A Fine Idea, But For the Cost

New Jersey Transit and Gov. Jon Corzine announced that they're going to be expanding the Hudson Bergen Light Rail into Bergen County. The cost? $900 million (a conservative estimate given that these things usually cost significantly more).

Instead, NJ Transit will turn to electric, trolley-like light-rail cars to link Bergen County to the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system, Governor Corzine announced today as he pledged to find the money to fully fund the estimated $900 million project.

“It will be accomplished,” Corzine said at a news conference. “This project will break ground in 2011.”

But he and the other state officials and legislators who have been pushing for the reopening of the Northern Branch for years acknowledged that funding hasn’t been fully secured. They said they are looking to federal transportation dollars and money from the state’s Transportation Trust Fund to support the project, which would extend the Hudson-Bergen line to Tenafly.

“It’s going to take between 800 and 900 million dollars,” Corzine said. The project “is going to require a federal partner. It’s going to require all of us in New Jersey to make sure we prioritize this in our Transportation Trust Fund allocations.”

However, Corzine also acknowledged that money in the transportation fund, which is supported by the gas tax, is set to run out in about two years.

So far, just $30 million to $40 million has been devoted to the project for design, engineering and modifications of the environmental impact statement, which is being updated to reflect that light rail, rather than diesel, is the desired mode of transit, according to Richard Sarles, executive director of NJ Transit.

In a flush economy, this could make sense.

Now? Not a chance.

The state of New Jersey can't afford to expand this particular service, which NJ Transit claims will bring an additional 24,000 riders into the system a day.

This announcement is vaporware. Corzine expects this to help towards his reelection, even though the state doesn't have any money to make this project happen, which is why the start date is 2011 at the earliest.


That also means that the $900 million cost will be far short of the true cost. All the rosy estimates and completion date will not happen.

The state doesn't have the money to rebuilt its existing infrastructure, let alone construct any new infrastructure, even with the federal porkfest. Then, there's the not insignificant matter of the the operating budget for NJ Transit. The NJ Transit operating budget is already stretched to the maximum with the current system. It built the extravagant Secaucus Transfer (aka the Secaucus Boondoggle), which costs well more than $1 billion (factoring in $700 million in cost, debt servicing, and the adjacent severely underutilized 15X Turnpike exit project that cost $250 million and which was supposed to run $180 million), and which gets a fraction of the users that were originally intended.

Now, the Transfer finally has a park and ride option, but it gets a fraction of the more than 1,000 spots filled on any given day. I further suspect that many of those people are riders who formerly used the Harmon Cove stop on the Bergen Line, which was eliminated when Secaucus opened. In other words, it's a shift of users, rather than creating new users.

With the planned ARC Tunnel, Secaucus is rendered obsolete since commuters could have one-seat trips into Manhattan from the Northern New Jersey rail lines (but the cost is already being picked up by the Port Authority, New Jersey and the federal government).

This project, like many other rail projects around the state depends on one substantial assumption to create riders. It assumes that there will be sufficient parking at the facilities. If there is insufficient parking, these new proposed stations will never see the usage rates projected. This is a problem that has plagued the system for years, and parking that is built by NJ Transit is done in places that have little need for it (see Ramsey Rt. 17). If there isn't enough parking, people will continue to commute by car. If the routes don't have sufficient schedules, people will continue driving, and scheduled are often constrained because local communities don't want the additional train traffic and associated noise and/or congestion due to at-grade crossings, which are prevalent throughout Northern New Jersey.