How Trump’s Hudson Tunnel Snit Threatens the National Economy | Hacker News Reader

How Trump’s Hudson Tunnel Snit Threatens the National Economy

bloomberg.com

32 pointskenrose13 comments

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.

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.

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?

> 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

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

That graph was a little surprising as well, but I'm assuming that it's taking the average of all-NJ wages instead of the NJ-NY metropolitan area. Furthermore, it's comparing to Manhattan and not NYC. So a bit of apples to oranges when comparing an entire state (including gems like Camden) to the richest borough of the richest city in the country.

Moving a business to New Jersey would mean a lot of people would have longer commutes from the other side of the city, through the same tunnels. There's no perfect location; it's all tradeoffs.

If you don't have to do your work in person, at a specific location with your hands and feet, you can work remotely.

If you're a business, and demand your worker be there in person, pay up.

> If you're a business, and demand your worker be there in person, pay up

Hence why wages are 3x higher on one side of the river versus the other.

> Hence why wages are 3x higher on one side of the river versus the other.

Not the workers. Taxes for infrastructure. Although, I suppose you can extract that out of wages through transport fees.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com