While the media is fast consigning Christie's Bridgegate to the Memory Hole, the clock is ticking on aging infrastructure. Atrios picked up on an article in This Week by Ryan Cooper: This upcoming traffic apocalypse will be the end of Chris Christie In a sane world, it would end fiscal austerity too...
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The New York, New Jersey, New England urban megaplex has a lot of critical infrastructure that's aging and desperately in need of repair/replacement. Thanks to Chris Christie, hundreds of thousands of people could have their faces rubbed in that fact on a daily basis Real Soon Now. As Cooper reports:
So, what is happening? Let's wind the tape back to 2010. The Recovery Act was in full swing, and all manner of stuff was being built across the country with stimulus money. The biggest project of all was called Access to the Region's Core, a plan for a desperately needed new tunnel under the Hudson River and a new train station in Manhattan. There are only two other tunnels under the Hudson, both single-track and over 100 years old, both stuffed to capacity during rush hour, with demand only projected to grow.
Christie canceled the project, claiming costs were skyrocketing and NJ would end up getting stuck with the bill - claims that were lies. Meanwhile Christie grabbed the money freed up to play games with the state budget elsewhere. Meanwhile, Superstorm Sandy flooded the century old rail tunnels under the Hudson - and the damage from the salt water is speeding the day they'll have to be shut down for repairs.
In a blackly comedic coincidence, the canceled ARC tunnel would have come online in 2018, maybe just barely in time to take up the slack from one of the old ones being closed. Now those 300,000 or so displaced commuters are going to have to swim across the Hudson.
Anyway, according to the Times, Amtrak is going to work on the tunnels under the East River first, with no firm plans as to when they're going to have to shut down the Hudson tunnels. They have a plan for another tunnel called the Gateway, but no way to pay for it as of yet.
(For those who want a fuller exploration of the tunnel situation and how potentially dire it is, back in May I wrote up
Forget Christie and Bridgegate - Christie and the Tunnels Are an Even Bigger Mess.)
The better of several solutions out there would be the Gateway Project. Not only would it build new tunnels under the Hudson, it would address other long standing transportation bottlenecks in the region. As Cooper notes in his article, the biggest problem is a Congress dominated by austerity fanatics.
...The prospects for action at the federal level are nearly hopeless, but it's worth noting that if they wanted to, Congress could solve this problem — just by appropriating some money for a new tunnel. Probably the best chance of that will be after the old tunnels are shut down and there's a massive traffic jam from Newark to Long Island.
But in any case, Christie's boneheaded posturing is at least yet another demonstration of the failure of austerity. Turns out not spending money doesn't make crippling infrastructure needs disappear. It just postpones the day of reckoning, and raises the chances of expensive catastrophic failure.
emphasis added
Chris Christie is the poster child for everything that's wrong with the Republican Party these days. From Ebola to Iraq, from Climate Change to Inequality - the Republican Party isn't the solution to our problems; it IS the problem.
This November, vote as though your life depends on it - because it does.