The Antiplanner » Tag » New Jersey

Tag Archives: New Jersey

Paying for New Jersey Transit

By | | Transportation
21 Comments

Delays to commuters and Amtrak passengers caused by a bridge malfunction are putting pressure on the Trump Administration to fund the $20 billion Gateway project, which would reconstruct bridges and tunnels connecting New York’s Penn Station with north New Jersey. Although New York and New Jersey politicians claim that this project is vital to the region, none of them are willing to ask their constituents to put up a single cent towards its completion.

Instead, they want the federal government to pay half the cost up front, and to put up the other half in a federally guaranteed, low-interest loan. Considering that neither New Jersey Transit nor Amtrak have the revenues needed to repay that loan, there’s a good chance the federal government would end up paying for it all.

Though this seems ridiculous, transit advocates have tried to make it appear that Trump is the bad guy here. In fact, the bad guys are the local politicos who want someone else to pay for their pork-barrel projects. Continue reading →

New Tunnels Unnecessary

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The Antiplanner spent part of yesterday in Washington DC stuck on a train while Metro was suffering yet another service disruption. I eventually got off and took a taxi, and soon after reaching daylight I received a call from a New Jersey reporter asking what I thought about a revised plan to build new tunnels under the Hudson River to supplement the North River Tunnels Amtrak and New Jersey Transit use today.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed the tunnel project in 2010 because he didn’t want New Jersey taxpayers to have to pay most of the cost including the inevitable cost overruns. Christie is perfectly happy to have the tunnel built so long as New York pays more of the cost. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants the federal government to pay the vast majority of the cost (it was already going to pay 51 percent) because, after all, this is interstate commerce. Now Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has a grand plan to create a quasi-governmental corporation to build it, as we didn’t already have enough of those. The two governors claim to love this plan even though Schumer still doesn’t say where the money is going to come from.

The justification for building the project is completely unrealistic. As the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, noted when Christie first cancelled the project, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit predicted that Midtown Manhattan would soon gain 500,000 new jobs. That as many jobs as are inside the Chicago Loop and far more than any other downtown in America, and there is little evidence that Manhattan job numbers are growing that fast (and little reason why taxpayers outside of New York or New Jersey should subsidize that growth).

Continue reading →