Dan's Papers - December 7, 2007

A man named Vincent Polimeni has proposed a 16-mile long tunnel under Long Island Sound to open Long Island traffic patterns in a vertical direction, as he put it. He means north and south rather than east to west, of course, and his idea is that with a new north to south dimension, traffic tie-ups will be at an end and Long Islanders can once again be on their way from point A to point B without delays.

Polimeni has engineering drawings of his tunnel plans. They show three 55-foot diameter tunnels, side by side. Two of them are for the traffic, a total of six lanes with three northbound and three southbound, and then the third tunnel is for maintenance, support and other services for the other two. The ride will cost $25 each way, but will reduce what is now at least an hour and a half commute to fifteen minutes. The tunnel will attract 80,000 cars a day. And it will cost $10 billion to build, the money coming from private sources.

$10 billion is a lot of money for any project and some say that Mr. Polimeni is not the man to build it. He recently sold his Islandia Shopping Center for $125 million. But that's about the limit of his resources, of which anyone is aware. So for him to propose a project estimated at $10 billion is tantamount to a man with $10,000 proposing a project costing $1 million. From a money perspective, it's a start. But the vast majority of the funding has to come from somebody else.

Maybe a tunnel is a good idea. I certainly don't know. But what I can tell you is it will draw a whole lot of opposition. The last time there was a cross-sound project like this, it was put forward by Robert Moses and was in the form of a 16-mile long bridge linking Port Jefferson with Bridgeport, Connecticut.

And even the great Robert Moses could not get such a project anywhere. Those here on Long Island feared there would be hordes of tourists from Connecticut jamming the roads on Long Island. While those in Connecticut feared there would be hordes of tourists from Long Island jamming the roads in Connecticut. Long Islanders wanted all the lanes to be northbound so they could ease traffic and get to the mainland. Connecticutters wanted all the lanes southbound so they could ease traffic and get to the Island.

If you ever wanted proof of what a provincial group of people we are, it was the instinctive response of dislike of foreigners that this proposal brought out on both sides. The great Robert Moses dropped the project like it was a hot potato and ran the other way. And that was the end of it.

Interestingly, this new project crossing Long Island Sound will not create this same xenophobia. It's planned to link Syosset and Rye. Syosset is on Long Island. And Rye is in Westchester. But Westchester, like Long Island, is part of New York. Who could object to a bunch of New York State residents driving through a tunnel to see another part of New York State? Nobody. We're all New Yorkers.

And you thought you were a sophisticate. Just look at what suspicion and distrust lurks beneath the surface. Suspicion and distrust of Connecticutters. But if it's New Yorkers, it's a different story.

Will a tunnel in the 21st century work? Well, on the Connecticut side, the tunnel will link up with Interstate 95, so that makes sense. But here on the Long Island side, the tunnel will not link up with anything of any great consequence. Polimeni is thinking to link it up with Route 135 and the Jericho Turnpike. That won't do at all. There will be a need for new superhighways here.

To give you a scale of this tunnel, consider that the Queens-Midtown Tunnel is 1.2 miles long, the English Channel Tunnel is 31 miles long, and there's a road tunnel in Japan that is 58 miles long. So, 16 miles under Long Island Sound is not such a big deal.

But you will need $10 billion to build it, though at 80,000 cars and trucks a day paying $25 each way, you'll get it all paid back in ten years.