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.
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.