Why ARC?

For the New York Region to thrive, its center must too. This means that it must be possible, even easy, to reach its core - Manhattan. And it should be easiest to reach Manhattan from the places where people want are coming from.

The simple fact is that for the last generation the suburban sector feeding the Manhattan Central Business District that has grown the fastest is by far from the west - northern New Jersey and Rockland and Orange counties in New York. 

Between 1980 and 2000 eighty-nine of every one hundred new commuting trips from the suburbs have come from these areas. And the beat continues. More recent data shows the same trend and more viscerally it can be seen every day. The road arteries have long been clogged and no amount of transportation angioplasty will change that. The two auto tunnels have long been congealed and backed up into the Hackensack every weekday morning. The Lincoln Tunnel bus approach - the exclusive bus lane - has hovered near breakdown for years. And now the Northeast Corridor rail tunnel into Penn Station regularly brings subway crush standee loads into the West Side.

To the rescue is ARC - the Access to the Region's Core rail tunnel planned by NJ TRANSIT and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - to almost double passenger rail capacity from the west. With its arrival, ARC will be just a thin wall from Macy's basement under 34th Street, have easy connections to all a nexus of subway lines, and be close to growing West Side developments coming in the next twenty years. 

ARC would add more than 60,000 additional seats for commuters, enough for the foreseeable future. The new capacity would immediately attract more commuters with more frequent service on lines already connected to the Corridor, would make possible one-seat rides into Manhattan from four lines without them now - three running through Bergen, Passaic, Rockland and Orange, which now contribute disproportionately to clogged roads, and the Raritan Valley line in Union and Somerset counties - and even open up options for new lines, if they proved cost-effective. 

ARC also paves the way (or, rather, lays the track) for a future extension to the east side, as advocated by RPA in its report, ARC & NYC: the New Trans-Hudson Tunnel, Making It Work Best, to be released this week. Look for it at a website near you (www.rpa.org).

ARC should be supported and you have as chance to do that on March 31 in New Jersey and April 1 in New York when hearings will be held for the latest step in its approval process, the Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement. See http://www.accesstotheregionscore.com/ for details.