The New Year has begun, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo evidently did not make an important resolution: stop announcing huge infrastructure projects without a way to pay for them. This week alone, Cuomo unveiled three projects worth billions of dollars, even as nobody knows how to fund last year’s projects. There’s nothing wrong with building infrastructure – in fact, it’s a good thing – but Cuomo has to starting picking his projects wisely, and then put some real cash behind them.
“Cuomo’s [Long Island Sound] tunnel idea would inevitably take away money from something else, perhaps something more useful.”
Cuomo stakes his legacy on big stuff you can touch. On Tuesday, he cited Robert Moses, New York’s mid-century master builder, in saying that “somewhere along the way, we lost our daring.” The governor said that, like Moses, we have to “think big” and stop it with NIMBY-ism.
It’s true that Moses built some great stuff – but also true that he built some pretty bad stuff, including highways like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which helped hollow out the Bronx six decades ago.
One marquee project Cuomo announced Tuesday represents Moses’ worst impulses. The governor said that he wants to build a car tunnel underneath the Long Island Sound, connecting the island with Connecticut, Westchester or the Bronx.
Such a tunnel would precipitate a lot of, well, NIMBY-ism – but for good reason. In 1964, around the time Moses was finishing the Cross-Bronx, he proposed a bridge over the Long Island Sound, something he said was a “fetish” for him. (Hey, to each his own.)
Nine years later, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller killed the idea. Local residents had for years agitated against a project that, as the New York Times put it, would “overload existing road systems, harm the ecology and the recreational value of (the) Long Island Sound, and destroy the communities in the path of the access roads.”
The residents were right, just as the people who killed the proposed Westway highway project along the Hudson River in Manhattan in the same era were right. We do not solve traffic problems by building more highways; new highways only cause more traffic.
Yes, a tunnel would have less impact on local towns, but it would have some impact. Think of the access ramps and such that the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel and Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel need. The worst effect, though, would be more cars on local highways and streets already choked with cars.
Moreover, when Moses proposed infrastructure projects, he found ways to pay for them. Building a tunnel under the Sound would cost billions of dollars. But the governor hasn’t yet proposed how to pay for his existing crossing project: the $3.9 billion Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, under construction north of New York City. This week, the governor did the opposite, proposing to freeze and even reduce tolls on the state’s Thruway system for another five years, at a cost of $1 billion.
Cuomo’s tunnel idea would inevitably take away money from something else, perhaps something more useful. Cuomo’s other major proposal on Tuesday was to build a new, 10-mile track on the Long Island Rail Road. This is actually a good idea. Right now, track constraints mean that the LIRR can run trains only in one direction much of the time, meaning people who would like to take the train have to take a car instead, or wait hours. And here, Cuomo’s policy team seems to have actually thought some issues through: reducing the number of houses the railroad would need to seize, for example, from 200 in an older plan to 50 now, would lower costs and mitigate community opposition.
The problem, of course, is money. A new track would cost well more than $1 billion (anything we do in this state costs at least a billion dollars). Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which would build the project, still has no idea how it’s going to pay for its existing expansion projects, including the $10.2 billion East Side Access project, another LIRR expansion.
One way to fund the new track would be to ask Long Island towns and villages to assess a fee on new apartment developments along the route. This would show that Long Island is willing to increase its density, which is the entire point of building anything at all. But here, too, with the Tappan Zee, expect Cuomo to start building (or at least studying) now and paying later.
“The risk in starting lots of new projects without having a way to pay for them is that the governor will force the MTA and the rest of the state to scrimp on old stuff that people don’t see.”
It’s a similar tale with Cuomo’s other big project of the week, a new Penn Station. Like a third LIRR track, overhauling Penn Station is a fine idea – fine enough that we’ve been talking about it for decades. And the governor is at least being specific on a funding source here: he wants the bulk of the $3 billion project to come from private real-estate developers, in exchange for allowing them to build offices and retail at the site. A similar scheme launched 10 years ago hasn’t worked out.
In the meantime, what Penn Station needs most, obviously, is that other tunnel: the one we actually need. New York needs to come up with $5 billion to help build a new tunnel under the Hudson River into Penn Station, and Cuomo hasn’t said where we’ll get that money, either.
The risk in starting lots of new projects without having a way to pay for them is that the governor will force the MTA and the rest of the state to scrimp on old stuff that people don’t see, like replacing subway tracks and signals. Already our subway riders are suffering under record ridership. A year ago, commuters thought we couldn’t fit any more people next to the 6 million people already riding daily; today, we’re fitting 200,000 more.
A bridge to Connecticut won’t solve that problem.
This piece originally appeared in City & State's New York Slant
This piece originally appeared in City & State