Hudson River & SI Crossings Tollpayers Rise 1.8%

123.6m vehicles used the Port Authority (PA) of NY/NJ’s six NJ/NYC crossings in the eastbound tolling direction in 1999, a 1.8% rise. The growing popularity of E-ZPass ET system, installed in all toll lanes and with many dedicated lanes, helped the NY-NJ links to remain reasonably free-flowing. PANYNJ has issued some 400k E-ZPass tags and more than 3m tags are in circulation in the nNJ/NYC region. Over 50% of transactions are now electronic with huge benefits to transaction time and toll plaza productivity, and the proportion continues to climb.

“Traffic levels at our bridges and tunnels are traditionally driven by the economy and job growth in the bistate region,” said Ken Philmus, the PA’s Director of Tunnels, Bridges and Terminals. “With continued economic growth projected we expect that the traffic volumes at our facilities will continue to increase.”

The PA is urging all its customers to get ET tags.

The 2-level 14-lane George Washington Bridge 53.4 million vehicles eastbound in 1999, up 2 percent. That’s 293k veh/day, which may keep it ahead of its rival for busiest bridge in the country – the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge CA. The Lincoln Tunnel was doing 116k veh/day keeping it the nation’s busiest tunnel, the increase being 1.4% on 98. The Holland Tunnel, New York’s oldest crossing hardly changed in traffic at 95.4 veh/day. (All the daily traffic numbers are a simple doubling of the one-way toll numbers which may underestimate actual traffic slightly - TRnl)

The fastest traffic increase was reported at the PA’s three Staten Island crossings – the Goethals and Bayonne bridges and the Outerbridge Crossing – which ran 86k veh/day an increase of 2.3% over 98. The increase was primarily trucks. Truck traffic has increased because of growth at the Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island, and general business and population growth in both New Jersey and Staten Island.

The PA wants to twin the Goethals, the present tight 4-lane bridge being a tight, slow, dangerous, and in every way miserable relic of an earlier age. You come off the NJ Turnpike, a modern, comfortable facility and proceed onto a quickly deteriorating and narrow approach road with undulating broken deck, and substandard lanes, no shoulder or offsets. Any work on the bridge, or incident, involves major disruptions of traffic. Since 1993 the PA has proposed to build a parallel span of similar size, splitting the directions of traffic between the old and new bridges, for 2x3-lanes with shoulder. Anywhere else in America there would be strong support for such a plan. But not in NY. It is a measure of the special virulence of anti-road hysteria in the region that there are almost no elected representatives supporting the plan publicly, so its future is uncertain.