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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

NJ<->NYC needs another "subway" tunnel pretty badly too. Ferrying people in and out with buses has reached its limit.

Thanks to Gov. Chris Christie it's not gonna happen anytime soon: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/nyregion/08tunnel.html

If you don't have the money, then you cannot go forward with this type of thing. Maybe after some years of getting back to balance on their budget, NJ can start big things again.

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of people pay every day for the inefficient mass transportation system. There are good ways to spend money in bad times. See: Great Depression.

And there are millions of children in NJ that need the government to not burden them with debt. NJ spends more than it takes in and needs to fix that first.

Even if a family has another kid on the way, they still need to make sure they have budgeted properly before building an expansion on the house.

A government with a rising tax base can spend more than its revenue in perpetuity. That doesn't mean it's always a good idea, but thinking about government spending the way a household manages its spending leads to incorrect conclusions.

There are millions of children in New Jersey that need their parents to be employed. Counter-cyclical spending helps to accomplish that, and if done wisely, it also acts as an investment from which those children will reap the benefits.

Discourse about government spending these days is sadly devoid of numbers that indicate the right choice one way or the other. We don't run our businesses this way.

I look at history and see how different administrations react to economic crisis. I see Harding & Coolidge vs Hoover's approach and the 1946 tax cuts as being pretty good guides. I don't see the stimulus spending by a R and a D as doing as much good.

Governments take on debt all the time. The US Govt, for example, has balanced the budget only a handful of times in its history. Building better infrastructure that makes NJ more livable is money well spent. Appealing for the future of all the little children isn't a convincing way to make an argument. Btw, the US debt is now at 100% of GDP. I'd say every American kid already has a problem.

> There are good ways to spend money in bad times. See: Great Depression.

Maybe, but that's not how "the great stimulus" money was spent. (And, as Obama learned, there are no shovel-ready projects.)

At this point, your argument is basically "yes, we pissed away the last $1-2T, but this time, we'll get it right."

People are lending money to governments at extremely low rates, and construction costs are extremely low. New Jersey's finances would've been fine if the project had proceeded. Paying down government debt during a recession is contrary to every economics textbook I've seen.

Research the Harding & Coolidge vs Hoover approach. Betting that interest rates can be kept low is not a good policy. It is very much like betting on a high rate of return like many public pension funds.

You can lock in rates through issuing bonds which is how these things are typically financed. Variable rate debt is fairly rare here.

That's the problem that financing addresses.

Assuming that the activity you're financing will return future positive captureable value (farebox revenues, increased taxable business activity), then borrowing money now to pay for current activities ensuring ability to pay back the loan makes perfect sense.

Note that that assumption of future benefit may not hold out, but if it does, failing to undertake the financing is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If you're getting free money from the feds, you absolutely should do it. Christie is alright in general but in that instance he's just burnishing his republican creds by the flashy turndown of federal money.

It's not free money, someone paid taxes on that. We need more governors to stop taking "free" money from the Fed. If we don't take some pain now, we won't have a later.

Ever heard of a sunk cost? From the perspective of the NJ governor, it's free money.

There's a project currently in planning stages that is supposed to upgrade the 11-mile section of century-old infrastructure between Newark and NYC, improving both Amtrak and NJ Transit service. It'd add a new Hudson River tunnel, a faster modern routing through the Meadowlands, and expand Penn Station into the old James Farley Post Office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_Project

None of that will move people off of buses to a subway or train. The proposal of extending the 7 line to NJ, for example, would certainly help.

If I understand correctly, the NJ Transit trans-Hudson services have been at maximum capacity for years, so they could carry more riders if they were able to add more trains at peak times, but without a new tunnel (and probably more platforms) it's just not possible to run more trains.

The gateway tunnel has been postponed indefinitely. But no worries, apparently the only reason the Gateway Tunnel was necessary was because the MTA previously refused to run things efficiently.

http://transportationnation.org/2012/06/14/ny-mta-chief-says...

Also interesting: "The Regional Plan Association, which held the conference at which Lhota spoke, and other advocacy groups have expressed support for through-running—at least until Gateway Tunnel gets built."

I.e., they want to be more efficient, but only as a stopgap measure until the tunnel is built.

(Also check out Market Urbanism's blog post on the topic: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ycccmpt... )

Interesting. I suppose there are not high odds that these multiple systems will ever get integrated into one regional agency, the way the various NYC subways were eventually merged into the MTA and interconnected?

As some comments say on that page, there are numerous technical details as to why it isn't nearly as simple as proposed. AFAIK you can't easily run LIRR trains to NJ because only a few engines support catenary operation, everything else requires a third rail to be built.

So while this might get us a few percent increase in the number of trains for now, at the cost of a few hundred million to build out third rails in NJ (or catenaries in LIRR areas where NJ transit trains might be routed), it doesn't change the fundamental infrastructure issue given the growth of mass transit in the NYC metro area.

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