Actually Christie cancelled a commuter rail tunnel project early during the Lesser Depression that had been pushed by 3 or 4 different New Jersey administrations -both parties.
More generally, I’m not convinced that New Jersey residents are particularly blase about corruption so much as their electronic media sources tend to cover New York politics in the North and Philadelphia politics in the south. So what goes on in the capital (Trenton) is pretty remote. The real problem with impeachment is that this story so far doesn’t involve high crimes, just sociopathic staff members, low scale criminal activity and piss-poor judgment. Also there’s a secret to surviving scandal which I’ll share with you: don’t resign.
Now back to the tedium:
You need to get a grip doorhinge. Here’s the original post:
Anyone familiar with google could find this WSJ article: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304477704579254012674389146
The headline substantiates the point. (“Governors Spoke Privately About Bridge Controversy: Chris Christie Complained to Andrew Cuomo That His Appointee Was Pressing Too Hard for Answers”) The article is behind a paywall, but excerpts are reproduced all over the internet. Pointing fingers and calling people liars in response to facts that you can’t emotionally handle isn’t very good form and is unworthy of a board dedicated to fighting ignorance. Unsubstantiated assertions that conflict with established fights don’t fly here.
Correction, it was you who made the unsubstantiated assertion. Once again, I never addressed the uncited reference to the WSJ article or the WSJ article. Since you’re aware that pointing fingers and calling people liars don’t fly here, perhaps you should take your own advice. Or not.
*And now for a little routine sidewalk sweeping.
Quote:
Originally Posted by doorhinge View Post
Hahahaha. Who accused the WSJ of lying? You?
Um, no that would be you. Recall:
Quote:
Originally Posted by doorhinge View Post
Or an outright lie made up by someone writing for the daily kos.
What’s one more unverified rumor at this point in time?
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacCat View Post
They were quoting the Wall Street Journal.
doorhinge’s positions appear to shift with the prevailing winds: only his lack of substantiation remains constant.
Now, perhaps, you can show me where I accused the WSJ of lying?
You posted: “Or an outright lie made up by someone writing for the daily kos.”
It was easily and immediately pointed out that the information was being reposted from the WSJ. Yes, we get you accused the Kos of lying, *not *the WSJ. Doesn’t make you right, still wrong.
I wonder how many Republicans would be going on about how this isn’t a big deal at all if it was a republican man who had died, instead of a woman. I mean, I understand that she likely wouldn’t have been saved, but it shows a complete and total callous disregard for the lives of others on part of the right wing.
Here is a report on an interesting bit of speculation about a link to a billion dollar Fort Lee redevelopment project - Hudson Lights - that would depend heavily on the 3 traffic lanes that were closed.
Thank you for posting this link. It’s certainly a interesting theory. Steve Kornacki has some unique insights into NJ politics.
Why would Christie have any interest in screwing up such a big development project? The smart thing to do is take credit for it. My administration’s economic policies are working. We’re revitalizing Ft Lee! Politicians love taking credit for successful projects.
I guess we’ll learn more as the investigations continue.
What are the next idiotic studies you’d like to see conducted by the Institute For Study Of The Amazingly Obvious?
“An Examination of Whether Decapitation Affects Life Expectancy”
“Sudden Complete Demolition Of The Empire State Building And Possible Traffic Backups on 34th Street”
“Setting Yourself On Fire: Does It Hurt?”
Redundancy is always needed in any engineering plan. A closed bridge should be an annoyance and not a catastrophe. Traffic should still move by alternate routes. That wasn’t the case here. The news indicated it brought everything to a standstill and had traffic backed up several blocks into Ft Lee.
The lane closings happened and may of been illegal. But the effects on traffic should be studied.
That’s all kinds of ridiculous. First of all, bridges are horribly expensive and if you can take one out of commission without significant effects on traffic then you shouldn’t have spent the hundreds of millions of dollars building it in the first place. Second, in this case the bridge wasn’t closed, but rather the access lanes from Fort Lee to the bridge were reduced from 3 to 1, without any notice or explanation. I don’t know the geography in question, but in my own city I can think of several places where cutting 3 lanes to 1 would cause complete gridlock over significant chunks of the city if it were to happen without notice, whereas with appropriate preparation and announcement the effect would be annoying but not catastrophic. Third, if you want to study the effects of things like this, you hire a traffic consultancy firm and they’ll do it all in a computer model and provide you with surprisingly accurate outcomes without delaying a single motorist.
There’s some truth to what you say. Lanes on the bridge could be closed by some emergency or they might need to close lanes for repairs.
But if they were doing this as a legitimate study, they’d have to prepare more than the reports say they did. They don’t appear to have had people present to measure the number of cars crossing the bridge and their speeds. Nor did they have people measuring the traffic in nearby neighbourhoods and at other crossings to see how much they were effected. And they didn’t have plans for rerouting traffic ready so they could test them to see which worked best.
So the only thing they seemed to have learned from this study was that closing down two lanes really screws up traffic. Which I think everyone knew in advance.
The trouble is, crossing the Hudson River is so expensive that you really can’t afford to have more bridges than you need. Redundancy is desirable but not always possible. Take the crown jewel of my own state, the Mackinac Bridge. If it went down, the alternative is to drive all the way around Lake Michigan. No getting around it, unless you build a second bridge.
I’m quite skeptical of the traffic study story. For one thing, they already have scads of data on how the bridge is used. If there aren’t recent traffic counts on each ramp they can always get them. If they want to make a thorough study and look at alternative lane uses, they’d need something a wee bit more technical than “hey, Jim Bob, let’s shut down some lanes and see what happens!” I sincerely doubt the Port Authority has traffic engineers on staff, they’d have to hire it out. Which would mean a public bidding process and the winning bidder would have to spell out what he intended to do, and there’d be people from FHWA and both state DOTs looking over everyone’s shoulder at every turn. It’s much more likely that the “study” was concocted after the fact.
What can they learn? That unannounced closures of the approach lanes in Fort Lee cause massive traffic jams. But they already knew that. There are emails from officials warning of this.
Why would temporary lane-closures hurt a development project that hasn’t even broken ground yet? There wasn’t any reason for developers to believe this would be a regular occurrence. And why would Christie want to sabotage a major development project in his own State?
I don’t think I’ve yet heard an explanation for the scandal that actually makes sense.
