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Brooklyn Broadside: A Tale of Two Tunnels
Brooklyn Eagle, October 18, 2007
by Dennis Holt
BROOKLYN -- A tunnel, a tunnel, my container port for a tunnel! One hopes that this paraphrasing of King Richard III and his plea for a horse isn’t seriously used about the cross-harbor freight tunnel. But the plea for such is back in the news again. The New York Times this week told us that the Port Authority commissioners will decide to spend at least $10 million on another study about the merits of a cross-harbor freight tunnel between New Jersey and Brooklyn.
The idea for this kind of tunnel has been around since the 1920s and has surfaced again in recent years for one primary reason. There is a need for a major container port in Brooklyn, in Sunset Park. (The small one off the Columbia Street piers is inefficient and almost useless.)
But for that sized container port to exist, most of the containers coming and going will have to come by rail. Surface transportation capacity is already maxed out. And the only way to create a rail-delivery system from New Jersey (and the rest of the country) is by a freight rail tunnel, probably to the 65th Street rail complex.
The $10 million, and another $90 million in federal funding, has been around for a couple of years thanks to Congressman Jerry Nadler, who has been in the forefront on this issue for several years. (The Sunset Park waterfront, strangely enough, is in his Congressional district.)
An estimated cost of a practical tunnel can be as high as $7 billion, which is a lot of money. A traditional return-on-investment review of how long it would take to make up for that capital amount may not be practical for another reason.
If someone blew up both the George Washington and Verrazano bridges, the island boroughs would have a difficult time feeding themselves. Even in the 1920s, with neither of those bridges in place, this vulnerability was a concern of planners.
So, get the study under way and get practical about that tunnel. And it should be remembered that it’s nearing time to get practical about another tunnel -- the Gowanus tunnel, which should replace the out-of-date and awful elevated expressway.
That concept has been studied, and two possible routes have been selected. Such a tunnel makes sense for two reasons. One is money; a tunnel costs more to build but much less to operate that a surface approach. It is environmentally much “greener” that an open-air highway. And it opens many doors to economic development along the Bay Ridge and Sunset Park Third Avenue corridors.
It may be too late to think of other tunnels in Brooklyn, but planners have speculated on the impact of a tunnel somewhere under Flatbush Avenue surfacing only at the entry to the Manhattan Bridge for Manhattan-bound traffic. Others have mentally played around with a northern BQE tunnel as well.
But two tunnels that really have to be done, and are very feasible, are the southern Brooklyn tunnels. And they should be done at the same time so they don’t run into each other.
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