I don’t know of a major bridge in the country that doesn’t have lanes shut down a good bit of the time.
I haven't driven across (or wasted hours trying to) the GW in more than 25 years, and I didn't know that the tolls had gotten that high. So a reasonable question to ask might be, "where is all that money going?" Construction on the bridge began in October 1927. Surely, it must be paid off by now.
We are never going to hear the end of this which is why it came out in the first place. NSA tracks all emails...The Dear Leader is feeling the heat from Robert Gates and Benghazi, problem solved! Time to play golf and relax. How do you feel about your pal Barry Soetoro now Tubby?
Does anyone west of the Delaware Water Gap really give a tinker’s? All this furor is merely further evidence of our NY-centric media. Forgiddaboutit.
1. The $40+ in toll costs along the Turnpike, I-95 and the GWB in New Jersey and New York City are paid if someone drives the entire length of the route between Delaware and New York City. So let's give New Jersey some credit here. New Jersey is always one of the worst states in the U.S. when it comes to Federal taxes paid compared to Federal expenditures in the state, and the state's elected officials have figured out a way to get some of that money back from people in other states.
2. People who live in New Jersey and commute to work in New York pay income taxes in New York, not New Jersey (technically they are taxed in both states, but they get a credit against their New Jersey taxes for the taxes they pay in New York, so they owe $0 to New Jersey). So these people use public resources in New Jersey, but don't actually pay very much for them. Tolls are one of the few public expenses that these residents actually pay.
3. Comparing the duration of a construction project in the 1930s to a project in 2014 is ridiculous. The biggest challenge with something like the I-287 project that the author mentions is that this was a major rehabilitation and upgrade of an existing roadway. This means that the project had to be done while the roadway was kept open for traffic -- which dictates specialized construction schedules and limits the duration of time when certain things can be done (try lowering beams into place on an overpass while traffic is moving underneath it, for example). I could shrink the 10-year construction timeline for the I-287 down to a year and a half, if you'd let me. But I would have to close one of the busiest stretches of highway in the NYC metropolitan area for 18 months.
Judge Pierro at her best:
Don’t forget the “Stimulus”; The next few years were filled with lane closures and traffic jams on highways all across the country. They all had signs bragging that the work was funded by the stimulus, so at least we knew why we were sitting there for hours. 20 miles of lane closures and maybe 50 feet of actual construction. If the people of Fort Lee can sue for this CF, then we should all be able to sue Peloser and Obummer for that mess.
Even emails and texts now flow to me in my car and when I'm sitting in traffic, I can get on top of that work flow as well. Bluetooth technology has gotten to the point where I can have these messages read to me and then verbally respond and have them converted to text and sent out.
Even when there's no immediate work to be done, I have over 100 commercial free stations (Sirius XM) to listen to or I can listen to my personal music collection, have books read to me, or discover new music through Pandora - all in my car.
It's at the point now where I actually get a little bummed when the traffic starts moving again and I have to shift my attention back to driving.
Meanwhile, in Hawaii, the residents surrounding Oprah’s Hawaiian Mansion are fit to be tied because BOTUS, (Beard of the United States), gets the traffic all bunged up every time she and her gal pals go out for ice cream.
It seems to me, that any politician that uses the power of government to punish those they disagree with, whether it be sicking the IRS on conservative groups, or punishing the citizens of a rival's city by shutting down bridge lanes, is not worthy of my support.