Connect Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal: Linking Manhattan’s two train depots is the smartest way forward By Mysore Nagaraja, Howard Sackel and Bob Previdi New York Daily News • Jul 03, 2023 at 5:00 am

Connect Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal: 

Linking Manhattan’s two train depots is the smartest way forward

By Mysore Nagaraja, Howard Sackel and Bob Previdi

New York Daily News

•

Jul 03, 2023 at 5:00 am

In only one year, London’s $18 billion pound ($22.4 billion) investment in the Elizabeth Line, a new rail line that crosses from west to east through central London has already carried 150 million passengers. It is the busiest line in the U.K. and is nearly equal to the 160 million annual ridership of the LIRR, Metro-North and NJTransit combined. This does not reflect well on the LIRR’s new $11 billion East Side Access project, nor Amtrak’s proposed $40 billion Gateway plan. The public needs to demand something more ambitious and connective like the Elizabeth Line if New York is spending more than $50 billion.

Unfortunately, since the LIRR’s Grand Central Madison station opened we’ve not seen as much ridership as the Elizabeth Line and it is only projected to receive 162,000 passengers when fully utilized (projection pre-COVID). Additionally, those who take the Long Island Rail Road to and from Penn Station have been complaining about a decrease in service. How can the opening of an important new terminal at Grand Central feel like a cut in service?

The answer is due to a lack of regional thinking and planning. London’s Elizabeth Line has a much broader series of ambitions than the MTA’s East Side Access and Amtrak’s proposed Gateway program. That can be changed if New York and New Jersey are ready for a paradigm shift in the way the LIRR, MNR and NJT operate through Manhattan.

Grand Central Madison’s shortcoming is that it only helps Long Islanders reach East Midtown Manhattan and does so by requiring the LIRR’s scheduling department to split the destinations from each branch, making what was previously a train every 30 minutes on the Port Washington and Babylon branches into hourly train service.

Because Penn Station and Grand Central are two separate facilities and are not linked, the only other option for increased service to Penn is for the LIRR to purchase more trains and double the number of train crews, both of which would be too costly to operate. Compare that to the success of the Elizabeth Line, which is poised to break even this year.

At Penn Station, Amtrak’s Gateway plans are poised to make a similar mistake, focused on adding capacity only for Amtrak and NJT into Penn Station. By only adding capacity to Penn Station, Gateway will not allow what NJT’s own studies have shown — that 35% of NJT riders want access to Grand Central.

London’s Elizabeth Line brings a host of local and regional travel time reduction goals together. Linking Amtrak’s Gateway and MTA’s East Side Access could have a similar huge impact on reducing travel time by rail in the New York metropolitan region as well as cut traffic congestion across the Hudson and East River bridges and tunnels, encouraging more drivers to take commuter trains instead of driving.

Physically, a link between Grand Central and Penn Station can be done — by either repositioning tracks 1 through 4 or by constructing a deep tunnel station below Penn Station thus avoiding tearing down the block south of Penn Station, known as Block 780. Then if we focus on building a connection (instead of building Penn South) to the LIRR’s East Side Access, NJT riders could reach destinations in Queens and Long Island, and LIRR and Metro-North trains can reach destinations in New Jersey.

The biggest problem here is the parochial thinking of Amtrak and the commuter rail agencies and lack of political leadership that puts customers’ needs over agencies. Someone, the mayor, the governors of New York and New Jersey or perhaps Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or even President Biden, “Amtrak Joe,” needs to step up and champion this kind of thinking.

Most cities around the world invest in new and expensive rail infrastructure that improves connectivity allowing more regional access. With just one investment London’s one year old Elizabeth line has equaled the ridership of all three commuter railroads. The current investments in East Side Access and Amtrak’s Gateway are expensive and have limited growth potential. The time has come for New York to build something big that justifies a $50 billion dollar expenditure.

Making a connection between Penn Station and Grand Central that allows all three commuter rail lines to operate from one end of the metropolitan region to the other will greatly increase attractiveness of the service and usher in an era of dramatically increased commuter rail use as much as London has just shown with the Elizabeth Line.

Nagaraja is a former president of MTA Capital Construction. Sackel is a former Amtrak and Port Authority director of the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) Project. Previdi is a former transit planner and spokesman for NYC Transit.

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-connect-penn-station-and-grand-central-terminal-20230703-hprbswddubav7j4jda2kjs6qly-story.html 

 

OPINION: Biden Should Link Gateway Program and Climate Goals

The $30-billion-dollar Northeast Corridor investment could force the integration of regional rail — and lead to much less driving and flying.

• By Bob Previdi, Mysore Nagaraja and Howard Sackel
• Sep 10, 2021
• 7 COMMENTS

The portal to the future Gateway tunnel being constructed at Hudson Yards in the west 30s in 2014. Photo: MTA/Patrick Cashin

The extreme storms that the Northeast has witnessed during the past 10 years make it painfully obvious that we can’t afford any longer simply to talk about our climate goals; we must make progress toward them. For the region’s transportation sector (the source of a third of our CO2 emissions) the method to effect those goals is fairly simple: The more people we can get to use less-carbon-intensive transportation, such as rail, bus, or bike, and the fewer people drive or fly, the better.

The Biden administration has greenlighted Amtrak’s $30-billion Gateway program — which will build two new train tunnels under the Hudson River, repair the existing two, and replace aging bridges in the Meadowlands — giving us a golden opportunity to make substantial positive change to help the environment.

But we need a more comprehensive plan.

Gateway, which will double train capacity to 48 an hour under the Hudson River, certainly will put more people on trains, but the plan focuses solely on adding capacity to Amtrak and NJ Transit’s operating territory. Designing to meet climate goals can’t be so rigid. If rail is to compete with our interstate highways, Gateway must serve more than just Amtrak and NJ Transit customers’ needs, and help our local railroads to become a truly interconnected regional system. A regional design could be a watershed moment for the nation if the investment in it truly advanced the vision of the Paris Climate Accords by reducing transportation’s carbon footprint.

President Biden could put a stamp on his legacy if he could force the issue. By linking the Gateway investment to the broader climate goals of reducing air and road travel in New York and along the Northeast Corridor, Biden could encourage more concrete steps that could lead to the lessening of CO2 emissions from vehicles using the facilities of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (including its airports), Metropolitan Transportation Authority bridges and tunnels, and other regional highways.

As a meaningful first step, Biden must ask New York and New Jersey to create a regional climate-action plan. There already is a vehicle: the Port Authority, the bi-state agency the Congress authorized 100 years ago in order to facilitate interstate commerce, is the best positioned of all regional transport agencies for the task because ion its size and its mandate to work across state lines. It could look at the current plans for Gateway and at climate goals and sit in a room with all transportation agencies and ask the basic questions that will induce more rail use and reduce the demand for car and air travel. (Indeed, the ideas that became Gateway originated in a 1995 major-investment study, Access to the Region’s Core, led by the Port Authority but also involving the MTA and NJTransit.)

If we want fewer people to choose to travel by car or airplane, then the regional services must make train travel attractive and convenient by simplifying operations through Penn Station. East Side Access, slated to open in 2022, will link the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal. But it has the same issue as Gateway: It adds capacity, but does not address regional travel demand with the goal of shifting drivers into rail cars.

When Amtrak took over the Penn Central Railroad in 1971, it gained tracks that spanned the country, including the Northeast Corridor, the nation’s most heavily trafficked rail corridor and one on which many local commuter railroads rely. In fact, of the 800,000 daily riders that use the Northeast Corridor, only 40,000 are Amtrak passengers, according to a recent Northeast Corridor Commission report.

Although Amtrak owns the Northeast Corridor, it does not control how local commuter-rail systems may use its tracks. Most rail-traffic congestion in New York’s Penn Station comes from commuter trains constantly crossing each other’s paths, changing direction and basically getting in each other’s way. This confusing system does not give people in New Jersey easy access to Long Island, the Bronx, Westchester or Connecticut — and visa versa.

The current, more than 100-year-old Gateway rail tunnel needs repair. Photo: File photo

In order for our local commuter railroads to knit themselves into a truly regional system, those services must operate beyond the limited boundaries that confine NJ Transit, the Metro-North Railroad, and the Long Island Rail Road today. A unified approach in planning, building and operating the greater capacity envisioned by the Gateway project could create such consumer and environmentally friendly options. Yet there is no plan to bring it all together.

The Regional Plan Association has talked about it for years, including in its most recent report, which “envisions a series of new projects, phased in over the next few decades, to unify the commuter rail system and expand it into a seamless regional transit system.” The RPA called it the Trans-Regional Express (or T-REX), which would “provide frequent, reliable service, directly connecting New Jersey, Long Island, the Mid-Hudson, and Connecticut, create new freight-rail corridors, and provide additional transit service to riders within New York City.”

The RPA and other advocates posit an integrated systems along the lines of the RER in Paris or London’s Elizabeth Line/Crossrail, which is scheduled to open in 2022. But in order to create a local analog of the RER here in New York and meet climate goals, planners must expand the design of Gateway beyond its immediate goals and extend it to include climate objectives.

To get working on this vision, however, we’d need an organizational push among city, state and federal officials, and transport agencies, the likes of which we’ve never seen. Biden must work closely with Sen. Schumer of New York and Sen. Booker of New Jersey in order to set the stage for the Port Authority to take the necessary steps to wean itself and the other agencies away from relying on tolls and parking and landing fees. The Port Authority could take the lead, yet without any interagency or interstate plan we are kidding ourselves that we will make any meaningful progress toward our transportation-sector CO2-reduction goals. We must use the $30-billion investment in Gateway’s development as a lever.

Time is running out to create a workable plan if we are to maximize the Gateway investment for the benefit of the region and our climate.

Bob Previdi is a transit consultant and a former planner and spokesman for NYC Transit. Mysore Nagaraja is a consultant and former president of MTA Capital Construction. Howard Sackel is a consultant and former director of the Port Authority’s ARC project.

From Crain's New York
June 10, 2019 07:00 AM UPDATED 3 HOURS AGO

A radical idea for Cuomo's transit panel

Merge our railroads to end turf battles, save billions and make travel seamless

Bob Previdi

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Buck Ennis

Turf wars and narrow thinking inflated the cost of East Side Access.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has asked for a review of the East Side Access transit megaproject to learn why it costs so much. The same question could be asked of Amtrak's Gateway. In fact, the mistakes made in the design of East Side Access could be avoided in Amtrak's project if our railroads work together.

This is no small task. It would require a tunnel between Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal and an agreement for New Jersey Transit, Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road to seamlessly share it. It sounds ambitious, but it would ultimately save money while enhancing riders' access to the region.

Lack of cooperation between our various rail agencies delays projects and inflates costs. Consider East Side Access, which will connect the LIRR to Grand Central: Conceived in the 1950s, it was started and stopped in the 1970s and restarted in 2007. It has seen the opening date pushed back nearly a decade, to 2022, and costs triple, to $11 billion. One reason for this outrageous sum is that the LIRR had to build an eight-track facility 100 feet beneath Grand Central because Metro-North did not want to share the terminal—despite both railroads being divisions of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The same issue is bubbling up on Gateway. When NJ Transit was working on Access to the Region's Core, a project Gov. Chris Christie canceled in 2010, it found that 35% of its riders wanted access to Grand Central. But it could not get permission to share Metro-North's Grand Central or LIRR's East Side Access. Gateway has that problem too. As a result, NJ Transit plans to build six tracks south of Penn Station, costing billions of dollars.

Connecting the operations of the railroads would simplify Penn Station's operations and eliminate the need for Penn South, where trains would merely turn around. For Cuomo and Gov. Phil Murphy, connecting these two initiatives would be an achievement on par with the merger of the subways in 1947.

Riders west of the Hudson would get one-seat access to Grand Central, Citi Field and LaGuardia and JFK airports. LIRR riders could take one train to Newark airport and Met Life Stadium. The congestion at Penn Station would be eliminated as the railroads figure out how to run trains between New Jersey and Long Island rather than terminate in Manhattan.

The MTA and NJ Transit already have a cooperation agreement for service on the Port Jervis and Pascack Valley branches of Metro-North. This can be a model. Other issues related to power, signals and the training of crews would need to be resolved, but that beats the alternative of spending billions digging out a station beneath Manhattan.

Merging transport agencies is not a new concept. The subway merger combined three distinct operators: the Interborough Rapid Transit, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit and Independent Subway lines. Paris integrated its commuter-rail systems in 1977. Philadelphia combined the Reading and Pennsylvania commuter lines in 1984, and Boston just finished a study to connect North and South stations. London has already opened Thameslink (a north–south link) and is in the final stages of building Crossrail (an east–west route). It can be done.

The costs for East Side Access got out of control because we did not think regionally and make the highest and best use of Grand Central Terminal. Cuomo could apply that lesson to Gateway and avoid the boondoggle that would be Penn South by finally linking Penn Station to Grand Central.

Joining the goals of East Side Access and Gateway will force greater cooperation between the railroads and make commuter rail in New York more customer-friendly and regional, as it is in Paris, London and Philadelphia.

The governor is right to review East Side Access. But he must add Gateway to his inquiry and chart a future that puts customers and taxpayers first. 

Bob Previdi is a transportation lobbyist and a former planner and spokesman at NYC Transit.

Op Eds from 2004 NY Times and 2013 Crain's NY

Bob Previdi

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So many years have past since my first OpEd in the NY Times on October 3, 2004 calling for a new unified vision for commuter rail around 2nd Avenue.

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Archives | 2004

Everywhere You Want to Go

By ROBERT W. PREVIDIOCT. 3, 2004

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The Long Island Rail Road (another subsidiary of the authority) has its $6.3 billion East Side Access project that will carry Long Islanders to Grand Central Terminal. New Jersey Transit has proposed a $4.5 billion expansion project connecting New Jersey, New York's Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central. And President Bush has offered $2 billion to help the Port Authority extend the John F. Kennedy International Airport's AirTrain to encourage business in Lower Manhattan.

Meanwhile, New York City Transit is spending about $3.5 billion for the first segment -- East 63rd Street to East 96th Street -- of the Second Avenue subway project, which would ease congestion on the Lexington Avenue line and make mass transit more convenient for people living along the East River. The full-length Second Avenue subway from 125th Street to Lower Manhattan is expected to cost about $16 billion.

If the planning and some of the money from all these projects were put into one Second Avenue pot, we could satisfy the goals of each at much less cost. This is possible by linking the Second Avenue tunnel to Metro-North at 125th Street, to Long Island Rail Road at 63rd Street and to Amtrak and New Jersey Transit at 31st Street.

The key would be running regional rail trains under Second Avenue instead of subway trains. That would eliminate the need for Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit to build multibillion-dollar terminals at Grand Central and the need for the Port Authority to extend the AirTrain to Lower Manhattan.

Under a seamless Second Avenue plan, people could catch a commuter train from Second Avenue to the Bronx, Queens, Westchester, Connecticut, New Jersey, Boston or Washington. Or they could simply use the line as an extension of the existing subway system. While such a system may seem like an obvious goal, there is no agency or federal law that encourages the kind of design that our Interstate highways have become. Our rail operators don't focus on sharing their resources or planning for needs outside their own operations.For example, New York City Transit did not have the mission to consider expansion outside the realm of subway trains or buses when it prepared the environmental impact statement for the Second Avenue subway. It studied many options to relieve congestion on the Lexington Avenue line but it never considered using commuter rail.

Today, we are facing similar problems to those that the private and public subway and bus companies faced early in the last century. They could not afford to maintain and expand service without mingling their resources. As a result, New York City Transit took over operations of many private bus and subway companies, providing an integrated system within the city.

Similarly, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has made moves toward an integrated regional system by using MetroCards to link bus and subway service and, more recently, forming the Capital Construction Company, whose goal is to create transportation hubs and increase mass-transit service in the New York City area. It can take the next step by making the Second Avenue subway a regional transportation hub, with the MetroCard becoming the E-ZPass of not just subways and buses, but also commuter trains.

The authority has already committed billions to the Second Avenue and East Side Access projects. If we combined these goals with the AirTrain and New Jersey Transit, we have the potential to get the Second Avenue line into Lower Manhattan sooner and get people where they want to go -- within the city and throughout the region.

The City Robert W. Previdi is a former spokesman and operations planner for New York City Transit.

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Here is another OpEd from Crains NY in 2013:

Penn Station is by far the busiest transportation facility in the nation. It moves 500,000 passengers per day, twice as many as the world's busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International. Still, there is a need to increase mass-transit capacity into Penn Station, which is why Amtrak has been looking to build a dual-track train tunnel under the Hudson River.

Unfortunately, finding the $15 billion or so for Amtrak's Gateway project has proved difficult. But there is a way to spend roughly half as much while still doubling rush-hour train traffic. It involves taking a regional approach in how we use Penn Station.

Today, many Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit trains terminate at Penn Station by discharging their passengers, loading more passengers and heading back in the direction they came from. This causes too many at-grade movements (where trains cut across each other's path) within the station. It slows everything down, limiting service and inconveniencing pass-through passengers.If trains simply kept going in the direction they came from—with NJ Transit trains continuing to Long Island and LIRR trains along New Jersey routes—we could streamline operations and expand the number of destinations each railroad serves.

For example, NJ Transit customers could reach JFK airport, Citi Field and the U.S. Open tennis tournament, while Long Islanders would be able to reach Newark Liberty airport, MetLife Stadium and the Prudential Center.Achieving this would require changing equipment and updating operating procedures, but this concept is not new or radical. It's been done in the U.S. and around the globe, including in London and Paris. Heck, even Philadelphia did it: Way back in 1984, the old Reading Terminal and Suburban Station were combined into the Center City Commuter Tunnel.New York City should not be three decades behind Philadelphia. Adopting this approach for Penn Station would take advantage of the LIRR West Side Yard's proximity to the station, allowing us to meet capacity goals with a new single-track tunnel at half the cost of Gateway.Amazingly, nobody has ever seriously demanded that the railroads (Amtrak, NJT or LIRR) rethink how they use Penn Station in a way that would reduce the capital expense of doubling Hudson River capacity.

If we are concerned about what we can afford—and how we can leave some funds to fix the existing station—then New York's and New Jersey's elected officials should insist that the agencies find a way to make better use of the existing track, tunnels and yards that support Penn Station.On a recent visit to Germany, I took an Intercity-Express train to Frankfurt from Mannheim. My return trip, while booked on ICE, was actually a French TGV train headed for Paris. If trains can operate this way between France and Germany, surely we can commingle NJT and LIRR service across the Hudson to save $7 billion.

Maybe Madison Square Garden will move someday; maybe it won't. No matter what we decide, we need to expand capacity for trains under the Hudson as well as fix the way Penn Station greets travelers, and do so in a way that makes sense financially for taxpayers and the riding public.

Bob Previdi is a career public transportation professional.

June 29, 2017 12:00 AM

Tunnel vision: Don't just talk—build (Crain's NY) 

Mysore Nagaraja, Howard Sackel and Bob Previdi

Amtrak put everyone on notice in 2014 that its two 107-year-old Hudson River tunnels—the lifeblood of rail service into Penn Station and between Washington and Boston, for that matter—were severely damaged by Superstorm Sandy. A total shutdown of each tunnel would be needed to properly repair them. And to avoid the crippling 75% reduction in capacity that one tube's closure or failure would cause, a new tunnel would have to be built first.

Three years later, virtually nothing has happened. Everyone agrees on the need for a new tunnel, but not on how it should be built and funded. Meanwhile, the state has committed billions of dollars to spruce up inefficient Penn Station.

New Yorkers should be furious. We should not be running the risk of closing this important link for up to two years because we cannot focus on what is most important here.

There are a lot of good ideas for improving Penn Station and eventually linking it to Grand Central Terminal, but trying to fix everything at once is bogging down the process. Instead, let’s act now on what is most critical: building a single Hudson River tunnel within five years. After that, one of the aging tunnels could be closed, repaired, and reopened in about a year, followed by the second one. Two tunnels would always be open, and after seven years there would be three.

During that work we can craft a new vision for Amtrak and commuter rail in the region, including a simplified and more functional operation at Penn Station’s track level. Amtrak’s proposed Gateway project would add tracks and Penn and a tunnel in each direction under the Hudson, but that is only part of the answer. We must follow the path that nearly every other major world city—London, Paris and Tokyo, to name three—has taken by routing commuter trains through the station. Even Philadelphia has done this.

Riders do not understand how much their suffering stems from the complex, underground dance between Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit that keeps 1,000 trains and 400,000 passengers in motion. And with plans being advanced to add Metro-North service to Penn Station, the congestion and bottlenecks will only get worse.

Other world-class cities have realized that a solution is to simplify operations at the heart of the system. London is nearly finished with its Crossrail plan, which will link western and eastern commuter rail lines through a new twin tunnel from Paddington to East Liverpool Street Stations. Paris has the Réseau Express Régional running below the city’s Metro and through the city, connecting major transfer hubs. And in the mid-1980s, Philadelphia eliminated its railroads’ dead ends by building the Center City Commuter Tunnel to connect its two rail terminals.

Connecting commuter rail lines into longer, subway-like operations allows trains to run more frequently and with less delay to more destinations. Here, New Jersey could be connected with Long Island, the northern suburbs and Connecticut by linking Penn Station to Grand Central.

Too much discussion has been focused on redesigning Penn Station’s passenger facilities before we really know what its foundation—the long-term train operations—will look like. So before we lay out a new Penn Station, with or without Madison Square Garden on top, we need to understand what the operation and track layout will look like in the future, with two new tunnels under the Hudson and more through train movements to Queens as well as Grand Central.

All this will take time to sort itself out, but we don't have that luxury with the old tunnels, which are on their last legs. It is critical that we fix what we have first, and building the new Hudson River tunnel will allow us to do so. During the several years while that construction takes place, we can plan the interconnectivity we need from our regional commuter rail system.

Mysore Nagaraja is a transportation consultant and former president of MTA Capital Construction. Howard Sackel is is senior vice president and regional manager for New York at Paco Technologies and was formerly director of the ARC Tunnel Program for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Bob Previdi is a transportation lobbyist and former planner and spokesman at NYC Transit.

Rail Services in 2015

Amtrak 100 trains/day 28,000 passengers

Long Island Rail Road 550 trains/day 220,000 passengers

New Jersey Transit 350 trains/day 160,000 passengers

Total 1000 trains/day 408,000 passengers

April 13, 2016 12:00 AM

If Amtrak's Gateway tunnel is too big, it will fail (Crain's NY)

Mysore Nagaraja, Howard Sackel and Bob Previdi

Associated Press

The exist tunnel under the Hudson River.

Amtrak has big plans to build two new Hudson River tunnels and six new platform tracks at Penn Station as part of a project called Gateway, now estimated to cost $24 billion. It is hard to believe, in today’s political climate, that elected officials in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., will be able to fully fund this project. That's a problem because new tunnel capacity has been urgently needed since Hurricane Sandy severely damaged the existing pair of 105-year-old tunnels in 2012.

The longer we wait, the greater the risk of losing the existing tunnels to the next hurricane or Nor'easter, which could cut off the Northeast Corridor—an essential rail route for our economy—at Penn Station for two or three years. To protect ourselves from such a doomsday event we need to take a lesson from the Second Avenue subway and break up the project into affordable phases.

We need to also consider a fundamental change in the way commuter rail services (which dominate 90% of the passenger and train movement at Penn Station) operate through Manhattan.

Our top priority today, however, must be to respond to Amtrak’s October 2014 report which outlined damage done by Hurricane Sandy to the existing 105-year-old tunnels. The report said each existing tube must be taken out of service for a year for major rehabilitation within the next five years. Without new tunnel capacity, that would cut rush-hour capacity to six trains per hour from 24, which would be a disaster for Amtrak and NJ Transit customers.

The Second Avenue subway project provides a practical model for Gateway. The cost of Second Avenue (in 2000 dollars) was expected to exceed $17 billion. And while the full environmental impact statement was completed from lower Manhattan to the Bronx, only the section from 63rd Street to 96th Street was funded. That will relieve worst congestion along the Lexington Avenue line.

Phased development of Gateway starting with a new single-track tunnel would allow for repair work to occur without draconian cuts in service. The cost of a single new tube would be much more affordable—approximately $5 billion to $6 billion—based on the experience with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's mega-tunnel projects (East Side Access, Second Avenue subway and the No. 7 train extension to Hudson Yards).

While the first phase of Gateway is underway, we should examine how other cities such as London, Paris and Philadelphia have streamlined regional rail operations and expanded service. Emulating those cities' commuter systems would mean changing the way the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit operate through Penn Station, linking them across the region and opening up more service for consumers.

We’ve known for years that 35% of NJ Transit riders want access to Grand Central Terminal. Linking the Gateway project to the LIRR’s East Side Access could also eliminate the need to build six new terminal tracks at Penn, cutting upwards of $6 billion from Gateway's cost.

Gateway is vital but at $24 billion is too ambitious to build all at once. We need a more affordable plan that adds some capacity under the Hudson River and encourages commuter-rail services to extend beyond their traditional territory. We already see this cooperation for Jets and Giants football games, so we know it can be done. A phased plan would ready us for the moment when Congress provides only partial funding, and allow us to make repair of the aging Hudson River tunnels the priority it should be.

Mysore Nagaraja is a former president of MTA Capital Construction Co., Howard Sackel was Port Authority project director for Access to the Region's Core and a senior project manager for Amtrak and the MTA, and Bob Previdi is a former planner and spokesman with NYC Transit.