New Hudson River Tunnels.....

[Laxman]

why making national infrastructure investment is the real national security issue we face. If the aging Hudson River tunnels are closed or fail it isn't just a problem for commuters. Rail service through New York City ceases. Period. You could still access NYC from the north (and head west via Albany 150 miles out of your way) but rail traffic from the south and west could go no further than Newark, NJ. Let's put aside the fact that 430,000 people use Penn Station each day and the place is designed for the sensibilities and ergonomics of a rat. The travel disruptions if (when) these century old tunnels go out of service would be a national issue and an economic disaster. But we needed to give corporations and millionaires tax breaks instead. I understand. We're just playing Russian Roulette until the next Sandy scale disaster comes along....

The Most Awful Transit Center in America Could Get Unimaginably Worse

To get to New York’s Penn Station, every northbound Amtrak passenger makes the last leg of their journey, through tunnels beneath the Hudson River, in the dark. Trust me: They should be glad. One day this autumn, an Acela pulls into Newark, N.J., and a railway spokesman escorts me onto the rear engine car, where we stand and take in the view facing backward. As we descend into one of the Hudson tunnels—there are two, both 107 years old, finished in the same year the Wright brothers built their first airplane factory—a supervisor flips on the rear headlights, illuminating the ghastly tubes.

Our train (unsurprisingly) is operating at reduced speed because of an electrical glitch, which just gives us more time to gawk at the damage. There are eerie, nearly fluorescent white stains on the tunnel walls that look like they were painted by a giant with a roller brush. The pale swaths are remnants of the salt water that inundated the passages five years ago, during Hurricane Sandy. Sulfates and chlorides have been eating away at the concrete ever since, exposing reinforcement bars underneath. “Keep your eyes peeled,” says Craig Schulz, the affable Amtrak spokesman, “and you’ll see some of these areas where there is literally just crumbling concrete.”

As we emerge into the bowels of Penn Station, Schulz points to wooden flood doors above the tunnel entrances. They were installed during World War II to hold back the river if the tubes were torpedoed by a Nazi submarine. In the gloom, the doors look a full century older than their vintage. They seem more suited for a dungeon than a modern rail system like this one—the Northeast Corridor, which runs from Boston to Washington, D.C., serving an area that generates a fifth of U.S. gross domestic product. Before we step off the train, Schulz repeats Amtrak’s mantra: The storm-ravaged tunnels are safe, for now, but the railroad doesn’t know how long it will be able to keep them in service.

I’d been assigned to write a story about Pennsylvania Station, but I wanted to get a caboose-eye view of the decaying tunnels leading up to it, because the only imaginable way the station could be any worse is if it were underwater. Penn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined. More than 200,000 people also use the subway stops that connect to Penn through harshly lit, low-ceilinged subterranean corridors. Locals race through the place; out-of-towners proceed more anxiously, baffled by the layout of what is truly not one station but three: Amtrak shares the space with the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit. All who schlep through the complex are united by a powerful urge to leave. “Everybody just wants to get the hell out of there,” says Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.

Read the rest here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-10/the-most-awful-transit-center-in-america-could-get-unimaginably-worse

[MineralMan]

1. Just one example of our failing infrastructure.

Nobody wants to spend the money required to fix things, much less to build new things. Structures that are old and crumbling were designed for a population that was much smaller, and a lack of maintenance and updates ages them more each year.

When the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, it came as a huge surprise to almost everyone, but it had been in trouble for quite a long time. There's a nice new bridge there, now, but other old, crumbling bridges still carry traffic across the river in the Twin Cities. There is no money to fix them, and none forthcoming.

We are watching the crumbling of America through infrastructure failure and an incompetent government. Things are not improving, either, in either area.

[delisen]

5. Maybe it's time to rethink Manhattan.

We should be be re-imagining the entire country.

If climate change proceeds overall as projected, do we really want to turn a large swath of the east coast into a modern Venice with massive investments in keeping out the water and re-building aged infrastructure.

Maybe our east coast cities are becoming obsolete. Some, like Miami, probably never should have been built.

Washington, D.C. was a swamp. How much do we want to invest in protecting our monuments-might be better to build a new capital somewhere in Kansas ala Brazilia. How about a domed city on the prairie with modern infrastructure ?

The people need to be the planners and deciders-fact is we are the ones who will be taking on the massive debt for infrastructure --since the billionaires and corporations don't want to be taxed.

[MineralMan]

6. Yeah, that's probably true.

However, it ain't happening, I'm afraid. Shipping is why it exists, really. That's way less important now than it was when Manhattan was settled and developed. But, now, everything is already there. There's really no place to put everything that already exists there, really. The idea is really an impossible one, I think.

It's going to get dicey, though, in the next decades.

[delisen]

9. I think a lot depends on how climate change plays out and

how effective we are in dealing with it.

I don't think that Paolo Soleri's dream of mega cities on pillars, with the natural environment protected, is totally dead. (Soleri himself is a controversial figure-apart from his work, and I do not want to aggrandize him).

I know there was a group, just a few years ago, wanting to plan something similar somewhere along the east coast-but do not know whether they are still at it.

We really don't know how things will play out for earth-catastrophe, natural or people-made, might at some point cause us to move in the direction of what seems impossible today.

So much of what we build today has had a negative effect on the planet,other creatures, and ultimately it seems upon ourselves and those who come after (much good also-don't want to be a downer). Our works also seem to require many people and many advanced skills to be sustained.

Yet in terms of catastrophic events, it is possible that we could suddenly be left with a fraction of our population.

Image a decimated population trying to make nuclear power plants safe.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

7. This affects the entire country, not just New York City or the Northeast Corridor.

Please see reply #4.

The people need to be the planners and deciders....

How is government by amateurs working out so far?

Also, the "DC was a swamp" myth was debunked a long time ago.

PostEverything

No, D.C. isn't really built on a swamp

By Don Hawkins August 29, 2014

Don Hawkins is a Washingtonian, architect, and historian of the early city.

There’s a story that D.C. residents like to tell young interns whenever the summer weather gets particularly hot or sticky or unbearable. ... The city, they say, was built atop a swamp, its location selected by George Washington. Washington wanted to be close to his beloved Mount Vernon home (about 15 miles away). He cared little about D.C.’s heat index, the intense humidity, the never-ending heat waves.

It’s a great story, like the one about our first president chopping down a cherry tree. ... But it isn’t true. At least, it’s not true enough to warrant its prevalence.



As an urban historian, I’ve studied the early geography of Washington for 40 years, and all the swamps I have found are itty bitty little things that would never have given a less politically vulnerable city a bad name. Russia’s St. Petersburg was built in the Neva River. New Orleans and Chicago were built in swamps, but that’s not what people most remember about them.

Within the original city’s boundaries (the area south of Florida Avenue), only about 2 percent of the total area fits the definition of a swamp. It was almost entirely laid out over well-drained terraces and hills. In fact, for a riverside site, it was amazingly free of swampiness.

[delisen]

8. I understand the British originally described it as semi-tropical.

How about Miami Beach area-was that swamp land?

[delisen]

10. I would assume that it was originally built on the high ground-

but would it be accurate to say that since then low lying areas or marshes have now been filled in and built upon?

I noted that New Orleans French Quarter was originally build on high ground but as it attracted more commerce and people, building commenced in low lying areas

I noted that in hurricane Sandy on Staten Island much of the most destructive flooding was in the areas that had been filled in and built upon in the latter part of the 20th century.

[crazycatlady]

2. Christie vetoed a new tunnel

Hopefully Phil Murphy gets that going when he takes office.

[Laxman]

3. This Will Take More....

than just state money from NY & NJ and it is a project that has national significance and is deserving of substantial national investment. Murphy is going to have his hands full just getting the state to operate functionally after eight years of Christie. All the good intentions in the world will have a tough time overcoming the disaster that has been left. The cancelling of the tunnel without a Plan B is just the tip of the iceberg.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. "Penn Station ... is designed for the sensibilities and ergonomics of a rat."

Here's some background on the origin of that phrase:

"One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat." -- Penn Station, NYC, 1910 - 1963

Vincent Scully, 97, Influential Architecture Historian, Dies

Back to the tunnels:

I'm a member of a loosely organized group that meets once a month to hear a presentation about rail transit issues. Back in December, we were honored to have as our guest speaker the executive director of the Northeast Corridor Commission. At the time, it was thought that an agreement was in place for the construction of the new tunnels to commence. Half the cost was to be paid with Federal funding.

Federal funding is well justified for this project. The PowerPoint presentation had slides that pointed out how much it costs this country - not just lower Manhattan - but this country if the Northeast Corridor stops running for just one day.

Overview of the Northeast Corridor

A VITAL ECONOMIC ASSET

The NEC rail network is an engine of economy activity for the United States that brings workers to jobs, business to clients, goods to market, and people to their friends and family.

Learn More » Report to Congress: The NEC and the American Economy

Then, on a Friday afternoon news dump, it was announced that there be no Federal matching funds for the work on the tunnel.

NEWS › POLITICS

December 29, 2017 4:44 p.m. Updated 12/30/2017

Trump administration kills Gateway tunnel deal

Feds declare agreement to share massive project's costs with NY and NJ "nonexistent"

By Will Bredderman https://twitter.com/WillBredderman

President Donald Trump dropped his own New Year's ball—in the form of a wrecking ball—with a late Friday afternoon announcement that effectively wipes out plans for perhaps the nation's most crucial infrastructure project.

The president officially scrapped his predecessor's proposal to have the federal government underwrite half the cost of a multibillion-dollar Amtrak tunnel connecting New Jersey to Penn Station, the busiest transit hub in the U.S. The lone existing tunnel is rapidly deteriorating, threatening to sever Amtrak's popular Northeast Corridor route and to divert tens of thousands of New Jerseyans from their daily Manhattan commutes via NJ Transit.

The administration released the news on the cusp of a holiday weekend in a letter from a top Federal Transit Administration official to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his New Jersey counterpart Chris Christie, who had agreed with the Obama administration to split the project's costs 50-50.

President Barack Obama's Department of Transportation, which encompasses the FTA, had consented to that framework with Christie, Cuomo, now-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker in 2015. ... Friday's letter, in response to an updated proposal by the two states to fund their half of the plan with federal loans, declared the deal null and void.

Trump to U.S.: drop dead.