Last year proved disastrous for New Jersey transit riders who were slapped with fare increases and cuts in service — not to mention Governor Chris Christie’s decision to put the kibosh on the Access to the Region’s Core tunnel. This year’s budget calls for increases in overall transportation and transit funding — specifically targeted [...]
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http://www.vimeo.com/19836629 In Streetfilms’ latest video, Tri-State’s Kate Slevin and NJ Future’s Pete Kasabach explain some of the factors behind the success of transit-oriented development in northern New Jersey. The film is the first in a multi-part series called Moving Beyond the Automobile. Areas like Jersey City and Hoboken are blessed with myriad transit options including [...] Amtrak's proposed "Gateway Tunnel" would increase capacity for both NJ Transit and Amtrak. This morning, NJ’s Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez joined Amtrak President Joseph Boardman to make the exciting announcement that Amtrak will try to take the lead on a new trans-Hudson rail project, the “Gateway Project.” The agency has proposed [...] Members of the Republican Study Committee recently unveiled the Spending Reduction Act of 2011 that reduces federal spending by $2.5 trillion over ten years, starting with rolling back all non-defense spending to fiscal year 2008 levels. As Streetsblog Capitol Hill reported earlier this week, the proposed cuts to transportation are deep and would translate [...] 2010 proved to be a disastrous year for New Jersey transportation, with the state’s most pressing transportation challenge going unaddressed and with great leaps backward in policy. New Governor Chris Christie entered the year well aware that the state’s transportation system needed a long-term funding solution. The Transportation Trust Fund (which gets most of its revenue from the state gas tax and represents the state’s contribution to the NJDOT and NJ Transit capital programs) had been borrowed against for too long and would go bankrupt by July 2011.  NJ Transit riders packed a public hearing on planned fare hikes and service cuts in Newark in March. Gov. Christie didn’t address the issue during 2010. But the tough budget environment hit transit riders in other ways, leading to major fare hikes and service cuts and the cancellation of the Access to the Region’s Core project, a rail tunnel between NYC and New Jersey that was necessary to increase service on the state rail system. A Tough Year for Transit RidersTo say it was a tough year for transit riders in New Jersey would be an understatement. The new governor opened the year by cutting state support for NJ Transit by 11%. A proposal for a 25% fare increase and huge service cuts soon followed. Thousands of riders protested at public hearings and sent messages to state politicians, and NJ Transit eventually lowered the fare hike for local bus and light rail riders to 10% while keeping the 25% hike for commuter trains and buses. But the increase was still the largest in a generation. In May, NJDOT Commissioner Jim Simpson revealed that the Christie administration had backed away from a financial commitment to a planned bus rapid transit and PATCO rail extension project in South Jersey. But this was just a sneak preview of one of the largest stories of the year — the cancellation of the ARC Tunnel. As recently as April, the governor was calling the ARC Tunnel “critical for the transit riders of New Jersey” and standing squarely behind the project, which represented the culmination of 20 years of planning and was the largest transit project in the nation. But in September he suspended new work on the project for 30 days, supposedly to review project costs. Many observers, however, had an alternate theory: that killing the tunnel could be a means to shore up the Transportation Trust Fund. NJ Transit Executive Director Jim Weinstein admitted as such, telling state legislators that cancelling the project could be a way to do so. The governor was urged to reconsider this short-sighted decision by broad swathes of the state’s civic, labor, business, and environmental communities, and Christie delayed making a decision as thousands of New Jerseyans came out to support the project. USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood flew down and set up last-minute federal-state discussions to try and salvage the project. But after delaying a decision again, Gov. Christie rejected several offered financing options. On October 27, the governor made the decision official, effectively precluding any major improvements to the rail network for at least the next 20 years. Doing so also put the state on the hook to repay $271 million in federal funds that had been spent on the project. The federal government has since reduced that amount, and the state has hired a D.C. law firm to try and lower the bill further. Toll Road Widenings AdvanceEven as major transit projects languished, the Christie administration borrowed billions of dollars to advance major road widening projects. Both the Garden State Parkway widening (between mileposts 63 and 80) and NJ Turnpike widening (6-8A), which the Corzine administration broke ground on, advanced further under Gov. Christie. NJ Transit's "My Bus" website allows riders to see the closest bus stops to a given address. “Where’s my bus?” The answer to that question is getting considerably easier for thousands of New Jersey bus riders as NJ Transit rolls out its new “My Bus” program, which takes much of the guesswork out [...] The federal government wants its money back from New Jersey for the cancellation of the Access to the Region’s Core rail project. The day before Thanksgiving, the Federal Transit Administration sent NJ Transit a letter demanding repayment, within 30 days, of the $271 million in federal funds spent on the project. The federal agency says it will charge interest on this claim if repayment is not made in time, may report the claim to credit and bond rating agencies, ask the Department of Justice to act as a collection agent, and as a last resort will garnish New Jersey’s future federal transportation funds. [UPDATE: The Christie administration has hired Washington, D.C.-based law firm Patton Boggs to contest the bill.] Full letter below (highlights added by TSTC):
Longtime MTR readers may have wondered where Tri-State’s annual analysis of New Jersey’s capital plan is. Typically, we’ve produced a detailed analysis of the capital plan in the late spring or early summer. In April of this year we published a brief “preview” of the 2011 capital plan, in anticipation of a more thorough [...] Gov. Christie has officially canceled the Access to the Region’s Core rail tunnel between NYC and New Jersey, condemning commuters to the status quo of frequently delayed and unreliable train service, setting back efforts to relieve the Hudson River rail bottleneck by at least a generation, and forfeiting $6 billion in federal New Starts [...] [Update: The Associated Press is reporting that federal estimates for the tunnel's potential overruns are $1 billion, considerably lower than the $2-5 billion overrun figure cited by Gov. Christie.] NJ State Assembly Transportation Chair John Wisniewski said today that a review of NJ Transit documents, received after filing an Open Public Records Act request, [...] |
 
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