The transportation systems in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Region are a barrier to the efficient movement of people and goods throughout the entire region, and thus to the region’s economy and the quality of life of its citizens. In an age when more and more jobs can go anywhere, this region’s survival depends on providing a quality of life that will support the decisions of businesses to stay and prosper here and of citizens to choose the region as a place to live and work.
The deficiencies of both the highway and transit networks make it difficult for this region to compete in the global marketplace. Many highways and river crossings are jammed during increasingly extended peak hours, costing billions of dollars in time lost each year. The region is past the age when it can solve this problem by building its way out of this highway congestion as it once tried to do, given the excessively high cost, environmental damage and community disruption of expressway construction. Instead, focus is increasingly turning towards more efficiently managing highway travel demand. Regional Plan Association’s Third Plan, A Region at Risk, proposes how to accomplish this, applying market-based measures and new technologies.
This report focuses on the transit system, particularly the extensive but inadequate rail network, and how it can be improved to help the region meet its economic and quality of life objectives. Today, the Tri-State Metropolitan region faces competition from other existing or budding world cities. Each of our rivals –Paris, Tokyo, London and the major cities of Germany – has developed or has ambitious plans to create its own regional rail system. Berlin’s transit network, long divided by the Cold War, is being reconnected. Even Los Angeles has launched a multibillion-dollar effort to create a rail network from scratch.
The region’s existing rail system hands us, perhaps for the last time, the opportunity to save, rebuild and recreate communities that have been losing out to the ravages of sprawled development. Moreover, if designed and properly coordinated with land use decisions, a truly regional system would effectively serve many medium-density portions of the region not now served by rail, while providing new opportunities for economic development in suburban centers.
RPA’s Regional Express Rail - Rx proposal described in this report is a generation-long, billion-dollar per year program to transform the existing transit system. Rx can become the springboard to launch the next wave of development in the metropolitan region and can spur redevelopment just as rail transit opened up new land opportunities early in this century and the automobile did somewhat later. Rx’s productivity gains would make more effective use of public funds and fares through more efficient use of labor, rolling stock and other infrastructure. Rx also breaks down artificial barriers among the three states and between the urban and suburban areas. Therefore, one region’s transit operators can make broader appeals for capital and operating funds and region-wide revenue sources, particularly as citizens of the Region come to view the entire rail system as their own.
