By STEVEN RUBENSTEIN and CARLO SCISSURA
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
JUL 18, 2020 AT 5:00 AM
Since 1910, when the tunnel below the Hudson River first carried trains, the region has survived the Spanish flu epidemic, two world wars, the Great Depression, multiple recessions, the Fiscal Crisis of the 1970s and 9/11. Each time, prognosticators predicted the end for New York City as a center of the national and global economy, but we’ve always come through stronger. We believe the current public health crisis is no different.
On July 6, NJTransit returned full service between New York and New Jersey. While some argue that a likely decline in ridership for the near future means we no longer need the Gateway Program, that would be precisely the kind of short-term thinking that has left us with a 110-year-old one-track-in, one-track-out system in the first place.
Mass transit keeps New York City running even during its most challenging times.
First, essential workers and those who can’t drive to their jobs in New York need reliable train service right now. After all, when your job is in a New York hospital, lives depend on workers being on time.
Second, we need safe social distancing created by predictable, reliable and spaced schedules.
But most importantly, Gateway isn’t a project for today or tomorrow; it’s a project for the next 100 years.
It would be incredibly shortsighted to use the current crisis as an excuse to once again abandon building a new Hudson Tunnel, which is a single point of failure on the busiest stretch of rail in the U.S. and the lynchpin of a 21st-century system connecting Washington, D.C., Boston and the core of the New York City megaregion.
We can’t continue relying on 19th-century technology to build a 21st-century economy. We must invest in America’s infrastructure, starting with the Gateway Program.
The Gateway Program is a great way to get millions of Americans back to work building our nation’s infrastructure. As Gov. Cuomo recently noted, the Gateway Program is uniquely situated to be a cornerstone of an infrastructure stimulus package that can help get the regional economy on track following the pain caused by the coronavirus.
We also need safe, reliable and modern mass transit because it’s unreasonable and unhealthy to have more trans-Hudson commuters travel by car. The number of cars on our roads is already rebounding quickly from the shutdown and it’s likely there will soon be more congestion than before. Furthermore, adding more cars will add pollution to many of our communities that have already greatly suffered.
It’s also become clear during the pandemic that many of the region’s approximately 2.4 million essential workers who rely on public transit have continued to do so and often travel during off-hours. We must have a system that works for them. We need an equitable recovery that prioritizes our region’s most vulnerable and those who need public transit.
Because of the advanced age and unreliability of the Hudson River tunnels following Superstorm Sandy, the Gateway Program remains crucial to the economic health of the entire tri-state region and the Northeast Corridor, which connects 20% of the nation’s GDP. Closing the existing tunnel even partially for repairs could cost $16 billion in lost economic activity and $23 billion in residential property values, further harming the region’s already fragile economy.
We need to seize this opportunity and plan for the future. The Gateway Program is crucial to helping us get there.
Rubenstein is the chairman of the Association for a Better New York (ABNY) and Scissura is the president and CEO of the New York Building Congress. Both organizations are members of the Build Gateway Now coalition.
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-on-gateway-dont-go-backward-20200718-hc6atlxcynaipidu3sgs5rfko4-story.html
