The Greater Brooklyn Tunnel: Thinking Big Again Brian Ketcham and Carolyn Konheim
The Greater Brooklyn Tunnel: Thinking Big Again The recent confluence of new ways to unclog entry routes for goods and people into and out of New York has given rise to the vision of a Greater Brooklyn Tunnel. It is an over-arching idea that will improve the city's economy, its neighborhoods and the quality of life, one that is the equal of any of the grand plans underway in the city's global competitors - Paris, London and Tokyo.
In a bold move, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has heeded the drum beat by Congressman Jerrold Nadler for a cross-harbor rail freight tunnel that would restore the New York harbor, make larger industries feasible in the city and Long Island, and lower the cost of all goods by reducing our dependance on heavy trucks that cause costly congestion, pollution, and destruction of our roads and the utilities below. The second set of innovations concern a critical truck link for New York to the rest of the nation: the Gowanus Expressway, a crumbling three mile elevated highway bisecting western Brooklyn that has been battered by heavy traffic seeking to avoid tolled crossings. In response to community fears about the six year traffic nightmare from rebuilding the antiquated structure, the New York State Department of Transportation held a competition that has produced six ingenious alternatives, and is now completing a comprehensive environmental review.
Even more ingenious than the Gowanus design options, but dismissed by the State for doubling the project's cost, is a proposal by the Regional Plan Association, wildly popular in Brooklyn, for a tunnel to parallel the Gowanus inboard from the Brooklyn waterfront, an idea that will be examined further with funds from the City Council.
As promising as these new directions are, they stop short of a larger vision, one that capitalizes on new tunneling technology being employed around the world by cities that have determined that tunnels last three to five times as long as elevated roads, and avoid the blight that the roads impose. Paris is tunneling under its 25 mile ring road while it maintains full operation. London and Tokyo are tunneling under their cities to open up new areas. By burying an elevated roadway, Boston is reuniting the city with its waterfront. New York City can go one better, and, thanks to E-Z Pass, we can pay for it all.
It is not enough to break the Gowanus juggernaut. The State has begun plans to replace the four layer Brooklyn Promenade and roads, as well as the elevated portion of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway that snakes under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. These huge disruptions will just move the traffic bottleneck along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway for decades. The solution is to extend Regional Plan's tunnel north of the Gowanus to connect with the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in the vicinity of Williamsburg. A preliminary investigation of the engineering feasibility of a tunnel along this route by architect and planner Allen Swerdlowe suggests it can be done. The Greater Brooklyn Tunnel would have three interchanges connecting with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.
It would remove the major access barrier to the much-desired Brooklyn Bridge Park on the abandoned Port Authority piers below the Promenade, and its construction could spin off the funds to make that dream a reality. Relief of the traffic that funnels through Downtown Brooklyn and gets dumped on Lower Manhattan would facilitate a broadly supported plan by the Brooklyn Borough President to design a showcase of traffic-calming measures, that would bring a new grace to city life.
A north-south tunnel with access to the port would build on Mayor Giuliani's plan for a rail tunnel from Staten Island to Brooklyn. It also ties in with an option being considered by New York City Transit in its East River Crossing Study to build a transit tunnel for the B, D and Q subway lines to lower Manhattan, removing them from the Manhattan Bridge, where they stress its fragile structure. That move makes possible replacing the Manhattan Bridge, its patch-up an endless billion dollar sink-hole, with a modern high capacity facility that could be as visually stunning as are new bridges around the world. Or, better yet, replace the Manhattan Bridge with a tunnel connecting directly with the FDR Drive taking 30,000 cars a day off the overused Brooklyn Bridge.
A tunnel under Downtown Brooklyn, with connections to the three river crossings, a new transit tunnel and replacement Bridge would add about $5 billion to the $1 billion that the Mayor's rail freight tunnel would likely cost. The benefits in new development opportunities, more efficient movement of people and goods, with all the associated benefits for the economy and environment of the region, would be at least five times as great. The upfront price tag is even affordable.
The $800 million a year that the New York City Department of Transportation has estimated tolling currently free East River bridges would generate at current toll rates, would finance about $8 billion in construction. Opinion research shows that drivers are willing to pay a sliding scale of fees for peak travel periods if they can see that the funds are being used to improve their mobility, and if they don't have to face toll plaza delays. Today's E-Z Pass technology can be installed anywhere along a road, without requiring any disruption of normal traffic flow, a pattern that will become much more rational when drivers no longer have an incentive to go out of their way to avoid tolls at some crossings.
The fact of the matter is that reordering how we spend our travel dollars will ultimately reduce the $125 billion a year that is the total direct cost for all forms of travel in the New York region. Our dependence on cars and trucks imposes further hidden costs of about $70 billion regionwide ($53 billion for New York State alone) in the form of lost productivity (congestion losses), traffic accident costs not covered by insurance, plus the environmental consequences of road travel. For Brooklyn, this economic burden is nearly $6 billion a year. Reducing this drag on the cost of living and doing business in New York makes the tunnel investment an even bigger bargain.
Without an ambitious vision of the future, the New York metropolitan area, and New York City in particular, cannot compete with other world class cities, all of which are investing heavily in new transportation infrastructure to service their regions. An ongoing study, led by the Institute of Public Administration, comparing New York with Paris, London and Tokyo indicates that, without significantly increased investment in transportation, both to bring New York's system to a state of good repair, and to expand it to areas now poorly served, the New York region will not effectively compete with other world financial capitals to attract the talent essential for success. A Greater Brooklyn Tunnel matches in scale and vision the plans now underway in other world cities. It provides the opportunity for Brooklyn and New York as a whole to thrive over the next century. In contrast, continuing the conventional route only sets in concrete the slow decline of Brooklyn and ultimately the region. Brooklyn, New York and the region, the nation's gateway, deserve far better.
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