Four companies got a green light from the Port Authority Wednesday to draft proposals to replace the old Newark Liberty International Airport monorail with a “21st Century Air Train,” with a goal of starting construction in mid-2022.
Officials, including Gov. Phil Murphy, called it a significant step in honoring the authority’s October 2019 commitment to the governor after he called for a $2 billion replacement of the 25-year old monorail that connects the airport terminals and the Northeast Corridor rail line.
The four groups selected are consortiums of major construction companies, transit equipment builders and engineering companies.
“I am pleased that the Port Authority is moving forward with this critical development,” Murphy said in a statement. “This Request for Proposals is one of the initial milestones for this project to become a reality.”
The basic concept would replace the monorail with a new 2.5-mile elevated rail link that authority officials called a “critical component of the modernization” of Newark Liberty. It would serve the new Terminal One, which will replace Terminal A and a future replacement for Terminal B.
The four teams were qualified after a thorough technical review that included financial capability and past project experience, among other factors, officials said. The shortlisted candidates advance to the Request for Proposals phase.
The projected mid-2022 construction start is slightly off the schedule in February’s draft environmental assessment report that called for a first quarter 2022 construction start with testing of the new system in the first quarter of 2025. Under that schedule, AirTrain would go in service in the first quarter of 2026 and the old monorail would be demolished.
Port Authority officials said the process was delayed, partly due to financial pressures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The FAA has not actioned on the environmental report.
The authority started discussing the monorail’s replacement in 2015. Built for $354 million in 1996, it carried 33,000 people a day in 2019. The monorail is considered to be at the end of its useful life.
The four finalists invited to submit proposals are:
- Liberty AirTrain Partners, which consists of Skanska USA Civil Northeast Inc., SNC-Lavalin Project Services Inc., COWI North America, Inc. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, Inc.
- Liberty Integrated Connectors consisting of Dragados USA Inc., Halmar International LLC, Schiavone Construction Co. LLC, HDR Engineering, Inc., and BYD Transit Solutions LLC.
- Liberty Mobility Express, consisting of Kiewit Infrastructure Co., Tully Construction Co. Inc., AECOM USA Inc., and Alstom Bombardier Transportation USA Inc.
- Tutor Perini/Parsons JV, made up of Tutor-Perini Corporation, Parsons Construction Group, Inc., and DCCCA1 Inc. ( Doppelmayr)
A transit expert, who favors extending the existing PATH line to each airport terminal, said a new AirTrain still requires air travelers to change trains and questioned if it will handle future passenger volumes.
“The question still is, will the replacement move more than 4 or 5 million passengers per year?” said Robert W. Previdi, a former NYC Transit operations planner. “Can’t the Port Authority do better? Do they want to do better? May not. They might be too wedded to parking revenues and that is not good for our CO2 reduction goals.”
The RFP has a minimum baseline capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour per direction, among many other performance criteria that must be achieved, authority officials said.
A PATH extension from Newark Penn Station to the Airport has been proposed, which would stop outside the airport. The fate of that proposal maybe in limbo, along with others in the authority’s $32 billion capital plan due to revenue losses expected to hit $3 billion by March 2022 due to coronavirus travel declines.
Previdi questioned whether the authority’s plans to extend PATH into the airport will change due to a Jan. 12 Federal Aviation Administration policy change. That decision allows Passenger Facility Charges, which finance airport projects, to be used to build rail lines and stations to serve the airport, even if they’re part of a line that extends to stations off the airport property. Before, that funding could only finance a rail line that exclusively served an airport.
This project does not preclude the Port Authority’s ability to connect the Rail Link Station to the PATH system in the future, officials said.
A 2013 Regional Plan Association study of extending PATH to the airport said a further extension of PATH to the airport terminals would provide passengers with a one-seat ride, but will be more expensive than other options. But it also mentioned other world class airports offer a one-seat transit ride to terminals.
“The Regional Plan Association wanted a one-seat ride when they signed off on a PATH train extension,” Previdi said. “But even they admit what is being designed with the PATH train extension and replacement Air Train is still a two-seat ride.”
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Larry Higgs may be reached at [email protected].
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