You've Been Warned

I had been telling you this for some time now. Maybe you'll listen to John 'Road Warrior' Cichowski instead.

But in this case, the joke is more costly than it is funny. If you listen carefully, you'll hear ticking at the transfer station. The sound isn't highway traffic or diesel locomotives.

It's a financial time bomb.

Under an (ahem) unusual deal with NJ Transit and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, the retail developer is only required to kick in its $140 million share of building the transfer station and exit ramp if the Allied Junction project can get off the ground by 2011.

The environmentalists are furious.

"Giant boondoggle sprawl machine" is the way Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club puts it. Since the offices and shops won't be built anytime soon, the environmental crowd thinks the exit ramp will simply bring more suburban development and traffic jams.

"I think the place might be cursed," said Patrick Andriani of Roxbury.

Andriani should know. His grandfather was buried in a plot there. You see, 15X used to be a potters field graveyard, so lots of grandmas and grandpas had to be dug up two years ago before the ramp to nowhere was built. More than 4,000 bodies were moved in what became the biggest disinterment in American history.

How big?

More than $6 million, courtesy, again, of the New Jersey Turnpike and its tollpayers.

You can't make this stuff up. It's Jersey, where the stumbling and the bumbling and the laughing show no sign of letup, especially along the turnpike.

And how are we going to be paying for all this with a Transportation Trust Fund that doesn't have any money, debt servicing on the bloated project takes a larger share than it should have had the costs been controlled from the outset, and riders will feel the pain for years to come. But Cichowski thinks that this may all work out in the end:

But here's the biggest joke of all: All these haphazard fits and starts might actually work.

"It sure is a testament to the disjointed planning in New Jersey that leads to perceptions that we don't know what we're doing," said transportation planner Martin Robins of Rutgers University. "But in the long run, this is a very valuable project."

Yes, despite all the foul-ups and all the jokes, is there any genuine doubt that the onetime site of a 19th century graveyard won't soon blossom exponentially?

That's what can happen when a combination highway-and-rail hub is completed just west of Manhattan. It's a no-brainer.

Parking? It's barely an issue anymore. For starters, Edison Park Fast wants to build a 1,700-car lot near the transit station. Two years from now, it'll probably be filled with off-peak parkers.

Why? Unlike the 1990s, when NJ Transit feared competition from cars, rail ridership to and from the city is building, partly because midtown Manhattan is enjoying a growth spurt.

"Maybe it's no longer such a bad idea to allow some people to drive to Secaucus from, say, Teaneck, to catch a train to Long Branch or points south, instead of requiring them to drive to an out-of-the-way rail stop," said Robins.

In the end, 15X might be more of a sea change than a Jersey joke. Thursday night might be remembered as the hour when the car teamed up with the train, and the toll collectors got busy after all.

The problem is that the local community doesn't want the parking lots. They don't want the urban sprawl, and the builders aren't kicking in the money they were supposed to when this project was first proposed.

The hurdle of dealing with a community that doesn't want the commuter parking lots in the first place has to be overcome.

Consider the alternatives that the $1.1 billion could have gone towards:
~ a far smaller and less elegant transfer station that would be functional and not a crushing burden on taxpayers and a brand new Hudson River tunnel that would alleviate traffic into Midtown and increase the number of trains that could get in and out of the city during peak times;
~ upgrading all the NJ Transit stations so that they're ADA compliant (high level platforms;
~ purchasing new rail cars and locomotives;
~ upgrading and maintaining existing infrastructure;
~ building a second track for the Pascack Valley line to permit two-way traffic at all times of the day;
~ building new park and rides/parking lots at or near transit hubs desperately in need of parking spaces - Edison, New Jersey for example. People don't ride the train if they can't park at the stations.

Those are just a few of the things that the $1.1 billion spent on the Secaucus project could have gone for. But didn't.

The expectations for the site seem overly optimistic considering that even the Turnpike Authority didn't want the interchange, and NJ Transit acknowledges that ridership using the Transfer itself is less than expected - so to justify the project, they need to build the parking garage to encourage people to use it.

Go figure.