Posted on 01/18/2021 5:08:37 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
TRENTON – Governor Phil Murphy, alongside Department of Transportation Commissioner and NJ TRANSIT Board Chair Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti, NJ TRANSIT President & CEO Kevin Corbett, U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, Congressman Tom Malinowski, and Amtrak Board Chair Tony Coscia, today celebrated the finalization of the Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to construct a new Portal North Bridge. NJ TRANSIT CEO and President Kevin Corbett executed the agreement with the FTA today, which will provide $766.5 million dollars in federal funding for the Portal North Bridge.
The new Portal North Bridge, a $1.8 billion project, is fully designed and fully permitted, having received a Record-of-Decision from the Federal Railroad Administration in 2013, which was adopted by the FTA in August 2017. NJ TRANSIT also announced that it has released an Invitation for Bid (IFB) on the project to build a new higher, fixed span across the Hackensack River in Kearny. The current 110-year old Portal Bridge has long been a source of major service disruptions for NJ TRANSIT and Amtrak customers traveling on the Northeast Corridor.
“After years of advocacy from my Administration, federal and state transportation leaders, and elected officials up and down our impacted rail lines, we are ready to put our capital to work to create a modern, reliable, and safe span that will carry our economy and our people forward for the next 100 years,” said Governor Murphy. “With construction of a new bridge, we’ll eliminate one of the most-frustrating choke-points in the entire Northeast Corridor, improving commutes for hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans. I look forward to working alongside President-elect Biden and his team to ensure the full Gateway Program is delivered, including new tunnels under the Hudson River.”
(Excerpt) Read more at insidernj.com ...
The comments section of the article is closed. I guess other people weren't being too nice to him, either.
Phil “Lousy Batman Villain” Murphy channels Willie Green, I guess.
PING!
Would building this bridge just cause more Glow Bull warming? Think of the all the fuel that will need to be burned to build this bridge. All the pollution, how could he hate the planet like this? He is going to kill us all!
/s We need to make our enemy live up to their own rules
That’s right. And with Butt-Head about to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline, we must make Warren Buffet live up to those rules, too! Kill all oil trains!
Now that no one is commuting into NYC anymore, let’s build a new bridge. /sarc
“Executing the Full Funding Grant Agreement marks a key milestone in our efforts to replace this critical yet unreliable 110-year-old bridge, and finally give our customers the reliability they deserve as they commute to and from Penn Station New York,” said NJ TRANSIT President & CEO Kevin S. Corbett. “
*****
Ridiculous comment since most commuters are working from home.
There are a lot of commuters working from home, but delays at the Lincoln and GW every day suggest that traffic is back to "summer normal". I work about 6 miles from the city and traffic is back to normal for when school is out.
That particular bridge however carries every train from the west that goes into Penn Station(the NY Penn, not the NJ Penn). It needs replaced. It needed to be replaced 40 years ago.
Great pitch for election donations from the engineering firms and civil construction firms and the unions representing their workers.
Meanwhile, commuting has mostly ceased, shattering the projections for public transit passengers for no one knows how long.
I read about that bridge before. As I implied up top, workers sometimes literally have to bang the bridge’s swivel span back into place with sledgehammers after a ship passes through. Otherwise, the next commuter train would derail over the Hackensack River.
Delays at the Lincoln Tunnel are back to “normal” because the roads are filled with people who will probably never get on a bus or train again no matter how bad the traffic gets.
Murphy is blowing smoke and unicorn farts out his @ss on this one. Most of the projects in the Gateway Program he references are an enormous waste of money. The Portal Bridge replacement is one of the few that makes any sense to build, and even that is only because it’s a shared Amtrak-NJ Transit undertaking.
New Jersey doesn’t need two new tunnels under the Hudson River. They just need to rehabilitate the ones that are there now. If they had shut them down for major rehab work one at a time when this COVID fiasco started last March, they could probably get the job done long before ridership levels on those trains ever came close to what they were before 2020.
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