We are living on borrowed time.
The links between New York and New Jersey face a growing crisis of capacity, connectivity, and potential collapse. The North River Tunnels under the Hudson River, which connect the entire Washington to Boston corridor, suffer frequent service failures, serve far more people than they were designed to handle, and need major repairs to prevent a catastrophe. The frequent delays and emergency repairs that commuters currently face are mild compared to what will happen if one of the tunnels fails before replacement tunnels can be built. Losing such a vital part of the regional network would spark disastrous ripple effects across the entire Northeast, affecting everyone who commutes by any mode across the Hudson River; businesses on both sides that rely on these connections; and communities that thrive because of our robust metropolitan economy.
That is why I am here today urging the release of federal funds for Gateway – funds which have been committed over years of negotiations through a federal/state partnership. Without immediate release of that funding, work on the Hudson Tunnel Project will soon stop, adding years and billions of dollars to the eventual cost of building new tunnels under the Hudson River, and putting the entire effort at risk. Over $1 billion has already been spent – taxpayer money that would have been wasted if the project were cancelled at this point.
In 2022, approximately 447,000 New Jersey commuters traveled daily to New York City for work. Even with post-Covid hybrid patterns, these commuters earned $138,000 on average, for a total of over $61.7 billion in wages that benefited New Jersey, New York, and the federal government. These commuters pay on average about $8,500 in income taxes to New York State and $25,000 - $30,000 to the federal government. That’s about $3.8 billion to New York and $13 billion in federal taxes each year. Simply put, a robust trans-Hudson commuter workforce contributes billions of dollars in federal tax revenue over time by participating in this integrated labor market.
These commuting patterns are far more than individual trips. They are critical to a shared regional labor market, sustaining 1.6 million jobs and $201 billion in earnings — a testament to how deeply integrated are the economies of NJ and NY. Losing capacity or risking tunnel closures threatens that prosperity – even for commuters, residents, and businesses that do not themselves use the tunnels on a regular basis.
RPA’s analysis found that the Gateway program – including the Hudson Tunnel Project – will generate roughly $445 billion in economic benefits by 2060 creating and sustaining more than 46,000 jobs on average each year over several decades. These figures represent not only construction activity, but continued economic productivity from improved transportation infrastructure.
Specifically for the Hudson Tunnel Project, construction activity alone will produce approximately $19.6 billion in economic output and create about 95,000 jobs during the building phase. These jobs span direct construction roles and induced employment across the supply chain and supporting businesses.
But the economic upside of Gateway isn’t just about growth — it’s about avoiding catastrophic losses. Because the existing tunnels are already fragile and damaged, the only way to repair them is to close them — effectively reducing trans-Hudson rail capacity by up to 75 percent during the repair period.
Such a shutdown would ripple through the entire transportation system. Nearly half a million commuters would face longer, more unreliable trips; thousands of rail passengers would be forced into cars, buses, or planes; and congestion on highways, bridges, and at airports would intensify dramatically as rail riders shift to other modes.
The economic consequences are severe: over a four-year shutdown, RPA estimates a $16 billion loss to the national economy, with more than half of that coming from lost worker productivity due to longer commutes and congested travel. The economic toll can be measured from Virginia to Maine. It would also cost approximately $1.5 billion in lost federal tax revenue and $1 billion in lost state tax revenue from New York and New Jersey. Traffic congestion alone — with tens of thousands of additional vehicles on already crowded roadways — would erode quality of life, raise travel costs, slow commerce, and diminish property values across New York and New Jersey by more than $20 billion.
The economic resilience of this region and the entire Northeast — which contributes roughly 20 percent of the nation’s GDP — depends on avoiding those outcomes.
