Last Monday, our editorial headlined “End Amtrak’s Gateway lies” argued that the railway continues to falsely insist that it must spend $17 billion to demolish the Midtown homes and businesses south of Penn Station, centered on Block 780, in order to expand the station capacity.
That day’s presentation by Amtrak was exactly as we expected with everything concerning Amtrak and its $50 billion Gateway boondoggle: Full of fibs.
The two speakers were Petra Messick, a senior program director for Amtrak’s capital delivery, and Foster Nichols, a senior vice president & technical fellow, rail operations planning, for the multinational giant WSP.
They said that the alternative plans offered by two civic groups, ReThinkNYC and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, to avoid the Block 780 demolition by instead utilizing through-running of trains, both fail to achieve what Amtrak and NJTransit need.
The analysis is worthless.
Amtrak cannot produce a fair and independent review of a competing plan to its own cherished blueprints. And as for WSP, they have long been on the payroll. The Gateway Trans-Hudson Partnership, which has been working on Amtrak’s monstrosity for years, is a consortium of WSP, AECOM and STV.
WSP is so proud of its close ties to Gateway that they had four of its men, Phil Rice, Jerry Jannetti, Drew Bazil and Omar Khan, present at the signing of Gateway’s $6.88 billion contract with the feds last month. While we were there, we don’t know these guys, but WSP helpfully put out a press release with their photo.
Messick laughably said, “Amtrak’s goal is more trains for more people to more places” yet Amtrak is refusing any deviation from its foolish and wasteful Gateway scheme, which will not add a single passenger nor a single seat when the new Gateway tunnel opens. Under their delusion, all nine parts of Gateway (including Block 780) must be built. That’s the $50 billion price tag.
Messick also said Amtrak does repairs of the existing 1910 Hudson tunnel during the weekends. That’s an old lie. Using the Freedom of Information Act, we have proven that Amtrak rarely does weekend work.
Another lie was that “anytime you do work here, you have to take tracks out of service.” She added that “a project that might take two years if you had complete access to the tracks for two years straight, could take six years if you’re doing it every weekend. You have to take tracks out of service. You have to inconvenience people. It becomes more difficult, more costly, and it takes longer.”
Untrue, all of it. The 1910 tubes can and should be fully repaired nights and weekends, like the MTA did with the L train and like a truly independent report from the world-renowned experts at London Bridge Associates showed. Amtrak rejected the LBA findings, but it remains the truth. The East River tubes should also be repaired the same way, night and weekends, as everyone else in the world does.
Like LBA did, a real outsider must review all through-running options with the mandate to make it succeed, including the best of all, the original Access to the Region’s Core tunnel (not the far inferior modification that Chris Christie correctly killed) that brings the new Hudson tunnel into Penn Station and out to Grand Central Terminal. Find an engineer to make that work, sparing Block 780 and $17 billion.