Regional governance timeline

Ordered in 1936 to make a new study, the Port Authority proposed a suburban rapid transit system for northern New Jersey that carried the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad from 33rd Street to 51st Street and across to New Jersey through a new tunnel. Its report said good rapid transit could add millions of dollars in property values. The New Jersey Legislature directed another study; in 1939 the Authority asked for more time, “and nothing more was heard of the proposal.”

Two articles date the plan to 1937; The Jersey Journal’s 1966 account gives 1938.

Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. convened the Metropolitan Regional Conference, later known as the Metropolitan Regional Council. This voluntary association of the top elected officials of the counties and major cities of the tri-state region discussed shared problems such as regional traffic control and water and air pollution. New York City paid most of its $50,000-a-year cost.

Project director Arthur W. Page recommended two new Hudson River tunnels, at about Fifty-ninth Street and at the Battery, carrying a rail loop that would connect New Jersey’s commuter lines with Manhattan over BMT subway tracks. A new bi-state district with a 32-member council would run it and assess counties for an estimated $12 million annual deficit.

The commission opened hearings in Newark on what The Record called “the nineteenth New York area transportation survey since the early 1920s,” moving to New York on September 17. Critics, including Representative Frank C. Osmers Jr. and engineer L. Alfred Jenny, pressed lower-cost alternatives.

About 20 people attended a Newark hearing on how to tackle metropolitan problems; Newark was the only New Jersey municipality to send an official. The council, elected officials who had met informally for more than two years, was weighing whether to seek formal status, and a committee under Columbia’s Wallace Sayre was to report on January 13.

A Regional Plan Association committee of eight headed by Columbia’s Wallace S. Sayre urged that the voluntary council be established by identical statutes in the three states and a compact approved by Congress, with a small full-time secretariat. “The present mass transportation crisis,” it said, “is but a foretaste of the difficulties which will soon and increasingly press upon the region.”

Governors Rockefeller, Meyner, and Ribicoff held a transit conference and heard railroads, labor, communities, and the Port Authority. Senator Walter H. Jones called it “a black day for New Jersey commuters and for the growth of regional concepts,” saying the governors of New York and Connecticut had washed their hands of the commuter problem.

The Senate passed the Assembly’s bi-state transit district bill 12 to 1, with most abstainers calling it futile, and the Assembly voted 53 to 3 for a State Division of Railroad Transportation in the Highway Department. The district bill could not become law unless New York enacted identical legislation. A bill to hand the problem to the Port Authority stayed in committee. In Albany the Senate voted 56 to 1 for an Office of Transportation in the governor’s executive department.

Governor Meyner signed the bill setting up a bi-state rapid transit agency. Two weeks later New York passed a different version, and New Jersey had to amend its law to match.

The two states had the Port Authority take over the bankrupt Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, now PATH, alongside the World Trade Center. The statute included a covenant that further deficit financing of railroad projects would be undertaken only within set financial limits, which the Authority read as 10 percent of its General Reserve Fund.

As the council sought formal membership agreements, the Westchester Board of Supervisors voted 26 to 7 against joining and Suffolk also refused. The council’s secretary said “hate literature” was being circulated. Mayor Wagner and Westchester’s county executive defended it as a voluntary agency; the latter said, “If it weren’t for the council, New Haven Railroad probably wouldn’t be operating today.”

At the Regional Plan Association’s conference, a survey of 5,600 residents showed nearly two-thirds of those outside the city approving a metropolitan planning agency with limited enforcement powers. The Long Island Rail Road’s president complained that after three years “nothing has been done, but we’re still talking about the same things”; William J. Ronan, the Tri-State committee’s chairman, replied that “a great deal has been done.”

After “several years of desuetude” and the defection of suburban members, the council had eight committees at work and a budget of $80,000, half from New York City, and had applied for a $210,000 federal grant. Its goal was to enlist every county and city in the region as a dues-paying member.

After the state’s transportation department warned that the traffic situation “would be hopeless without rail commuter service,” the public approved a $640 million bond issue with $200 million reserved for mass transit. The money went largely to repairs and replacing old rolling stock.

Governors Cahill and Rockefeller established a task force of Austin J. Tobin of the Port Authority, William J. Ronan of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and John C. Kohl, New Jersey’s transportation commissioner.

After Governor Cahill threatened to veto the Authority’s Kennedy Airport rail link unless it did as much for New Jersey, the commissioners agreed to survey a rail tunnel under the Hudson at Weehawken, and rail access to Newark Airport, and to examine improving and operating Penn Station in Newark.

Tobin told legislators from both states that the Port Authority could not enter mass transit on an unlimited deficit projection. Governor Cahill called it a “negative, defeatist attitude” and told New Jersey’s commissioners he regarded them as “the policy makers.” Theodore W. Kheel sued to void the 1962 covenant; the federal courts dismissed the case. Tobin retired in December.

Tobin, Ronan, and Kohl reported that connecting the Erie lines to the Penn Central at Harrison and Secaucus would give through service to Penn Station “possibly a decade sooner” than a new rail tunnel, but that “the long term needs of trans-Hudson travelers could best be met by a new rail tunnel into mid-Manhattan north of 42nd Street.”

The Department of Transportation presented a master plan with an estimated $3.1 billion in transit improvements, including a Weehawken tunnel to be built “by others.” “We have seen neither a plan nor a program but many projects lumped together,” said the Ridgewood Transportation Committee’s chairman.

Estimates by the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission through 1990 came to $12.2 billion for New York, $2.9 billion for New Jersey, and $256 million for Connecticut. Ridgewood’s newspapers proposed their own plan, starting with an Erie Lackawanna–Penn Central interchange at Secaucus for direct entry into Penn Station.

The Institute for Public Transportation proposed that the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission write a binding transportation master plan, with zoning review and power to withhold federal funds, and that an expanded Port Authority coordinate service across three states. “This would end the present practice of transit authorities writing their own plans,” its director said.

Connecticut commissioners withdrew objections to the New Jersey–New York transportation improvement program after Tri-State agreed to study their air-pollution concerns through a special committee. The compromise allowed the regional rail and highway project list to proceed to federal officials rather than be tabled, exposing the tension between Connecticut’s stricter air-quality obligations and its neighbors’ transport investments.

Tri-State tabled a proposal to reclassify land around the I-78/I-287 interchange as open space, including Allan-Deane’s 1,532-acre tract in Bernards and Bedminster. The commission ordered further study of the tension between environmental limits and housing near employment, retaining local zoning authority while debating how its regional guide should balance physical and social needs.

A televised series asked how the region’s transportation should be managed. A columnist wrote that the Tri-State commission’s staff had “presided over the disasters” of unfinished projects “with nary a public whisper,” because it was “a planning commission with no responsibility to implement.”

The commission declined for a third meeting to explain how it approved Westway against its own plan. Connecticut passed laws letting towns petition to leave its jurisdiction, and the three governors appointed a 15-member task force. Of more than 2,500 Town Meeting participants, 98 percent wanted regional decision-making imposed on the splintered transportation agencies.

The council, the region’s only association of local governments, discontinued operation after losing its Tri-State funding. Its planning director wrote that “the voice of local government in this complex region of ours has been effectively silenced by governmental appointees.”

The 223-page report called for stronger commission leadership and a Tri-State Regional Forum to respond to communities. The panel’s director said one commissioner had never attended a meeting. The commission then had 220 employees, spent $14.7 million a year, three-quarters of it federal, and reviewed federal funding requests for 586 local governments.

The Legislature’s Appropriations Committee deleted the $140,000 that would have been Connecticut’s share. New York and New Jersey began work to continue as a two-state commission. Tri-State’s director said withdrawal could cost Connecticut more than it saved.

Connecticut’s withdrawal took effect and the commission, which for more than 20 years had been the conduit for about $3 billion in federal aid, was gone. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council took its offices, serving New York City and five New York counties. “Without Tri-State there isn’t that kind of framework,” one planner said.

A New Jersey transportation panel proposed a high-speed commuter trolley line from a Meadowlands park-and-ride through a Weehawken tunnel and south along the waterfront to Hoboken, Exchange Place, and Jersey City, with a busway and limits on parking, at up to $850 million. The Regional Plan Association’s “River City” report called for a waterfront planning agency able to override local zoning.

Transportation commissioner Frank Wilson and NJDOT staff met with the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic and NJPIRG to develop joint corridor planning. The initiative sought alternatives such as demand management before road expansion and identified local participation and access to project decisions as key conditions for selecting corridors.

NJ Transit reopened commuter service to Hackettstown and Mount Olive, extending the Boonton Line by nine miles and two stations. A two-year, $7 million federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grant supported operations while the agency sought enough ridership to sustain the extension.

Connecticut DOT, EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, town governments and local advocates narrowed Route 6 options to three improvements along the existing roadway. Public opposition to a new four-lane rural highway had brought the agencies into joint planning, with possible town-center bypasses still under review.

NJ Transit issued a planning handbook encouraging towns to organize mixed-use development, pedestrian access and public space around transit stops. Executive director Shirley DeLibero presented it as a way to build closer working relationships with municipalities, while the Federal Transit Administration planned national distribution through its Livable Communities initiative.

The MTA board voted to defer reconstruction of Brooklyn’s Franklin Avenue Shuttle despite pressure from community groups, transit advocates and Borough President Howard Golden. It directed the Transit Authority to search other capital projects for possible funding, leaving the deteriorated shuttle’s rehabilitation unresolved.

NYMTC’s Program, Finance and Administration Committee adopted a candidate list for major-investment studies that omitted the Cross-Westchester I-287 widening, Gowanus Expressway reconstruction and Goethals Bridge expansion. Advocates challenged the exclusions as evading ISTEA’s alternatives analysis; director Ray Ruggieri subsequently offered discussions on how projects were defined and selected.

A Port Authority feasibility study found that the proposed new Goethals Bridge could accommodate rail in its space and loading requirements. Project manager Dennis Vignola announced the result to an interagency and public-interest working group, and the authority asked the Coast Guard to include rail capacity in the preferred alternative, without committing to operate rail service.

Governor Chris Christie canceled the ARC trans-Hudson tunnel project, which had $3 billion in federal New Starts funding. A Record columnist later wrote that he “killed a trans-Hudson rail project without offering any alternative.”

A deal between the federal government, New York, and New Jersey to fund Amtrak’s Gateway Project was brokered. The project included two new Hudson tunnels, a Penn Station south annex, a second Portal Bridge, and a loop for Bergen County trains.

The U.S. Department of Transportation proposed requiring multiple metropolitan planning organizations in one region to merge or draft a unified plan. Since Tri-State’s end the New York region had splintered into as many as ten such organizations, none crossing a state line. Three associations of planning organizations asked that the proposal be withdrawn.

Senator Charles Schumer said federal financing for two new Hudson rail tunnels could be in place in two years, with construction beginning in 2019. The preliminary cost estimate was $23 billion. “We need the states of New York and New Jersey, working through the Port Authority, to come through,” said Senator Robert Menendez.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced plans to expand Penn Station south of its existing footprint while leaving Madison Square Garden in place. The proposal added tracks and tied the station project to large-scale surrounding redevelopment, setting off a debate over whether regional through-running and a redesigned existing station could deliver capacity with less demolition.

Amtrak selected Arup to lead a two-year, $73 million design and engineering effort for new Penn Station tracks, platforms and passenger circulation. Amtrak would pay for the work, with the MTA leading environmental review; the expansion study was separate from the agencies’ procurement for renovating the existing station.

A Tri-State Transportation Campaign report by Liam Blank proposed adding two tracks south of Penn Station and then rebuilding the existing track-and-platform layout around regional through-running. It paired wider platforms and simultaneous boarding with trains continuing between New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut, while identifying power systems, rail yards, labor arrangements and fares as obstacles to integration.