Gateway Tunnel Gets $77 Million Lifeline, But Penn Station Trains Still Stalled

The halting of the Gateway tunnel project beneath the Hudson exposes the fragile machinery behind New York’s largest infrastructure ambitions—and the outsized costs of political brinkmanship.

On a bitter February morning, silence reigns over the yawning pit in Manhattan where, in theory, a bustling army of workers would be advancing the $16 billion Gateway tunnel project. Instead, restless commuters and idle construction crews bear witness to a spectacle more familiar than novel: a grand public work stymied by stop-start federal funding and political horse-trading. Though the U.S. Department of Transportation dispatched another $77 million—following a federal judge’s order to unfreeze $205 million in allocations—shovels remain untouched.

Planned as a replacement for the 113-year-old rail tubes that carry Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains beneath the Hudson River, the Gateway tunnel promises to alleviate one of the country’s worst transit bottlenecks. Every weekday, 200,000 passengers depend on the current, ailing tubes to reach Manhattan. Yet despite renewed flows of Washington cash, the Gateway Development Commission says it cannot yet restart construction after exhausting a vital line of credit during the project’s hiatus.

The latest round of negotiations underscores a melancholy fact: for all New York’s brash pride in engineering wonders past, its present ability to build anything monumental now hinges as much on federal largesse as local grit. President Donald Trump’s administration, having frozen funding in October and labelled Gateway a “future boondoggle”, persists in lambasting the tunnel as a “financially catastrophic” venture in need of “proper planning”. Onlookers could be forgiven for wondering if, in America’s political calculus, obstructionism is both method and outcome.

For New Yorkers, the costs are nowhere abstract. Each interruption throws more than a thousand laborers off the job and threatens daily routines for nearly a quarter-million New Jersey-bound commuters. Gary LaBarbera of the New York State Building and Construction Trades Council notes the perverse pattern: “You can’t start a project, stop a project, start a project, stop a project,” he told a rally, gesturing at the moribund diggers and idled hard hats. “You need certainty. You need continuity.”

The malaise has macroeconomic overtones. Penn Station is the lifeblood of the region’s commuter economy, funnelling workers into Midtown’s offices and bolstering Manhattan’s fragile post-pandemic rebound. Repeated delays may yet prove ruinous if a critical tunnel collapse or protracted outage were to occur. Already, rail agencies warn of cascading delays, degraded reliability, and the ever-looming spectre of New York’s employers seeking greener (and more accessible) pastures.

Local leaders are not reticent. Governor Kathy Hochul, exasperated, recounts four unreturned calls to President Trump, pleading for more predictable fund releases. New Jersey’s Governor Mikie Sherrill, referencing the thousand construction workers sidelined by the stoppage, blames executive caprice for project “chaos” and mounting costs. That cost, incidentally, has crept ever upward, putting familiar American concerns on sharp display. Europe, for instance, manages to build much-needed tunnels at less than half the price per mile.

Globally, even cities with robust populist opposition to spending manage to sheath their infrastructure works in less discord. Paris did not halt its Métro extensions when governments changed hands; Tokyo’s bullet trains ignored mayoral elections. In the U.S., however, the caprice of Washington often trumps—or at least delays—shovel strikes on the Hudson’s banks. Few advanced countries permit a single president or judge to wield such influence over a transport artery serving ten million people.

Beneath Manhattan, a metaphor for American dysfunction

The acrimony now surrounding Gateway is not strictly about rails or budgets—it reflects deeper fissures in American governance. The United States is rife with grand infrastructure ambitions shackled by legal squabbles and partisan posturing. Each fresh tunnel or bridge risks becoming another tableau in the nation’s expanding gallery of boondoggles—more celebrated for what might have been than for timely completion.

In New York, construction industry leaders are deservedly wary. The loss of “continuity”, as Mr LaBarbera warns, portends not only higher costs—every delay is paid for, dearly—but saps whatever confidence remains among skilled tradespeople that public works are worth the trouble. Meanwhile, region-wide uncertainty ripples outward: developers, businesses, and property owners must factor in the possibility that transit assets will remain antiquated–or worse, break irrevocably.

The broader economic implications are daunting. New York’s financial standing, already buffeted by pandemic-induced deficits and slow-going office returns, faces further uncertainty. Any sustained disruption to cross-Hudson transit flows would send ripples through the property market and threaten the city’s place atop America’s business hierarchy. National reputation is at stake, too: it is hard to tout American renewal when its largest metropolis cannot build a tunnel with funds in hand.

Comparison with peer democracies is not flattering. Infrastructure research firm Oxford Global Projects finds New York’s tunnel costs routinely rank among the highest, surpassed only by a handful of petrostates. Political infighting, arcane procurement, and litigation conspire to make the city’s headline numbers look ever more bloated. Meanwhile, China drives tunnels beneath the Yangtze with startling speed, unfettered by New York’s peculiar brand of democratic gridlock.

It is tempting to lay the blame at the feet of one presidential administration, or to invoke the spectre of corruption and inefficiency. The reality is less tidy: New York’s tunnel saga is the logical endgame of a system where bold aspirations are yoked to uncertain patronage, and no single level of government feels obliged to see the job through to its end. In such a system, it is little surprise that progress is measured in fits, starts, and, for now, idleness.

Bringing Gateway online will ultimately require something in punishingly short supply: durable political consensus. Until then, the only certainty beneath the Hudson is uncertainty itself. New Yorkers, who have long claimed grit as their birthright, might wonder when the machinery of government will discover its own. ■