Developer Says Sound Tunnel Will Help Reduce Traffic But If It Doesn't, He Won't Build it.

If you're looking for an example of meaningless non-news, you have to look hard to do better than this story, in Newsday. The reporter was sent to cover the public hearing about the proposed Long Island Sound tunnel (the hearing was somewhere on Long Island, I think, although I'm not sure because the reporter doesn't say where). Covering a hearing is a pain because people tend to get up and say the same things that you've already heard and reported.

So to her credit, the reporter seems to have buttonholed developer Vincent Polimeni afterwards and asked him some questions. What she got out of him was this:

The developer who proposed a $10-billion tunnel beneath the Long Island Sound said at a hearing that he would pull the project if a regional traffic study finds it would make traffic worse.

"If it finds that it will enhance the traffic situation, we want to go forward," Garden City developer Vincent Polimeni said yesterday. "If it will make things worse, I'm stopping it. I don't want to waste more money."

Think of it: if the tunnel will make traffic worse, he won't build it. Now think of the opposite: Imagine if he had said, I don't care if the tunnel will make traffic worse, I want to build it anyway? Obviously there's no way in the world he would say that, even if it were true (whichit might be).

So why report it? I guess because Newsday had to send her and she had to come back with something.

This story, in the Journal News, is far better (for one thing, it tells us that the hearing was in the Oyster Bay Town Hall). The reporter was in on the same interview but added this:

Polimeni said he would commission a study to project the tunnel's impact on traffic - including on Interstate 287 and the Tappan Zee Bridge - and that it could be done within six months.

But Polimeni predicted that the tunnel project would not draw traffic. Rather, he said, it would help the region better handle the legions of cars and trucks already growing in number.

That at least allows us to question how objective a study is going to be if it is commissioned by a developer who has already made up his mind that the project will not increase traffic.

Build a Tunnel Under the Sound and It's Just a Matter of Time Before the Traffic Will Arrive to Fill It

Vincent Polimeni, the real estate developer who wants to build a for-profit tunnel under Long Island Sound, from Syosset to Rye, implies that anyone who doesn't seen the benefit of his proposal is being obtuse:

The benefits to the region's environment can be summed up, he said, in "simple mathematics." Whereas it takes a 45-mile trip to go from point A to point B, the tunnel would cut the distance to 16 miles.

"So just that savings alone is huge, in terms of gas consumption, in terms of pollutants put in the air and all that means," he said.

Right. More transportation infrastructure results in less traffic. That's why Los Angeles has high air quality and no traffic jams. That why's Staten Island, where I grew up, is as quiet and bucolic as it was before Robert Moses built the Verrazanno Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway.

Sorry, Mr. Polimeni. It's pretty much an iron-clad law of road building that when a new highway or bridge or tunnel opens, it eases traffic congestion for a while -- a relatively short while. But soon drivers realize there's a new highway or bridge or tunnel where the traffic isn't so bad, and the vaccuum gets filled.

Polimeni's quote comes from Phil Reisman, in the Journal News, here, who lets the history of other grandiose traffic projects convey his skepticism. Background and other opinions here.

Long Island Sound tunnel: One Thumbs Down, Lots of Questions

The New London Day is the first paper I've seen to comeout against the Long Island Sound tunnel. An editorial in the Day on Sunday said:

If you thought the Broadwater plan to build a floating liquefied natural gas terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound was one of the worst, environmentally abominable ideas ever proposed for the 110-mile-long estuary, consider the plan announced recently by a New York multimillionaire.

The editorial notes, by the way, that New London is about 100 miles away from where the tunnel would be built. From even further away, near Dallas (does it reflect badly on a Long Island Sound blog that the two people who comment most frequently, Bryan Brown and Sam Wells, both live in Texas?), Bryan Brown has sent me some worthwhile thoughts on the tunnel, in response to this post. Here's part of what Bryan says:

Where are they going to dump the material from the tunnels? It's 500 million cubic feet or 18.4 million cubic yards of rock and soil. If they used it as fill, 100ft of it would cover 116 acres.

If half the borings come out of the LI tunnel, how are they going to move 9.2 million cubic yards? At 30 cubic yards per load, that's 300,000 truck trips.

Have 55-ft diameter tunnels been bored before? I haven't found any that are that big. The tubes all seem to be less than 40ft in diameter.

24 million gallons of gasoline per year saved seems reasonable based on a trip that's 30 miles shorter. Is it still 24 million gallons in 2025 when we're all driving hybrids or electric cars that get 100mpg?

How much of the so-called green benefit from this project gets eaten by the CO2 emissions associated with building it? Cement is responsible for GHG and this project will take a lot of concrete. The construction equipment will be burning diesel (or maybe CNG or LNG).

If Sam is right and it induces more traffic, that would reduce or even wipe out the so-called green benefits, particularly if there is no rail component.

A Tunnel Under the Sound

I already have a headache over this proposal from last week to build a tunnel under Long Island Sound, connecting Syosset and Rye. Not that I think it's a terrbile idea. But it's easy to foresee an endless review process and an eternal stream of news stories featuring on the one hand many people hate it but on the other hand many people love it.

The Journal News story is here, Newsday here. Newsday's editorial states the obvious in saying that the proposal should be studied carefully (here), while the Journal News editorial (here) asks whether we should be undertaking big projects to make driving easier, which I think is the right question:

There are global questions to be answered as well. Is building a tunnel that will make driving more convenient really the way to reduce greenhouse gases? If the goal is to reduce smog and make travel connections between the mainland and Long Island easier, why not invest in mass transit and expand the railroads instead?

Let's Build a Bridge from the North Fork to Rhode Island

What would you think of a highway that runs from Riverhead east along the North Fork, crosses via bridge to Plum Island and then Fishers Island, and crosses again to Watch Hill, Rhode Island, with a spur from Fishers Island to New London? As David Collins, a columnist for the New London Day, says, "Wow."

The idea for a highway like that was alive, at least in the minds of some people, from 1938 until 1966, when smart people in Rhode Island said they weren't interested. It's a ludicrous idea in retrospect but really it's no more preposterous than the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (maybe less preposterous, in fact), the motto of which is "Follow the Gulls to the East Coast Scenic Shortcut."

My opinion is that in general we've had enough of these engineering marvels to last us a while. Collins's column talks about the old proposal for a bridge across the Race in the context of the new proposal for a tunnel under the western end of the Sound, which most definitely wouldn't be known as the East Coast Scenic Shortcut.

The Sound Tunnel in the Times

Peter Appelbome of the Times writes about the Long Island Sound tunnel today and, as you’d expect from the Times as compared to the local papers, raises good points and says it better:

The promoters say it would save time, and with up to 80,000 cars not stuck idling in gridlocked traffic, it would reduce fuel consumption by more than 24 million gallons a year and carbon dioxide emissions by up to 235 tons per day. It’s safe to assume that those numbers will not go unscrubbed. And there’s always the rejoinder that if the ride is that simple, maybe it will simply produce more cars and more pollution. …

The review process should ask that and more — nuts and bolts ones on the impact of the project on existing roads and highways and big picture ones about whether it’s needed (why not more ferries?), whether the price is right ($25 tolls?) and whether an all-auto project of this magnitude makes any sense. Don’t expect it to happen without a rail component as well….

Here are two other issues. The first is whether the civic technology for killing projects is so much more refined than the technology for building them that you can’t attempt a project like this anywhere near high-dollar neighborhoods in the Northeast. The second is whether the cooperation between city and suburb is so flaccid that there just isn’t the political will to get this done, whatever its merits.

If it’s a lousy idea, it’s hopeless. If it actually makes sense, economically and environmentally, the question is whether the handful of people who really matter in Manhattan, Albany, Nassau and White Plains think this is worth investing political capital on.

The early reaction will be worth watching. Either this dies a quick death or we’re at the beginning of a process that will make the seemingly endless rebuilding of the Tappan Zee Bridge look like an impulse purchase at the mall.

Hike to the Melting Glacier

Memories and anecdotes are unreliable as evidence. Nevertheless I've lived in this neighborhood for almost 20 years and can't recall a year in which we hadn't turned the heat on at least once by the first week of October. This year we haven't though. We haven't had a frost either and tomatoes are still ripening in the garden.

One of the great luxuries of my life is the trip to Switzerland we've taken in each of the last several Februarys, to ski in the Engadine. The overnight flight is brutal and by the time we get off, gather our luggage, buy train tickets, hop the commuter train to Zurich Hauptbahnhof, the regular train to Landquart and then finally the Rhaetia Bahn into the Engadine, I'm ready to sleep in my seat.

It's a good opportunity to do so because you get a few minutes to settle in and then the tracks duck into a long tunnel and travel through the dark for 15 minutes. On the other end, you're deep in the mountains, near Klosters. It's a scene of great beauty, Alpine meadows rising into mountains that get lost in the clouds, snow falling, skiers gliding past. We keep going to the end of the line, however, another 45 minutes on the train, and last year when we got there we skied in 50-degree weather for the whole week, the brown patches on the mountainsides growing noticeably larger as the days passed.

The glaciers are melting in Switzerland, of course. In Klosters they're trying to make the best of it, by promoting a mountain hike to view the effects of global warming:

Here, climate change serves as an occasion for a climate hike. The four-kilometer-long circular tour from the Silvretta hut high above Klosters to the glacier features 15 theme-posts proposing interesting tidbits on the glacier, the melting of the ice, alpinism, the local flora and fauna, and the influence of humans on the Alpine ecosystem.

The Global Warming Trail features 15 theme-posts describing the effects of climate change and giving suggestions as to how individuals may learn to respect the climate in their daily lives. Changes, which may already be observed, are also documented. In this manner, the consequences of climate change are both made visible and tangible. The circular route evolves on a simple trail set in a lovely landscape. The beauty of the trail is in itself a highlight. For further information www.silvrettahuette.ch

I-95 in New Haven: Put It Underground

The interstate highway system is one of those monumental mistakes that, if it weren't so massive, we would look at it rationally and dismantle it. In my book I quoted Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, who quoted Lewis Mumford, who wrote in the mid 1950s, "When the American people, through the Congress, voted a little while ago for a $26 billion highway program, the most charitable thing to assume is that they hadn't the faintest notion of what they were doing."

There are many reasons why the interstate highway system is bad, but one of the most obvious is that the highways were built in bad places. I'm thinking now in particular of New Haven, where I-95 is an enormous barrier between where people live and work (that is, in the city of New Haven) and their beautiful harbor. This story, from the Register, talks about state and city plans to somehow improve the highway and the local roads. My solution: make a priority list that says this -- cars and trucks are not the most important thing in the world; they are destructive but, for the time being, useful; it would be better for everyone if people could easily get to the harbor and the shoreline. So put vehicles in their proper place. Tear down the highway, and tunnel 95 under the city.