The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is proposing toll hikes for people trying to get to Manhattan and to the region’s three airports. By way of excuse, officials glom onto the nation’s infrastructure crisis, citing “half a century of neglect and inaction” on physical assets such as bridges and transit. Yet the PA is an unwitting example of the country’s real crisis in building: poor priorities. The agency has plenty of money; it’s just been spending it all wrong.
Come next January, the PA, controlled equally by the governors of New York and New Jersey, wants to raise tolls for drivers crossing the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln or Holland tunnels, as well as fares on the PATH and the JFK airport AirTrain. Peak car tolls on the bridge and tunnels would go to $13.75 from $12.50; the AirTrain fare would get jacked to $7.75 from $5.
Before last week’s board meeting, PA officials spun these hikes as essential to critical investment in roads, airports and transit. Executive Director Rick Cotton cited “unprecedented investment in our region’s infrastructure,” asking drivers and riders to “provide needed funding.”
Indeed, the PA is upping its 10-year plan to invest in core physical assets by almost $5 billion, to $37 billion. It wants to build new rail links to both LaGuardia and Newark, each at an estimated $2.1 billion. And it’s in the midst of full redevelopments at all three of its major airports, costing $7.4 billion in PA funds.
Yet the PA should be able to pay for these projects without asking commuters for more.
We don’t normally think of government entities earning profits. Yet the PA’s main spheres of operations — roads and airports — are so profitable that they almost print money.
That same month, thousands of students at Drake University in Iowa protested after racist notes turned up on campus. Kissie Ram, an Indian-American student, admitted to targeting herself and others in the hoax. She later pled guilty to making a false report to a public entity.
And there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators.
At Oberlin, in particular, this problem precedes the Trump era. In 2013, students at the elite liberal-arts college panicked after someone reported seeing a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on campus. The administration canceled all classes for the day.
The phantom klansman was never found, though police did find someone wrapped in a blanket. This overreaction was preceded by a month-long spate of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay posters around campus. These, too, were found to be hoaxes.
Obsessed with identity, privilege and oppression, our institutions of higher education increasingly promote a paranoid climate of perpetual crisis. Is it surprising, then, that young men and women caught in this hothouse environment would respond to an incentive structure that rewards manufactured victimhood?
Annual payments on this debt are up, too, to about $900 million a year, twice the level of a decade ago.
It may seem silly to focus on the past — there’s nothing we can do, now, to undo the mistakes that then-Gov. George Pataki made about rebuilding the WTC more than a decade ago. And perhaps mistakes were forgivable in the aftermath of the terror attacks, which clouded everyone’s thinking.
Even so, the story of the WTC is the story of New York’s repeated mistakes. The state and city continually insist on subsidizing real estate — the Oculus is essentially a high-end retail mall, when the last thing the city needs is more retail space — at the expense of the transportation infrastructure that supports real estate.
It makes no sense, in particular, to hike the price of the JFK AirTrain ride to $7.75. The AirTrain at JFK should be free; the only reason for the charge is a jurisdictional dispute between the PA and the New York-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Many of its nearly 21 million riders, if they arrive to this last leg of airport transportation via the MTA’s subway or the Long Island Rail Road, have already paid. Now, the combined price for the train and subway for a group of four will be $42, making that $68 Uber ride tempting.
If the PA wants to connect higher tolls to costs, it shouldn’t hike the AirTrain fee — and instead charge people $7.75 to visit the Oculus.
This piece originally appeared at New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post