Build back dumber: Gov. Hochul must wake up to Jersey’s Portal North Bridge Gateway con game

Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News
·2 min read
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There were many untruths spoken during President Biden’s appearance at a NJ Transit railcar repair shop yesterday to tout his spending plans. The falsehoods aren’t about his bills, but about NJT’s vastly overpriced, over-designed $1.8 billion Portal North Bridge, for which New York could end up paying a fortune as part of the $33.7 billion Gateway boondoggle. Unless newbie Gov. Hochul wises up quick.

Despite what Gov. Phil Murphy says, it was no groundbreaking. There is no signed contract for Portal North, let alone a start of work. This was a dual campaign rally for Biden’s agenda (which we mostly support) and next week’s reelection for Murphy (whom we endorsed).

Another fib, which Biden unknowingly repeated, is that Amtrak’s 1910 Portal Bridge sits low on the Hackensack River carrying trains between Jersey and Manhattan, “but ships and barges also need to get under it” and “the bridge opens over a 100 times a year and 15% of the time something goes wrong.” Nope. Amtrak’s logs through June show that Portal opened seven times in the prior year, and no trains were inconvenienced.

Same for the old tale of 2,000 hours of delays caused by Portal. Ancient history, before the Coast Guard permanently locked it closed for trains 10 hours every weekday.

The president says only a new, super-high, overpriced span would “allow us to increase speed, safety, efficiency and capacity.” Again, not true. Any new bridge would boost speeds from 60 to 90 mph and no two-track replacement produces any increased capacity.

The NJT press release has a typo from Hochul praising “replacing the Portal North Bridge.” But it’s right as a new, low, inexpensive, technologically advanced crossing, called a bascule bridge, is the wise way forward. The bridge engineering experts at Hardesty & Hanover built one for $150 million along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor in Connecticut in 2012. That Niantic River bridge opens 4,000 times a year, flawlessly. With New York owing hundreds of millions for Portal North, Hochul must demand the smarter plan or refuse to pay a cent.