the budget. After not quite reviewing the budget but simply pondering federal projections, Christie canceled the tunnel on Oct. 7. Under pressure from the feds, who had already committed $3 billion to the project, he promised a two-week review, but the writing was on the wall. On Friday, the federal cost projections, showing potential overruns of up to $4 billion, leaked, and the project’s fate was all but sealed.

According to The Star-Ledger, the feds know it’s all about the money. Sources close to the governor allege that Ray LaHood and his staff “offered to improve the financing terms but committed no new money.” Without the additional funds, Christie could not commit a financially-troubled state to the build. Barring a last-minute reprieve, ARC, the country’s biggest public-works project, will die.

The New Jersey-based paper has a bit more on the decision:

Washington transportation planners have been “aggressive” in trying to convince the governor to reinstate the tunnel project and have offered alternate financing and the possibility of scaling back parts of the mammoth trans-Hudson undertaking, the officials said. But Christie has been emphatic that he wants more money from other sources — like the federal government — and, without that, he would have no reason to change his original plan.

U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) released a statement blasting the governor’s decision: “The federal government, at my urging, presented Gov. Christie with a number of financing options that would limit and even eliminate New Jersey’s responsibility to pay for cost overruns on the ARC Tunnel. The federal government demonstrated its strong commitment to building this tunnel, but it was clear from the beginning that Gov. Christie planned to kill this project no matter what.”

Money, money, money. It’s a common theme here. Someone wants money, and the same someone doesn’t have money. That someone also needs to find money to restore his state’s broke Transportation Trust Fund, and what better way to do so than by canceling a giant tunnel out of New Jersey that has garnered only lukewarm support from many of the Garden State’s transit advocates? And so the ARC will die, and twenty years of planning will be flushed down the drain.

There are, of course, many solutions Christie could have pursued. He could have worked with the feds to cut down on the costs of the project. He could have started building it and, if he’s still the governor when the time comes, simply ordered to stop when the money ran out. At that point, the state would have more leverage to negotiate with the feds over completion funds. He could have figured out a way to, as the feds seemed to have offered, bond more money out of it. After all, a new tunnel that increases capacity is the perfect bond project because it will generate massive amounts of revenue that will go toward bond payments six or seven years down the line. He did not.

So New York’s economy and New Jersey’s economy loses out. The meager tunnel underneath the Hudson River in use by New Jersey Transit trains will remain the sole access point to the city, and trains will remain crowded. Too many cars will try to drive in from Jersey, and commuters who have seen train crowds more than double over the last 12 years will find space and comfort at a premium.

Who knows when a project of this scope will next get off the drawing board? The next iteration of the ARC Tunnel should address the concerns of those who worry about the deep cavern and the lack of integration with Amtrak. The next iteration of the ARC Tunnel will also require even more money than this one. Even as the project promises to improve commute times and increase property values, it will die the death of cost overruns. After all, it’s all about the money, and the money just isn’t there.

The deep cavern in Manhattan is one of Governor Christie's gripes with the ARC Tunnel. (Via ARCTunnel.com)

It might yet be the ARC Tunnel’s day of reckoning. According to unsourced reports out of New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie will at least take the weekend to ponder the fate of this vital rail project.

Meanwhile, although I reported this morning that the feds’ estimates featured cost overruns of just $1 billion, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has broken his silence to explain the government’s cost projections for the tunnel. In his statement, he explains the upper and lower bounds of the FTA projects. He said:

In response to press reports, I want to clarify the range of numbers regarding the ARC tunnel project.

The Department of Transportation has estimated the low-range cost of the project at $9.775 billion. The mid-range estimate is $10.909 billion and the high-end range is $12.708 billion. For complex projects, we do a range of estimates in the interests of accuracy. However, DOT is committed to working together through the life of the project to keep costs down to the lowest estimate.

In addition, we’ve been discussing with New Jersey officials the simultaneous construction of the $775 million South span of the Portal Bridge project.

We are committed to continuing the constructive dialogue we have had for the last two weeks with New Jersey officials to find a way to move forward on the ARC tunnel project, which will double commuter train capacity between New Jersey and New York.

This statement by LaHood reminds me of the FTA’s approach to the Second Ave. Subway. Last year, the feds released their own cost estimates for Phase 1 of the SAS, and they include a completion date as late as 2018 and a budget as high as $5.7 billion. (See this chart for more.) The MTA has maintained that the project will wrap on time in late 2016 or early 2017 and will cost under $5 billion. It’s important to remember that the federal are just that. They’re trying to keep the costs low, and the final price could range from $9.7-$12.7 billion.

It’s clear that Christie is facing a budget crisis of sorts with this project, but it’s too important to scrap now. We’ll find out next week if he and LaHood can reach an agreement to keep the ARC Tunnel on track.

Time flies when you’re trying to save a tunnel.

Six weeks ago, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans to halt work on the ARC Tunnel to assess its costs. He claimed, without providing much evidence, that cost overruns could be as great as $5 billion and that the State of New Jersey could not continue with the project under those budgetary assumptions. Two weeks ago, he canceled the project due to this same claim after state officials conducted a bare-bones analysis of this project. When Ray Lahood, President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation, stepped in, Christie agreed to conduct a two-week review, but just a few days ago, it sounded as though the tunnel would be scraped for good this week.

Now that the day of reckoning for the ARC Tunnel has arrived, the drama is far from over. New Jersey politicians are parrying with the governor over his fuzzy math, and FTA sources have seemingly leaked their strategy to the media. Both the state and federal officials claim that Christie’s claims of $5 billion in cost overruns are simply a figment of his imagination.

Item #1: NJ State Assembly Transportation Chair John Wisniewski requested a series of documents from the Governor and found no evidence of current cost overruns. “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 yesterday. “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.”

Item #2: The federal estimates that Christie claims project a $5 billion increase in the cost of the ARC Tunnel actually show only a $1 billion increase, and the feds are willing to work with Christie to reach a compromise on the funding. The Star-Ledger elaborated:

Among the added incentives LaHood may offer to keep the nation’s largest public works project alive are federal high-speed rail grants and cost-sharing with Amtrak to expand rail capacity, said those close to the project. They asked not to be named because they are not at liberty to discuss the talks publicly…

Those close to the project said it was during the meeting two weeks ago that LaHood told the governor the low estimate for the project was $9.7 billion. Part of the reason for the differing numbers is that Christie’s figures include $800 million to build two tracks along a new bridge over the Hackensack River just south of the existing Portal Bridge between Kearny and Secaucus. The 100-year-old bridge is in disrepair and is so low it is often opened to allow commercial boats underneath, leading to delays.

Federal officials have counted the tunnel and Portal Bridge projects as separate entities, while Christie has maintained they are joined at the hip and should be counted in the same cost estimate. Including the Portal Bridge, the estimate LaHood gave Christie was $10.6 billion to $13.5 billion, said a third person familiar with the talks. The governor has continued to use the higher cost projections in his public criticism of the project.

Although federal transportation officials have seethed over Christie’s use of the higher projections even after his meeting with LaHood, they had kept the $9.7 billion figure a closely guarded secret because of the transportation secretary’s belief he could conciliate with Christie.

It’s clear by now that Christie simply wants to kill the project so he can beef up the state’s depleted Transportation Trust Fund. What the numbers actually say is of little concern to the New Jersey governor.

In reality, Christie could point to the ARC Tunnel’s cost projections. Take a look:

Originally, the conceptual-level construction cost estimate came in at $4.3 billion, but that number, state officials said a few weeks ago, should be discarded. It doesn’t include real estate costs, escalation of contingency planning. In 2007, though, the project was pegged at $7.4 billion, but by January 2009, at the urging of the FTA, the ARC Tunnel’s price tag rose to $8.7 billion. It has, despite the right-most column in this chart, remained there for the last two years, and even if the feds believe it could cost $9.7 billion, that increase is a modest one compared Christie’s claims of a $5 billion overrun.

Unfortunately, these revelations, clearly leaked on purpose by the FTA on the eve of its meeting with Christie, are a last-gasp effort to shame the governor into reversing his decision. It’s a risky political gambit, and one that won’t work. As he’s shown time and again, Christie will stick to his guns, for better or worse, once he makes a decision, and he doesn’t appear willing to move forward with ARC.

So if this is the end, what next? The project itself suffered from some design flaws, but there is little doubt that this new Hudson River rail crossing is a must for economic, transportation and sustainability purposes. It’s taken 20 years of planning to get to the point where contracts have been awarded and work begun, and Christie could wipe out that progress with one word tomorrow. The region will come to regret it.

This graphic from Infrastructurist shows how the current NJ Transit tunnels are at capacity.

And there it goes again. The Star-Ledger is once again reporting that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will kill the ARC Tunnel when its two-week reprieve is up on Friday unless alternative funding sources can be identified in the meantime. Based upon comments Christie has issued on the record, the future of this long-planned and badly-needed tunnel may not be bright at all.

Christie said he was comfortable walking away from the project unless the federal government finds another source of money to cover cost overruns on the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) project, which is projected by Christie’s advisers to cost $2.3 billion to $5.3 billion more than the original $8.7 billion price tag. “I don’t want to hear about the jobs it will create. If I don’t have the money for the payroll,” it will not create the jobs, Christie said. “This is not a difficult decision for me.”

The governor killed the project on Oct. 7 after saying the real cost would be at least $11 billion and that he did not want to put state taxpayers on a “never-ending hook.” The next day, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood persuaded the governor to wait two weeks to explore funding options. “Every person who has criticized this decision, ask them a follow-up,” Christie said this morning. “How would you pay for it? I can’t write the check if there is no money in the account.”

Speaking to rail proponents in Westfield around the same time, [NJ Transit Executive Director Jim] Weinstein said, “At this point, I don’t see how we can afford it.”

Despite these signs, proponents are still pushing hard for the tunnel. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has put forward a We Need ARC website designed to spur on voter support, and the RPA has run a newspaper ad for $25,000 decrying Christie’s decision. “New Jersey needs ARC,” Tom Wright, executive director of the RPA, said. “Unless transit capacity under the Hudson River can grow with demand, New Jersey has a hard cap on its economic potential. With the 70,000 additional daily riders who would have used ARC, New Jersey would be more connected to New York City and the expanding global economy, companies and workers would continue locating in the Garden State, home construction would pick up, and the value of homes near transit stations would rise by an estimated $18 billion.”

Earlier today, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg hosted two rallies in support of the tunnel, but Christie, in response to recent studies, simply cited costs. “It’s $2-$5 billion over budget,” Chrstie said of Lautenberg’s support, “and if he really is concerned about it, he should go find the money to pay for it.”

After the jump, the RPA’s ad is embedding. Notably, it disputes Christie’s assertion that the project is truly over budget. “Federal and state officials agree that ARC can be built on budget,” it says, “and there won’t be any overruns if New Jersey manages its end of the project.” Click the image below to enlarge.

An interactive map from the RPA shows by how much commute times will be reduced with the ARC Tunnel. Click the image to view the interactive map.

As New Jersey politicians and rail advocates work to convince Gov. Chris Christie to restore the ARC Tunnel, the Regional Plan Association and Sen. Frank Lautenberg have released a study touting the benefits of the project. According to the latest report, the tunnel will have a significant impact on the commute times from New Jersey to Manhattan. It will double the number of households within a 50-minute train ride to the city, cut travel time by 15-30 minutes and shave up to 35 percent off many commutes.

“The ARC Tunnel will not only allow more New Jersey residents to work in New York, but it will significantly cut the amount of time it now takes to get to Manhattan,” the Senator said in a statement. “Make no mistake: With the ARC Tunnel, commutes will be shorter, but without this tunnel, commutes will become intolerably long.”

In an effort to highlight the impact that a transfer-ride ride into Manhattan for riders on the eight New Jersey Transit lines that current require a transfer to reach the city, the RPA explored how the timetables would change with this new one-seat ride in place. It is the companion piece to a study released earlier this year showing how ARC will lead to an $18-billion increase in property value. “The benefits of ARC are far-reaching and well-defined,” Bob Yaro, president of the RPA, said. “The project will increase the reliability of NJ Transit trains, reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, drive economic growth in the right places and boost home values. Perhaps most significantly, ARC will cut commute times for NJ Transit riders on average between 15 and 30 minutes per day.”

By comparing the Spring 2010 train schedules with trends in NJ Transit operations and the project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement, the RPA assessed savings on a station-by-station basis. Travel between Trenton and New York City would speed up by nearly 20 minutes, and the ride from Orange to the Big Apple would take 36 minutes less than it does now. Those coming in from the North Jersey Coast would see travel times reduced by over 45 minutes. (Information by each station is available on this interactive map.)

Currently, Gov. Christie and the Federal Transit Administration are undertaking a two-week study of the ARC Tunnel’s finances, and on October 21, the two sides will again meet to determine the fate of the tunnel. Lautenberg urged them to find a solution.

“We are already at near capacity with the current 100 year-old tunnel,” he said, “and demand for rail service in New Jersey to midtown Manhattan is expected to double over the next two decades. If New Jersey is to remain competitive for jobs in New York in the future, we must build this tunnel. If this project is cancelled, New Jersey’s transportation system will become a parking lot — isolated from job opportunities in Manhattan. Jobs that would have gone to New Jerseyans will instead go to people in Connecticut, Westchester County and Long Island. We can’t let that happen.”