Rail

The Regional Plan Association produced a nice explainer video on why the region needs to build more rail capacity under the Hudson River, the risks facing the existing train tubes, and what will happen if one of them has to be taken offline for repairs before another tunnel gets built.

Rail travel has many advantages over flying, like the view out the window, or arriving at a downtown location. Perhaps most importantly: You don’t have to get to the train station an hour early to go through security checkpoints like you do in airports. But last month’s attack on a Paris-bound train has amplified calls to beef up rail security.

To history’s list of epic negotiations, we may someday add the prospective deal to finance the Gateway Project between Newark’s and New York City’s Penn Stations. With two belligerent states, a disgraced Port Authority, and Amtrak and the federal government on the hook for Gateway’s $15 billion (and counting) expense, divvying up the cost will be contentious, to say the least. But the final equation will almost certainly include a rise in New Jersey’s stunningly low gasoline tax.

With the boroughs outside Manhattan adding people and jobs faster than the city core, New York needs to reorient its transit priorities, argues the Regional Plan Association in a new report. The authors warn that increasing travel in the other boroughs will strain the local bus system and lead more people to drive, causing more traffic congestion and imposing the burden of car ownership on more low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

This post is part of a series featuring stories and research that will be presented at the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference September 8-11 in Pittsburgh.

I hope you all had a good Labor Day. Streetsblog is back to work today, and you probably are too. But Congress? Not until next week. Every time there's a Monday holiday, Congress takes the whole week off, and they're milking the last moments of their August recess.

Yesterday was a tough day to try to get attention for a Senate hearing on the future of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. After all, at least one senator had gotten a poisonous letter and everyone on Capitol Hill was on high alert. What’s more, the Amtrak hearing coincided with the vote on gun control, one of the most dramatic and high-stakes votes in the body so far this session.

This is the second installment in our three-part "Revolving Door" series about how cronyism in state DOTs leads to wasteful highway building. The first part profiled Ohio DOT chief Jerry Wray, who has switched back and forth between working directly for the asphalt industry and shoveling money to the asphalt industry as a public official.

Speaking to reporters earlier today, Federal Railroad Administration chief Joe Szabo said that people are driving less and using transit more -- and that those changes are permanent. "America’s travel habits are undergoing rapid change," he said. It's a fact, he said ("not opinion -- statistically proven"), calling on Congress to show that it understands these changes by moving in a new direction.