Heartbreak bridge

Jane Williams, the soon-departing Trump political appointee running the Federal Transit Administration, apparently doesn’t realize that in notifying Congress that she is preparing to sign a contract granting NJTransit $766.5 million for its Gateway offshoot Portal North Bridge, she is telling legislators of a clear and unambiguous violation of a 2015 law Congress wrote.

The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act created special Core Capacity funding for physical improvements resulting in at least 10% greater morning rush capacity. Chicago is constructing a bypass around an L train bottleneck. Dallas is lengthening its light rail platforms from two cars to three. San Francisco is electrifying diesel commuter rail and upgrading its BART system’s power and communications. All boost capacity only after the project is done, just as Congress requires.

NJT fraudulently claims Portal North yields more Manhattan-bound seats. That is a lie. The “gain” is bringing back a temporarily sidelined train out due to a lack of engineers, wholly unrelated to the new bridge. (Our online video shows how the scam works.) The other extra seats are produced using longer trains and converting all routes to double-decker cars.

That new equipment arrives in 2023, three years before Portal North.

Smoke, meet mirrors.

When NJT board members asked directly about new capacity, NJT exec Eric Daleo dissembled. The truth rests in Attachment 1 of the contract, laudably made public by Sen. Bob Menendez. NJT will go from 20 trains to 21 trains and add cars, gaining 3,673 seats. Actually, that’s their typo: The real number is 3,763, but not one of those seats is caused by the $1.9 billion bridge.

Another deception: The FTA’s outside consultant, Eric Chang of David Evans and Associates, hired for the final sign-off, reviewed NJT’s 2018 Core Capacity info, not the 20-magically-turns-into-21 scheme.

Congress rightly killed Alaska’s ridiculous Bridge to Nowhere. At least that didn’t break the law.