The Northeast Corridor's looming infrastructure nightmare

Bloomberg highlights the potential impact, by the numbers:

• "[T]he trans-Hudson bridges and tunnels available to cars already have punishing rush-hour delays. Imagine the backups, road rage, and pollution if tens of thousands of additional commuters had to use them. Common Good, a bipartisan government-reform organization, estimates that 50,000 more automobiles crossing the Hudson each day would sap productivity by $2.3 billion per year."
• "The Northeast Corridor Commission, a panel created by Congress in 2008, projects that the U.S. economy would lose $100 million per day—$36.5 billion a year—if the entire train route from Boston to Washington ever shut down."

What they're saying: "There will come a time when the reliability of the tunnels starts to decay. The curve, once it starts, may be fairly sharp. We’ll just have to see. Nobody knows. This is a great science experiment," said Charles “Wick” Moorman, Amtrak co-CEO.

What's next: New York is building a new entrance hall slated for a 2020 opening for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad trains next door. Although that'll help lessen the time spent in Penn Station's subterranean confines, it won't do anything to fix the potential infrastructure nightmare. The Trump administration reneged on an Obama-era agreement between the federal government and New York authorities to split tunnel refurbishment costs, calling the issue "a local project where 9 out of 10 passengers are local transit riders."