Cranbury Forum | Bulletin | Info Sharing

Post a reply

Username

Subject

Message body

Emoticons

Font colour: Font size:

Close Tags

[quote="Guest"][quote="Guest"]Maybe increase the ticket price to help pay for this project? Majority of the state residents don't travel to NYC daily.

This is not a federal funded project, right?[/quote]

Actually, 1/3rd is federally funded (keep in mind federally-backed Amtrak shares the current maxed out tunnels and needs this relief capacity too), 1/3rd is funded by New York state (which is in worse budget trouble than NJ but ponied up) and 1/3rd is NJ funded.

As for what's fair in terms of who funds it, consider a few things:

1) This is a project of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a combined agency that has also funded and run car tunnels, the various airports in the region, the ports, the World Trade Center, PATH (which only benefits downtown commuters, far fewer than NJT), etc.  So the NJ taxes of us train commuters have already contributed to projects like the World Trade Center, JFK, etc. that benefit substantially fewer NJ residents than the train tunnels to NYC;

2) In this area we are serviced by the Northeast Corridor line.  Ours is far and away the most crowded line in the entire NJT system and from Princeton Jct we pay some of the highest fees (almost $15 one-way, every day, twice a day).  Our line of the train is the only profitable part of the entire system – we subsidize the riders of all the other lines.  The line along Bergen County by comparison operates at 30% occupancy while rush-hour on our line is often standing room only.  Yet much of the money collected from NEC commuters has been used by the state to fund construction and ongoing operation of new stations that exclusively benefit the less traveled lines that can’t self-support themselves.  So our ticket prices are paying for 7 different stations in one greater Township where we are serviced by one, even though our 1 has more users than the seven stations combined.  Then let’s talk about the new Secaucus Transfer Station that is severely under-utilized and is, again, only useful to people on those other lines that already couldn’t pay for their own level of usage.  So, frankly, we’re already overdue for some of our ticket prices to actually go to projects that benefit the most users and not politically-motivated projects that benefit those communities with disproportionate political influence.  Besides, this tunnel benefits all the lines.

3) NJ residents who work in NY contribute billions a year in taxes to NJ.  Almost none of the things the state spends money on benefits all taxpayers.  But you would be hard pressed to find a larger group of taxpayers in this state that directly benefit from a single project as much as we would from this one.  If your criteria is that only those that directly benefit should pay for any given expense then that undermines basically everything the state expenses.  And on balance I guarantee you that if the NY commuters only had to contribute to the state for projects they benefit from they would save so much on taxes that we could 100% fund this and many other tunnels and still come out ahead.

Not to mention that the studies show not adding tunnels to deal with the train capacity will have a ripple effect on everyone and cost the state billions of dollars in lost productivity, taxes, jobs, etc. and make the auto tunnels and bridges, turnpike and other major roads and highways a nightmare for everyone.  The fact is why should be grateful NJ was only covering a 1/3rd of the cost given how critical it was to us regardless of how much of the bill we had to foot.

Assuming it’s not just some play on Christie’s part for deal leverage that is doesn’t let play out to long (which one can only hope), it may go down in history as the single worst decision by a NJ governor since Ben Franklin’s son declared himself a Loyalist.[/quote]

Options
HTML is ON
BBCode is ON
Smilies are ON

	Disable HTML in this post
	Disable BBCode in this post
	Disable Smilies in this post