In today's document dump, there are a series of PowerPoint slides that appear to be the preliminary findings from a 'legitimate' traffic study. You can find them in several places, but the most complete set I have seen so far is in Exhibit E, starting on p168.
The rationale for the study was to increase total volume of traffic over the bridge by throttling inflows from local roads in Ft. Lee.
There is a slide (ExE, p171) that shows mainline flow (I-95) increasing by 2114 cars/hour and local Ft. Lee flow decreasing by 1704 cars/hour. In theory, that would mean that the experiment was a success. Throttling Ft. Lee would increase total bridge flow by almost 400 cars per hour. There is a caveat that the gain may not have been totally real, since local police quickly started to reroute local traffic to other access points that would have been counted in the mainline flow.
Think about that ... then go over the fold.
Bridget Kelly said ... "time for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee".
Somewhere, someone (presumably there really is a consultant somewhere who is keeping their head down) came up with the idea that reprioritizing access to the bridge would get some marginal total flow increase.
I can see that. It's possible that the merging of local (slow) traffic with faster main flow traffic caused turbulence that choked some capacity. Or it might be totally bogus. Only a physical test would prove it one way or the other.
As it happens, the reported results show that the benefit are probably pretty limited.
However, if the experiment showed any gain, it might provide a fig leaf to cover making the change permanent.
Who would benefit? Presumably commuting residents in areas further instate than Ft. Lee. Maybe commuters in areas that voted more reliably Republican? Plus I-95 long-haul users passing through, but why would NJ care about them?
Who would lose? The residents of the local communities whose property values were directly linked to their easy access to NYC. Residents who happened to be voting Democrat.
My take is that they weren't conducting a short-term punitive strike on Ft. Lee or Dem voters. They were looking for a way to hit them hard and forever.
When Kelly said "time for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee", she mean't it.
Update:
Look at pages 688 to 700 of Exhibit A. There is a 13 page memo, heavily hand-edited, that seems to be a justification (by Wildstein ... it is in his subpoened materials?) for the lane closure experiment.
To me, the most interesting parts are the paragraphs that were stroked out. They lay out the history of the Ft. Lee special lanes. According to the (possibly self-serving) memo, the lanes were installed because of lobbying by previous and longtime Democratic Ft. Lee mayor Jack Alter. He died in office in 2007 and Democrat Sokolich replaced him.
The way the memo writes the history, it is clear that the writer thinks Alter got a special deal for his town ... and the writer is clearly biased to reverse that.
So it was political. One Democratic NJ town had years ago gotten a useful perk and the Republican administration were eager to see it taken away.
If that memo is Wildstein's or has his edits, the political animus is fully evident.