re: #304 Amory Blaine

There are more than a few people who think Christie’s decision to kill the ARC was an even bigger hit with gridlock in the region’s future, but I still think that was the right decision.

It was a poorly conceived plan that put a feckless agency in charge - NJ Transit - that flooded out its rail fleet during Sandy and for which no one was fired despite an emergency action plan that The Record requested in FOIA that indicated that the agency should move trains to higher ground. It would expand the NJ Transit fiefdom to be sure, but it doesn’t allow through-running trains and more efficient track usage. But since it was funded, people are saying that was better than nothing.

A badly designed program is a badly designed one, even if it is funded.

The Gateway project is better, and would vastly improve rail traffic flow into Manhattan with better connections across the NEC. That’s what’s needed - not expanding the NJ Transit fiefdom that would end up falling short on actual capacity.

That plus NJ Transit has shown itself incapable of controlling costs - the Secaucus transfer cost 5x as much as originally planned, and the agency spent more this past year to expand the platforms for the Super Bowl - something that should have been in place when built (and when originally built, there was no parking, so ridership was a fraction of the projections). It’s only now coming up to the projections that the agency originally held more than a decade after they thought they would.

I have few good things to say about NJ Transit in that regard (capital plans and rail/maintenance).