The bistate Gateway Development Commission says that all work on their vastly overly expensive and completely useless $16 billion new Hudson River rail passenger tunnel will stop on Feb. 6 unless President Trump unfreezes the money he stopped in October in a fight with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who kicked off the cheerleading at the GDC meeting yesterday.
As we’ve warned for years in these columns, the current plan is a gigantic boondoggle. If it is dead forever, it will be of little consequence and taxpayers will save $16 billion. However, this is an opportunity for Trump and his officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation to use their leverage to force changes that can make Gateway much more efficient and productive, saving billions of dollars and years of time.
Then everyone will be a winner. Trump will have turned Gateway from a wasteful money pit with no utility into a valuable infrastructure improvement. Schumer will get the project he has been championing for years actually built. Taxpayers will save a bundle. And passengers will have better and more frequent trains.
A new Hudson rail tunnel could be beneficial, provided it expanded capacity, but Gateway as now designed doesn’t add a single train or even a single seat. In order to allow for additional trains from New Jersey would require tearing down a vast swath of Midtown for a new dead-end terminal station on Block 780, called Penn South, that would cost upwards of $20 billion (and there’s not a cent anywhere for Penn South).
But Gov. Hochul has rightly said absolutely no to demolition of Block 780 and the purchase of the adjacent Stewart Hotel to be converted into permanent affordable housing means that Penn South can’t happen.
So Gateway, if built and finished by 2040, will bring the new two-track subaqueous tunnel to a station at Block 780 that won’t exist and will never exist. That’s a very bad use of $16 billion. There will be an inefficient connection to actual Penn Station, but adding train service, which is the primary objective of Gateway, will be impossible. That is, unless Gateway is modified to connect only to Penn Station, the day it opens in 2040 it will do nothing. We repeat: That’s a very bad use of $16 billion.
Schumer got the $16 billion for the tunnel assembled during the Biden administration. We sincerely doubt he’ll be able to get another $20 billion for Penn South and as well as billions more to pay for all nine parts of Gateway so the tunnel will have some value.
The construction workers who showed up and spoke at the rally-like GDC meeting yesterday asking Trump to turn the Gateway money back on fear for their jobs. But shouldn’t those jobs, paid for with federal taxpayer money, be building something that will have some use when it’s done?
Otherwise, Gateway is just a make-work project, the biggest one ever, digging a tunnel to nowhere at great expense. Trump should insist that Gateway abandon Block 780 and shift towards Penn proper by adjusting the alignment. Then the construction workers will still have their jobs and the taxpayers will get something in return for our money.
