This month, the NY Metropolitan Transportation Council approved the elevation of the EDC's cross-harbor freight tunnel study to a regional Major Investment Study, eligible for federal funding. The next phase of study will begin to develop specific plans for options to get rail cars across the harbor. It will likely look at rail float barge operations as well as at the tunnel. The MIS will raise the profile of the harbor tunnel and rail freight issues considerably over the next few years, and the potential for a significant increase in rail freight movement across the harbor calls into question use of public funds by the NY State DOT or the Port Authority to increase truck capacity on I-278 or I-95.

A big issue for study of the tunnel is whether or not NY State and NYC are willing to develop intermodal freight port facilities on the NY side of the harbor, outside of the shallow-draft Arthur Kill. Tunnel proponents, and apparently the EDC study, say the benefits of displacing truck traffic can cost-justify the construction of the tunnel on their own. But the tunnel would also make possible revival of the Brooklyn port. Freight industry watchers say that the shipping industry is following air transport in moving toward hub-and-spoke distribution systems -- without a deepwater port able to accommodate increasingly deeper-draft ships (that cannot easily get through the Arthur Kill to Ports Newark and Elizabeth) New York could lose the competition to become the North American East Coast hub port. If this happens, business at Ports Newark and Elizabeth will suffer as well. Nadler estimates that a New York hub port would require about 1,000 acres. That area could be divided between Brooklyn, the unused naval port at Stapleton, Staten Island, and the now-vacant naval port in Bayonne. The costs of dynamiting the floor of the Arthur Kill to accommodate the current generation of deep-draft ships would be over $1 billion, according to Nadler, and might not be finished before an even deeper generation of ships begins to operate (delays due to environmental and other opposition to dredging/blasting plans aside).

The possible advent of a Brooklyn port raises in turn the question of how best to configure the Gowanus Expressway, because while an intermodal port and harbor rail tunnel would reduce truck traffic across Staten Island, it could increase it north along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A Gowanus tunnel would reduce impacts from this traffic, and insure that port development does not run afoul of the chaos of rebuilding the elevated Gowanus. Additionally, an elevated viaduct would be beaten back into disrepair again within several decades by heavy truck use, whereas a tunnel can withstand the pounding for much longer.

FYI

Barges connecting Brooklyn and NJ rail heads moved some 600,000 rail cars across the harbor annually as recently as the late 1960s. This market evaporated as major private railroads failed. Moreover, the establishment of Conrail in the 1970's did not provide for rail freight operation east of the Hudson in the NYC area. In 1995, approximately 9,000 rail cars were ferried across NY Harbor.