Overview
The metropolitan tri-state region, which includes portions of southern New York, northern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut, is facing a major urban freight mobility challenge. The region’s economic prosperity is a key driver of the U.S. economy and fuels a tremendous demand for goods movement.
For the past fifty years, however, the freight transportation system east of the Hudson River has not kept pace with this growth in goods movement. While the East-of-Hudson region has invested heavily in improved public transportation and passenger roadway facilities, the rail freight system has not kept pace.
Instead, the concentration of port, rail and air freight facilities needed to sustain the region’s economic link to the rest of the world has developed largely in the West-of-Hudson region; the only direct connection from this freight hub to the heavily populated region east of the Hudson River is by truck.
The result is a freight transportation system that:
- Relies on trucks to move the overwhelming majority of goods destined for the region;
- Suffers from chronic congestion throughout most of the day;
- Imposes additional costs and unreliability on regional businesses and consumers;
- Causes significant detrimental impacts to local communities in the form of truck trips diverted through local streets; and
- Is potentially vulnerable to major disruption, provides limited ability to avoid major disruptions, and provides limited redundancy at a few key links such as the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges, which together handle 30,000 truck crossings each day.
Forecasts indicate that the demand for goods in the metropolitan region will grow roughly 70 percent by 2025. Without a significant improvement in the current freight system, this rapid growth will overwhelm current roadway capacity and degrade the region’s economic competitiveness and quality of life. The freight system needs to be substantially upgraded to prevent congestion from constraining the region’s economic growth.
n |
