Governor Pataki’s announcement that he favors construction of a new tunnel between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, to carry LIRR riders and JFK airport passengers, drew a significant amount of skepticism last week, especially after the governor appeared to pull outlandish ridership projections for the project out of a hat.

Most commentators fear the service will attract to few riders to warrant the project’s big price tag. The Governor said it would be $6 billion. But "transit insiders" cited in news reports said it would cost $7 billion.

Pataki said the project could carry 100,000 riders per day. But these projections "are very weak and very questionable," Beverly Dolinsky of the LIRR Commuters Council told Newsday. In 2000, 137,000 rail riders per day entered Manhattan through the LIRR tunnel to Penn Station, and these included Amtrak passengers. Reports say about 13% of LIRR commuters are ultimately destined for lower Manhattan. The governor’s ridership numbers seem to herald an enormous boom in Long Island-NYC commuting, even though Long Island population growth is static or slow, and job growth there has been dramatic.

The Straphangers Campaign said the governor’s rider numbers were "hard to credit." A Straphangers statement asked "why would LIRR riders switch to a new service that would take them to the World Trade Center area, when many of them work in the Financial District?  Rather than walk from the Trade Center, most would go to Penn Station and take the 2/3 to the Financial District. The provided travel time projections do not include walking times."

"In our opinion, there are other projects that are more important...for Long Island," Mitch Pally of the Long Island Association told Newsday. Senator Dean Skelos of Rockville Center, the State Senate’s point person on mass transit, agreed: "I want to make sure East Side Access is completed and there is no threat to that funding."

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and transportation agencies will also apparently still study taking part of the M/R subway line tunnel to bring the suburban service to Manhattan, but the emphasis of the governor’s remarks was on a new tunnel. That would remove the big political problem of displacing many city subway riders in favor of a few suburban commuters, and will focus concern and criticism on cost and ridership.

In fact, a bright note in the governor’s announcement was the opening he gave to room in the tunnel for new subway connections to Brooklyn. "The boring of this tunnel will create the capacity to extend additional rail lines — such as the Second Avenue subway and existing services such as the E train...to Brooklyn and beyond," the governor said, according to the NY Times.

Newsday editorialists liked the inclusion of new subway crossings in the Governor’s vision, but said new revenues might be needed to build the entire plan. The scheme is mainly backed by downtown business groups who seem to be grasping for big projects to build in the wake of Sept. 11, and by political figures they are close to, such as the governor and Senator Schumer.

Pataki said the new downtown service could be running by 2013, two years after the LIRR is planned to begin serving Grand Central Terminal. It’s unclear how a new tunnel would work with the construction schedule for the Second Avenue subway, whose first segments are far uptown.

Pataki said the environmental review for the LIRR-downtown tunnel project would begin this summer, and that the design for the MTA Fulton St. transit center would be unveiled May 26. v