The
George Washington Bridge, between Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey,
is the busiest motor vehicle bridge in the world, its 14 lanes carrying
over 100M vehicles a year. Most of the working residents of the small
town of Fort Lee work in Manhattan and commute across the bridge several
times a day. There's some construction on the bridge that began in
august, but the lane closures were devised to minimize the disruption.
There is no toll eastbound (into Ft Lee), but there is a toll westbound,
and there are 31 toll booths in Ft Lee to collect a toll into
Manhattan. All of these booths are on the various through roads that merge
together to cross the bridge. Most of these roads must be entered
outside of Fort Lee, but there's an access road that allows 3 of those
booths to be accessed from the surface streets of Fort Lee. Essentially
all Fort Lee commuters use those three booths. There's a barricade that protects the exit/onramp and effectively prevents them from being used by through traffic, and the approach makes it essentially impossible for Fort Lee commuters to use other booths, unless they go a few miles in the wrong direction first, to get onto the through roads from out of town. During the busy morning commute, those booths are always jam packed.On the first day of school this year, two of those three booths were ordered closed by their supervisor, a main named David Wildstein, appointed by Mr. Christie, a long time friend and supporter. No warning and no clear reason was given, and in subsequent investigation, the explanations given were proven to contradict the facts. Predictably, the traffic from the thousands of people trying to get across the bridge backed up into Fort Lee, clogging surface streets all day long, making many people late for work or miss it entirely, costing jobs, school credit and more.
A few days earlier, Mr. Christie, a Republican, had asked the Mayor of Fort Lee for his endorsement in the gubernatorial election two months later, in which Mr. Christie was leading by double digits in the polls. The mayor, a Democrat refused. It's difficult to see how this is not a political retaliation. Mr Wildstein has already resigned and the people who had reported to him have expressed that there was a culture of fear in the department, and that they are still afraid of testifying even now for fear of retaliation. (Most of these are low-skill, low pay jobs while the unemployment rate in New Jersey is considerably worse than most at just under 9%, while the national average is 7%.)
The possibilities of what happened are relatively few:
Mr Wildstein was acting on his own, trying to punish the Mayor.
Mr. Wildstein was doing this under orders from the Christie campaign or Christie himself.
Mr. Wildstein actually was, as he claimed, trying to run an experiment in traffic flow manipulation.
If the first or third were true, Mr Wildstein should have been ordered to fix the situation, and probably fired for corruption or incompetence as soon as Christie heard about the situation. Instead, he laughed it off. Wildstein only resigned under intense public pressure.
Whichever it was, lots of panicked commuters tried to alert authorities to the situation and get it fixed. That it didn't get to Christie's attention by about 730AM and fixed a few minutes later is evidence of either gross management incompetence, or of tacit or explicit support. It did take a week to get it fixed.
My suspicion is that Wildstein was doing it on his own, but that Christie didn't mind a little political retribution and didn't really care about what was happening in Wildstein's department. The "culture of fear" in the department, should be, by itself, a major blow to Christie's political future especially if he is found to have abetted it. This is the same guy that cancelled the new ARC subway tunnel on the grounds that it cost too much, and claimed New Jersey was on the hook for most of it, even though that was only 17% and that the economic value it would have had for New Jersey was many times its cost.
update 13 Feb 2014
An email trail tells us that Wildstein was ordered to create traffic problems in Fort Lee by Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly. The phrasing of the order made it clear that this had been planned. Christie fired her without asking her why she had done this.
Previous discussion between Christie's office and the mayor of Fort Lee included a new, half billion dollar high rise residential development, just over a block from the On-Ramp that was closed, on the same street--just barely beyond the southern edge of the picture above. The money for the buildings comes from private investors, but the units are being sold, predicated entirely on how easy it would be to get into Manhattan. It this context, it is difficult to see how the shutdown is anything but punishment for Fort Lee and it's mayor.
Today it was revealed that the grand jury is studying the circumstances of the ARC tunnel shutdown and has issued Subpoenas. It's beginning to look a little like this money was effectively stolen from the port authority (which also runs the subway) to be used to build New Jersey roads...purely so Christie could get credit for building those roads without raising taxes.
At this point, the question is not so much whether Christie will be running for President in 2016 but whether he'll be in prison.
addenda 20 Feb 2014
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