
How Trump’s Hudson Tunnel Snit Threatens the National Economy - kenrose
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-hudson-river-amtrak-tunnel-american-economy
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cameldrv
This is a project that seems like it needs to be funded, but we wouldn’t even
be having this conversation if it didn’t cost over 10 billion dollars to dig a
1.3 mile tunnel. If it cost a billion, New York and New Jersey could just pay
for it themselves. To put this in perspective, this is $12,000 per daily
rider, just for the tunnel. If we can’t get infrastructure costs under control
in this country, we aren’t going to even be able to maintain what we’ve got.

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acjohnson55
Of course, Trump is just the latest in a long line of folks who have put
sectarian politics ahead of the long-term needs of the economy. As one of the
people who would be directly affected by any sort of outage in the tunnel, I'm
pretty well disgusted. The problem should have been solved long before Trump
ever took office. But as the article points out, we largely have Chris
Christie to blame.

If the Northeast Corridor fails, the amount of real wealth that would be
destroyed is staggering. It would almost certainly put me underwater on my
mortgage. I'd have to imagine default rates would skyrocket, railroad town
economies would go into recession. I'm at least lucky that I can do my job
just fine from home and that the PATH offers me an alternative route to the
office.

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api
While this is definitely a clusterfuck, I also think it's worthwhile to ask
why commuting to Manhattan doubles one's salary. Does the same work really
have 3X the value when performed across a river?

The super-concentration of wealth and opportunity in a tiny number of very
small locales is the real problem. I have a sense that it's gotten a lot worse
over the last 1-2 decades, though I'd be curious to see real numbers.

Even if we do build a new tunnel here it still remains a very small single
point of failure. If Manhattan is US Economy HQ then a hurricane, engineering
failure, or terrorist attack could destroy the economy of the entire country.
Wouldn't it be better and more "antifragile" to geographically diversify?

Why can't we do this? Why is this so hard?

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JumpCrisscross
> _why commuting to Manhattan doubles one 's salary_

"Mr Glaeser, a Harvard economist who grew up in Manhattan...calls cities 'our
species' greatest invention': proximity makes people more inventive, as bright
minds feed off one another; more productive, as scale gives rise to finer
degrees of specialisation; and kinder to the planet, as city-dwellers are more
likely to go by foot, bus or train than the car-slaves of suburbia and the
sticks."

TL; DR People become more productive in cities. That translates to higher
wages.

[https://www.economist.com/node/18111592](https://www.economist.com/node/18111592)

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api
There are dozens of large cities all across America and hundreds of smaller
ones.

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meri_dian
Being a NJ resident close to NYC this whole tunnel debacle has been
infuriating, but I can think of one positive that may come out of some
catastrophic tunnel failure.

If one of the tunnels does eventually collapse or otherwise become unusable,
companies may be forced to adopt a long term remote work policy for the huge
number of NJ->NYC commuters that would be impacted, at least until a new
tunnel is built or the existing ones are rehabilitated.

I want companies to be more flexibility in regards to working from home... I
wouldn't want to work from home every day but honestly doing it 2 or 3 times
per week would be glorious.

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acjohnson55
I'm guessing we'd see WeWork and other coworking options spring up all over
the Newark Penn Station area.

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OrganicMSG
Doing infrastructure piecemeal is surely the most expensive way of doing it.
It should require more than a whim for a politician to put a halt to an
infrastructure development or to screw with the brief half way through. Same
goes with stuff like NASA. Things that take longer than a political campaign
to plan and execute, should require a defined formal process to be followed in
order to screw about with them.

