Fact Sheets Now Available
Move NY & NJ has just released handouts listing the benefits to individual regions. Click here for fact sheets.
Benefits of the Tunnel
The Cross Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel project, which seeks to build a tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Brooklyn and improve rail freight infrastructure, would solve these problems, and many more that our City will face in the near future. The benefits of a Cross Harbor Tunnel are overwhelming. The tunnel would:
- Remove over one million tractor-trailers a year from New York City streets (in every borough), making a huge contribution to solving road congestion and wear and tear issues. It would also allow better movement of emergency vehicles, which is critical to our safety. If we do not build this tunnel, we will instead see 80% more freight trucks on our streets over the next 20 years.
- Reduce our rising asthma rates (now amongst the worst in the nation), and help to solve environmental health issues, by reducing particulates released from freight trucks.
- Create 23,000 new long-term jobs, and over 1,000 construction jobs, with family-sustaining wages and benefits.
- Act as a key engine for economic growth. If we do not build this tunnel, we will put an immovable lid on economic development. Freight volumes coming into the City and Long Island are expected to increase by as much as 80% in the next 20 years. Without a tunnel, the region could come to a virtual standstill.
- Stem the loss of manufacturing jobs and help us grow new high-wage, high-tech, new economy manufacturing jobs. Taking over a million trucks off the streets will make it less costly to do business here, so our notoriously high-priced manufacturing and consumer goods will be cheaper. Even our food would be fresher and cheaper.
- Provide national security benefits, since goods could still move into the City even if the bridges are closed to trucks and cars. As nearly all of our goods come over the George Washington Bridge, one bomb-threat to that bridge could isolate us from the goods we need.
The Tunnel: A Critical Investment for our Future
The Cross Harbor Tunnel Project has the highest benefit to cost ratio of any major regional transportation project currently under consideration
(2.2 to 1). Most infrastructure projects barely exceed 1 to 1. The net present value of the benefits (conservatively) is approximately $10.5 billion
and this estimate doesn't include so-called "induced" economic benefits. In addition, the federal funding for this project will not compete with our
transit projects, since it will likely be coming from a source reserved for projects of national significance.
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