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Christie: An Anti-Transit Governor?

Addressing a joint session of the state legislature yesterday morning, Governor Christie announced that he will cut state funding to NJ Transit by $33 million as part of an effort to close the state’s $2 billion budget deficit. He charged the agency with “patronage hiring” and suggested that it look to service cuts and fare increases to make up the difference. The cut comes on top of a $62 million cut enacted last year, and Christie’s transportation transition team has warned that the agency will face a $200 million budget gap in the next fiscal year.

It’s increasingly looking like we have an anti-transit governor,” Tri-State Transportation Campaign executive director Kate Slevin told the Associated Press in response. Christie ruled out increasing the state gas tax earlier this year.

TSTC and a broad coalition of business, labor, environmental, and planning groups immediately called on Governor Christie to reconsider his proposal, saying that transit fare increases and service cuts would hurt the state’s economy and environment, and that commuters will face drastically higher fares, longer waits at stations, more congestion on roadways, and worsened air pollution.

“Raising fees for transit use, instead of raising fees for road use, will dampen the years of progress that the state has made increasing transit ridership, focusing growth and redevelopment near transit stations and working to get more cars off the road,” said Peter Kasabach, executive director of NJ Future. NJ Transit ridership has increased by almost 50% over the past decade, far outpacing the increase in driving.

State Assembly Transportation Chair John Wisniewski said his committee would review the budget cuts, saying that any resulting fare hikes would represent “increasing taxes on working families.”

Opportunities to Respond

Governor Christie is sending the wrong message for the state’s transportation priorities by penalizing transit riders while refusing to consider an increase in the gas tax or other driver user fees. Luckily, the public has the opportunity to speak out:

  • Wednesday, February 17 – 10am in the State House Annex,  Committee Room 11. The Assembly Budget Committee will be taking testimony on any of the cuts in Governor Christie’s proposal.
  • Wednesday, February 17 – NJ Transit Board meeting at 2pm at NJTransit Headquarters, 1 Penn Plaza East, Newark NJ.
  • Thursday, February 18 – 10am in the State House Annex,  Committee Room 11. The Assembly Transportation Committee will hold a hearing specifically on the transit cuts.

By law, NJ Transit must also hold public hearings before implementing any fare increases or service cuts that result from the slashes to state aid. MTR will publish the dates and time of those hearings after they are announced.

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James
James
14 years ago

Good for Christie – NJ Transit is a mess internally, and only once in the past ten years did they not raise fares for their budget. The whole thing is one big union patronage shop and it’s pretty difficult, if not impossible, to get fired for doing a crappy job there. Strike the fear of God into them and maybe they’ll actually start squeezing out the unions and paying their employees market rates and forcing them to contribute to their healthcare and pension plans just like everyone else. We can’t afford to subsidize their opulent benefits packages any more.

Adam
Adam
14 years ago

James, they already do that. I heard conductors have to buy into their own healthcare plans and have 401K style retirement plans. Christie would be a hypocrite for campaigning against raising the gas tax but advocating for fare hikes and service cuts for transit riders. The gas tax does not cover all of the highway costs; I do not use the highways yet I have to pay $300 a year to subsidize them (conservatives, who whine about having to subsidize transit they don’t use have no problem with me doing this). I wrote a nasty letter to Christie about this and I am anticipating a response.

Bill
Bill
14 years ago

The Rail employees have been paying for healthcare for awhile. They do not have a pension plan and are behind all other railroads in the region in pay. I don’t know where Christie thinks the great benifits contracts are.

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James
14 years ago

@Adam, increasing the gas tax would be a ridiculously stupid idea. Any idiot who’s had even a small semblance of economics in their education would tell you that you don’t raise taxes – anywhere, for any purpose – in a recession. The workforce privitization / de-unionization would be only ONE of the big things NJ Transit could do to reduce costs. Focusing train service only on rush hours and cutting service at all other times would be a great idea. Also, reducing fares would be another great idea (look at iTunes – raising prices from .99 to 1.29 on songs basically cut their income and people stopped buying from them). If you take the fare down, for example from 4.00 for one way to NYC from Newark Penn, Newark Broad, or any other station one hop (Secaucus) away from NYC, to 2.00, you’ll see ridership increase and the coffers will start to be flush with cash again.

Cutting other services would help too: Newark’s City Subway can be cut down to hourly trips after 9 PM or completely shut down after that point. Likewise with bus services – they don’t need to run all the time. If you have a bus that’s full all the time, great. If you don’t, cut it from the schedule. Also, if you have a line that’s an extremely limited run (the 43 comes to mind here – it’s only run three or four times a day on weekdays and weekends), why not squeeze it into another line, like making it a branch of the 40 or 30? Both lines run nearly parallel service and could easily be modified to run the same stops or provide service to the same stops as the 43. That’s only one of the many examples one could see in a review of NJ Transit’s bus and train services.

Oh and let’s try this one on for size: completely spin off NJ Transit bus service and make it its own company, in competition with DeCamp and CoachUSA. NJ Transit could then focus all of its efforts on NJ’s crappy rail service, rebuilding and expanding it in the future once the finances are in order. I guarantee, you eliminate subsidized bus service in New Jersey, not only will you see a ripple effect across the board in adjoining states, you’ll see prices drop like a rock, since they’ll have rider happiness as priority one, instead of patronage and union gladhanding.

PLJ
PLJ
14 years ago

When NJ Transit took over the 22 from Academy, service improved dramatically. And by “dramatically”, I mean the bus showed up on time. I, for one, do not want to see our bus system privatized.

Adding a nickel a gallon to the lowest gas tax in the country won’t hurt anyone.

SMC
SMC
14 years ago

Focusing train service only on rush hours and cutting service at all other times would be a great idea.

Thereby forcing anyone with all or part of their commute outside of rush hour to buy a car and drive to work. Great idea, not!.

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James
14 years ago

@PLJ, by privatization, I mean completely divesting any interest the state has in the bus system at all and allowing the free market to solve the problems on its own, rather than waiting for Big Daddy Government to solve everything for us and waste taxpayer dollars on more committees to study more problems that a private company could’ve fixed in less than half the time. The 22 may show up on time, but that doesn’t mean NJT Bus is necessarily any good – just that Academy is poorly run on that line. The problems with bus service all stem from the fact that NJT owns most of the buses and subsidizes bus service in NJ – remove those artificial props and bus fares will go down.

Also, adding a nickel a gallon might not hurt you, but that sure does add up for people who drive everywhere (by necessity or by choice) and actually enjoy the privacy and freedom of their own car, that they bought and paid for on their own and that they need to maintain without any government subsidy. Only a fool would think that taxing someone during a recession would be a good idea. It’s just like any other ridiculous behavior modification tax: it won’t change anything, it’ll just piss everyone off, and the money will be siphoned off to some bullshit slush fund, to be spent however the Legislature decides. Perfect example of this: look at any cigarette taxes – they’re designed to push people away from cigarettes, yet people still buy them, they’re more pissed off about them and they’re more likely to circumvent those tax laws by ordering untaxable Indian cigarettes or other such things. And where do the proceeds go? Supposedly to education, but no one really knows for sure.

@SMC, It’s not the state’s job to make sure you can get to work on time. It’s the state’s job to maintain the infrastructure that makes it possible for you to get where you want to go without doing that old fashioned “walking” thing. It’s your choice to use a train or a bus or a car to get there. If you choose a train and they’re only available in the morning or evening, I don’t see what the problem is. You still have the bus or car as an option – you just don’t want to use those for whatever reason. Fine, that’s your personal preference, but don’t expect me to finance your personal preference. You want to commute to a job in NYC from Burlington County or Salem County or some other far-flung area? Get up early and be on that train. You don’t like it? Get a place closer to work. No one likes moving away from areas they enjoy, but you live where you must for your job. You wouldn’t expect to be able to live in Baltimore with that same NYC job and expect train service to cater to your hours, would you? Absolutely not.

Ann
Ann
14 years ago

James, The whole “No taxes now but it’s okay to make the next generation pay!” angle is really tired. Things cost money – either you pay now or pass the bill to the children and grandchildren.

Also, generally when transit systems run by private companies are taken over by government-run systems, riders see vast improvements in service.

NJ needs to adequately fund public transportation, plain and simple.

Clark Morris
Clark Morris
14 years ago

Transportation funding is circuitous and confusing at best. In New Jersey much of the road network is paid for in part or full by property taxes. Then the state turns around and takes some funds out of the fuel taxes and tolls for transit (probably far less than the amount of property tax used for roads). Public parking lots reduce the amount of land available to be taxed. Transit even with operating subsidies may be cheaper than increasing the number of lane miles and parking spaces.

New Jersey Transit does need to get its act together. It does need to become an integrated entity. The German Verkehrsverbund concept could be the best approach. There a small body contracts with government, semi-government and private operators to provide services on an agreed upon schedule and sets the fares. This body may or may not own the equipment and or the right of way. The fares are normally by zone similar to the NJT concept. What is different is that the ticket allows someone to ride ANY public transit vehicle for the allowed zones within a given period. For single tickets its normally about an hour for a single zone ticket with longer periods for multiple zones. Enforcement is the same system as the LRT lines. In this scenario, PATH would become another NJT contracted service and the private bus companies would be better integrated to give riders more choice of how to get between two points. Hopefully New Jersey Transit Rail would be forced to better provide for New Jersey to New Jersey service. Going to a verkehrsverbund model could provide for better service for less money.

James
14 years ago

@Ann, no one said anything about making the next generation pay. Geez, are you even reading what I wrote? I’m saying the best way for the state to handle this is to cut its losses and force the private sector to pick it up and do what it can with it, while at the same time getting government out of its way. That’s not forcing our kids to fix this – if anything, it’s asking our friends and neighbors, our fellow Americans, to stand up on their own and fix this without waiting for government to do it for them. The American private sector is the greatest force for change for the better the world has ever known, and to act as though they can’t do this better than a government agency can is to suggest that somehow, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, government-run services are better than private-run services.

@Clark, PATH is independently funded by fares and much smaller contributions from NY and NJ through the Port Authority, and is a minor component of a bi-state agency – one cannot simply toss them into the mix with NJT and one would really be shooting themselves in the foot to even try.

The system you’re suggesting, with the exception of the timed ticket portion, is exactly the system they have already across the board. Monthly passes for rail can be used for however many zones are printed on the ticket – for example, a Newark-to-New York monthly pass is equal to a three-zone bus pass and can be used back and forth on NJT bus.

In addition, technically there isn’t any true private transportation service in NJ to begin with – every company that runs service does so under contract and with a subsidy from, NJT. If we wanted truely private service to work, we’d need to have NJT stop subsidizing each bus line, have NJT spin off its bus service as a private company, and watch the free market do what it does best.

Greg
Greg
14 years ago

@James, your ideas of putting our complete reliance and devotion on the free market and private sector to solve our problems is is amazing considering that they were the major cause of this recession. Transit is a social good and should be recognized as one and funded accordingly. The free market will never “solve” this problem for us. James, government is not all bad…If we rely on the free market we’ll ruin the “crappy” mobility you enjoy now in NJ.

Tony Lee
Tony Lee
14 years ago

@ “James”
Can we stop with the personal nature of responding to legitimate comments? do we need to belittle the other person just to make our points clearer? where is the CIVIL discourse? Your opinion is just as valid as mine. Why the need to imply others are “idiots” and “ridicuously stupid idea” (see Feb. 15th, 1:08 to Adam) and “Gezz, are you reading this” (see Feb. 18th, 7:59 to Ann).

As for free market doing what it does best idea. I’m afraid many in this day and age don’t exactly have the world of faith in the market givne what Wall street has done for the economy lately. It hink there are many to blame for the mess the state’s budget and NJ tRansit’s budget is in including the pay levels, but mainly the lack of fortitude and mismanagment by, yes, both Republican and Democratic governors of the Transportation Fund. Voters, including you and me, are to blame for not demanding more form our elected officials.

Tom
Tom
14 years ago

James is just regurgitating the “free market” tea bagger talking points of someone who does not have the facts and does not care to find them, NJT does subsidise it’s own competition (Coach and Decamp) so much for “free market”. He likes to talk about the “freedom” of driving, I guess he misses the whole “freedom” of buying imported oil from people who want to (and do) kill us. He misses (deliberately) the billions of dollars of subsides for the endless cycle of road construction/repair/construction.

You cannot argue facts with a parrot.

If the Governor really cared about “rich” contracts, let him explain his deal with John Ashcroft.

Ann
Ann
14 years ago

James, I read your post. My point is that cutting NJTransit and keeping taxes low is essentially the same thing as making the next generation pay.

And, health care is based on free market principles and 20% of Americans don’t have it because it’s too expensive (though the companies still make record profits). Those of us that do have it are paying hundreds/thousands of dollars a month for overly complicated plans (or our employers are).

Jerome
Jerome
14 years ago

Fire Christie
He does not know or undrstand the benefits of mass transit and is an anti transit Robert Moses who once said “The Public Be Damned”

He does not want to pay transit workers what they are worth who are the ones who keep transit moving in The Garden State and support businesses they use to live in NJ.

How will his attitude affect the Lackawanna Cut-Off restoration?

James
14 years ago

@Greg, the recession was caused by fascist agitators forcing banks, by way of the Community Reinvestment Act, to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them and the market finally having run out of places to dump the bad debt that had accumulated over the past thirty years. It wasn’t caused by the failure of the free market – if anything, the free market prevented the collapse of the housing market and the start of the current recession by giving banks an outlet, however small, to shift around the debt until they could pay it down.

The free market also gave us the railroad and bus systems in the first place. The free market allowed investors to build the transcontinental railroad in less than two years with technology that today is considered extremely antiquated, whereas building a railroad from Los Angeles to Las Vegas is going to cost the federal government upwards of ten billion dollars (so far, the estimate may have changed since I last checked a few weeks ago) and it will take several years to build. The free market allowed private railroad operators to build their own tunnels into NY from NJ and Long Island, on their own dime and in a fraction of the time estimate that we’re all hearing from the proponents of the ARC tunnel (or whatever it’s named now). The free market allowed Penn Central to grow and provide rail service to almost the entire Northeastern United States, including large chunks of NJ that NJT has ignored and written off. Let’s not even start on the NYC Subway System, which was built on free market money, taken over by the government and currently has multiple expansion projects plagued by cost overruns and delays, and choked down by sweetheart union deals.

I’ve no gripe with giving someone a fair chance (such as what happens in the free market) but the government has proven, time and again, that they are ridiculously incapable of efficiency in all areas save defense and tax collection.

@Tony, those weren’t personal insults – someone who advocates raising taxes while the people are being hit with the worst recession in several generations has lost touch with reality either on purpose or through negligence in research. As for the “Geez” comment (you misspelled it, by the way, and misquoted me – I said “Geez, did you even read what I wrote?”), it did not appear, based on her comments, that Ann actually understood what I was saying and was misusing the phrase “generational theft”. She’s since clarified what she meant (and I still disagree with her).

As for blaming Wall Street or the free market for our current financial predicament, that’s outside the focus of this discussion at this point and I’ve said all I mean to say on that point in my response to Greg.

@Tom, resorting to using such graphic insults against me tells me all I need to know about you. If that’s your first shot, that means you had nothing in your quiver to begin with.

You confirmed my point about the lack of a free market in NJ with regards to bus service – with horrible grammar and lack of any follow-through on your point. You also bring up oil – if it helps, I don’t buy from Hugo Chavez’s state-owned Citgo (but I’m sure you didn’t mean him, since he’s only killed his own people so far, and not Americans). If you want to purchase oil without thinking you’ve got blood on your hands, do what I do and advocate opening up American territories for American companies to drill and supply Americans with oil. You lastly mention road maintenance – technically it’s not the government’s job to take care of those either, and Indiana proves it’s better to hand off the job of maintaining them to the private sector, but NJ is one of the most densely populated states in the union and drivers here seem to have no problem paying tolls and such for the privilege of using these roads. The funds that were supposed to be available for road maintenance are going instead towards propping up NJT and its unsustainable financial situation – namely its union workers and overpaid executives with gold-plated healthcare and benefits packages, who expect raises and bonuses when they’ve done nothing to merit them.

As for John Ashcroft, I fail to see how a man who was Attorney General for a short period of time is relevant to this discussion on transportation in NJ in 2010 and Governor Christie’s policies towards them, but I expect that you’ll find a way to work that, and, no doubt, BUSHILTER, more blood-for-oil crap, and any manner of climate change rubbish, into a follow-up comment.

@Ann, pulling back government support and forcing the free market to deal with the transportation issue on its own is the only way to ensure that the next generation actually has a transit system to use. As for healthcare, I’m not sure where that came into the discussion but the problem is the same with healthcare as it is with transit – in a truly free market, you could buy a healthcare plan without employer support from a company based in a different state than you, you wouldn’t need to worry if you got fired (OK yeah you would, but not as much) because you’d still have your healthcare plan, and doctors and other healthcare professionals would be able to set their own rates without worrying about whether insurance companies would continue to subsidize them.

I could go on, but as I indicated before the discussion here is Governor Christie’s transit policies.

Steven Higashide
14 years ago

There are some basic, Microeconomics 101 reasons why transit systems (and transportation in general) are publicly run. Here’s one overview – http://www.patransit.org/information/subsidy.htm. (This is an advocacy group providing a nontechnical explanation, but it’s the same one you’ll get from introductory economics textbooks.) This is not to say that all transit agencies are well run or that there is no waste.

This discussion has gotten a little heated, so I also want to remind everyone to refrain from personal insults and profanity.

James
14 years ago

@Steven,

Nothing in that link has anything to do with micro, macro or any other form of economics – rather, it’s all about social justice and societal good, which is what one would expect from an advocacy group (and thank you for pointing out its bias as a source in advance).

It also does not answer the question of why state and federal governments are funding transportation instead of leaving it to the free market. There is no good reason for the federal government to run Amtrak, nor is there a good reason for them to run GM, nor is there a good reason for NJ or NY state to own and operate their transit systems. Providing limited transportation options (school buses) for schools and the elderly (community shuttles and such) is one thing, which the state could probably afford if it weren’t so wrapped up in financing the rail and bus and light rail systems.

Steven Higashide
14 years ago

Sorry I don’t have more time to unpack these, but I want to point out that this is in fact microecon I’m talking about. I believe the full econ-textbook rationale is: 1. Transit is a natural monopoly. 2. Monopolies maximize social benefit by charging at marginal, not average cost. 3. Ergo, government should run or highly regulate transit. 4. Because transit has large positive externalities, drivers and businesses that benefit should help fund it.

The link I posted above is a list of positive externalities (ways that transit benefits non-users of transit). Because so many people who do not use transit benefit from it, most economists would argue, transit users should not cover the entire cost of the service.

Again, sorry I don’t have time to talk in more detail. A good explanation of why transit agencies do not charge fares that recover 100% of costs (point #2 above) is at http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/01/marginal-cost-pricing-for-mass-transit.php

Ann
Ann
14 years ago

James, if we funded transportation via a free market strategy, you’d be paying much much more to drive to work every day. The roads would all be tolled very heavily and you’d probably pay per heavily per every mile you drove.

Your whole theory is flawed if it does not apply to the entire transportation system. Road construction and maintenace is heavily subsidized. The price of gas is heavily subsidized (ever been to Europe?). If you agree to pay much more to drive I agree to pay to much more to ride transit. Deal?

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[…] grim ramifications of Gov. Christie’s plan to slash NJ Transit funds are becoming clearer.  New NJ Transit executive director James Weinstein acknowledged that a […]

James
14 years ago

@Steven, thanks for engaging in rational discussion here. I disagree with your first point, though. Transit is not a natural monopoly – if a company builds a rail line, then they are allowed to do what they want with that rail line, up to and including allowing or disallowing outside vendors the chance to operate trains on that rail line. If another company wants to come along and build a competing route, they are absolutely allowed and encouraged, under the free market, to do so.

And this doesn’t even begin to cover bus service, which can’t ever be said to be monopolized, since the last time I checked, buses used the same roads as everyone else – they just carry a lot more people when they do.

@Ann, please explain what you’re talking about, since tolls and taxes cover the roads, and fares and taxes cover the buses and trains. Roads wouldn’t be heavily tolled – in fact, the tolls may be lower or non-existent since there’d be less for the government to pay for in the end.

The price of gas? What are you talking about? You’re spinning off in ten different directions here, without explanations for any of them.

Not that it matters, but I happen to heavily depend on transit myself, and I would happily embrace competition (which, by the way, would drive the cost of service DOWN, not up, since that’s how the free market works), true competition, in New Jersey’s transportation system. I have a proposal for a light rail extension for Newark’s City Subway system which would use existing track to expand service out to Kearny (and possibly Secaucus) to the east, Paterson to the north, and Montclair to the west, and it’s quite possible to fund this expansion with private dollars if NJT wasn’t so wrapped up in focusing exclusively on state and federal funding as sources of income, and being completely ignorant of the wants and needs of the citizens of New Jersey.

joe
joe
14 years ago

The union workers of nj transit pay into railroad retirement, which is much costlier than sociail security. That is where there pensions come from. They also have money deducted from there checks weekly to pay for healthcare, and monthly for union dues. They are paid much less than other union workers in this area to perform the same jobs. Examples being PATH LIRR and MTA workers. Take your wrath out on NJ Transit management. These are where the overpaid and uselss jobs are, and believe me, there are many.

Steve
Steve
14 years ago

I thank Steve Higashide for advancing this discussion with a brief explanation of why public transit needs to be subsidized. I remember the pre-NJTransit days when privately run transit was truly filthy and unreliable. Public Service was happy to get out of the trolley and bus business. Privately-run, publicly-subsidized bus companies in Hudson County never seem to publish schedules.

Yet, there may be some room for privately financed and operated mass transit systems, such as what James proposes. And Governor Corzine’s proposal to “monetize” the Turnpike and Garden State was also a good idea, maybe the only way to impose a gas tax increase on both NJ and out-of-state drivers and really hack away at the state debt.

We need also to consider the costs of private automobile-oriented transportation and consequent suburban sprawl which are not captured in current gasoline prices and the laughably low gas taxes in New Jersey. Federal gas taxes do not capture the cost of our multi-$trillion military interventions in the Middle East. Iraq sits on at least 100 billion barrels of oil. Our adversary, the current regime in Iran, is a petro-power and can buy whatever nuclear materials and expertise that it wants. Every time we put gas in our private cars, we subsidize terrorism. Petro-power Venezuela, which produces at least 10% of our refined petroleum, is colluding with Iran. Our cartopia is vulnerable to politically-motivated disruption and is a major cause of our current economic weakness.

Gas prices and taxes do not capture the cost of automobile-caused damage to our environment. We, too, are creatures of the Earth and are harmed by polluted air and water that contain chemicals that cause cancer and even damage human fertility.

As a city-dweller who rarely uses his car, why should I subsidize private auto transportation and services to far-flung suburbanites?

It is foolish of Governor Christy to favor cars over mass transit.

Ricky
Ricky
14 years ago

If Christie is anti-transit and anti-Rutgers (and so far he appears to be) than I am anti-Christie. I am thus willing to support any reasonable opponent to Christie that is pro transit and pro Rutgers.

Ricky
Ricky
14 years ago

>>NJT does subsidise it’s own competition (Coach and Decamp)

Good! That’s what the government should be doing in the transit market – driving down customer costs and subsidizing competition and then getting out of the way to let the players compete on service and quality and convenience issue. Competition increases choice. What the government should NOT be doing is issuing a lot of burdensome rules. The only rules I would impose are that management not fatten their ranks and wallets irresponsibly and that money spent is dedicated to the employees and the customers – and largely to the customers.

Ricky
Ricky
14 years ago

>>The funds that were supposed to be available for road maintenance are going instead towards propping up NJT and its unsustainable financial situation – namely its union workers and overpaid executives with gold-plated healthcare and benefits packages, who expect raises and bonuses when they’ve done nothing to merit them.

Why do we have so many roads and highways anyhow? As for union workers and execs, yeah, they’re a little overpaid. But we overspend on new highways and roads anyhow, and we could try closing a few lanes. Perhaps that would pump ridership back into NJT and thus the money.

Ricky
Ricky
14 years ago

>>Governor Corzine’s proposal to “monetize” the Turnpike and Garden State was also a good idea

I’m not so sure about that. All that might do is create a white elephant of a superhighway system and a bunch of shunpikers. Perhaps tolls should be raised a little, and lanes should be closed as “unsafe” and thus abandoned.

Tom
Tom
14 years ago

Ah yes, “monetize” just look at the facts and tell me how that is working out? The roads were built with public aka taxpayer money and are owned by the taxpayers, so the solution is to take publicly owned infrastructure and turn it over to a private for profit organization, that tells me all I need to know about you as well. About the whole “blood for oil” thing, you have no idea where that gas you put in your car came from, it’s purchased on the open “free” market.

About that “magic” of open markets and the transcontinental railroad being completed in two years?, well of course you do know that slave labour was used? and major sections did have to be rebuilt within two years due to the fact the construction was so poor? And before reveling in the myth of Penn Central, remember they had a monopoly and did eventually collapse under the weight of it’s own poorly interconnected infrastructure and bad business decisions?

Transit systems every where are subsidized, this includes the 30 to 40 Billion each year for the airlines alone, are you advocating cutting those as well?, how’s that going to impaxct that $99 ticket to Disney?

And by mixing fascism and the community reinvestment act together in the same sentence should tell anyone reading all they need to know.

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[…] across the state, the agency said today. The agency is readying this proposal because Gov. Christie cut state support for NJ Transit by 11% this year and is expected to make more cuts next […]

David
David
14 years ago

Transit riders are consistently viewed as second class citizenry in this state. This will not stand. We are already taxed to death in this state, and we see so little for what we put in. Transit supports and drives commerce. It is so sad to see our elected officials so out of touch with reality and so in touch with their inability to be effective or intelligent.

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[…] for transit riders in New Jersey would be an understatement. The new governor opened the year by cutting state support for NJ Transit by 11%. A proposal for a 25% fare increase and huge service cuts soon followed. […]

Waltraud Turbin
12 years ago

Hey not to go off topic but can anyone give me overview of. Philadelphia Car Insurance Reform 1044 Market St. Philadelphia, PA 19107 (215) 618-2175 They can be down the block with me. I was wondering once they were a good insurance agency. I need to get coverage, it is the law you know, but I have to have a good price price plus I’d prefer friendly service.

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