Tristate Transit Truths

From its ivory tower, the Regional Plan Association has laid out a new scheme to get commuters to the city from Jersey. It’s a wonder it didn’t call for beaming folks straight to their work sites.

The report makes some fair points: It rightly notes that the metro area’s transit network wasn’t built to handle the 1.6 million people who trek to the city daily.

It cites the “frequent service failures” of the Amtrak-NJ Transit cross-river tunnel, Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And it highlights transit’s importance to the tristate economy.

Most important, the report also offers a useful reminder of the need to make construction of new rail tunnels the top priority: “The entire Northeast Corridor relies” on the link to Penn Station, yet if the existing tubes fail before replacements are built, this year’s Summer of Hell for commuters will seem “mild” by comparison.

RPA’s dreamers, free from worries over costs, also wring their hands over transit pitfalls (e.g., inadequate rail service between suburbs) that seem like nonstarters, given all the higher priorities.

And they project travel patterns — the number of commutes to the city could rise 38 percent by 2040, they say — that at least partly depend on what happens to transit: Stretch the rail line from Jersey to Queens, as they suggest, and, yes, you might see more riders. But if not, ridership won’t grow as much — and strain “capacity.”

Other RPA ideas, like building a new bus station at the Javits Center, seem distracting. Officials need to focus on one thing: getting the Hudson rail tunnel built. Before disaster strikes.