Tag Archives: scandal

No, There Was Never a Legitimate Traffic Study About the Fort Lee Lane Closures

by N0bodyh56 Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby has been doing yeoman’s work on the Fort Lee lane closures, pointing out that some liberal pundits have gotten a little too far over their skis on the scandal. I’d say that’s fair. However, he also takes issue with the allegation that the “traffic study” offered up as the reason for the closings was merely a pretense made up after the fact. Technically, he’s right: there’s plenty of evidence that bridge authorities talked about the study before the lanes were closed. But that doesn’t mean the study wasn’t a pretense, only that it was a pretense made up prior to the closures. There’s a ton of evidence suggesting that this supposed study was never anything more than a tissue-thin charade:

Most traffic studies don’t involve actually doing anything to traffic: “Traffic engineers will assess the existing flow by counting cars….Then they’ll take standard calculations for what the proposed change would introduce, and plug them into formulas provided by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. It’s a pretty automated procedure, with little impact on traffic.”
If traffic is affected, it’s usually for a single day, not multiple days.
Yes, data was being collected while the lanes were shut down. However, as Somerby points out, it was tolls data. This is collected every day automatically. Nothing special was done during the Fort Lee lane closures.
No serious planning document has been produced. When the general manager of the bridge was asked if “traffic experts or engineers” had been consulted about the plan, he replied, “We had talked about gathering data….” That was it. This is hardly the hallmark of a genuine study.
Several managers at the Port Authority were flummoxed about what this study was all about. They asked why it was being done, and apparently received no credible answers.
A few weeks before lane shutdowns, one of Chris Christie’s senior aides, Bridget Anne Kelly, gleefully emailed David Wildstein, a top Christie executive at the Port Authority, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” This is obviously damning. In the first place, it doesn’t seem likely that a Christie aide would have any role to play in a legitimate traffic study. And if she did, she certainly wouldn’t take a tone like that.

Put all this together, and it’s hardly likely that the traffic study was ever genuine. The folks involved obviously knew that they needed a public story, and so they made one up. I agree that everyone should get their tenses right on this, but at this point I think it’s going too far to remain agnostic about whether the Fort Lee lane closures were ever part of a legitimate traffic study. If they were, we’d know it by now.

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No, There Was Never a Legitimate Traffic Study About the Fort Lee Lane Closures

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Here’s the Traffic "Study" Chris Christie Wasn’t Sure Existed

by BrittanyBrice Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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New Bridge Scandal Emails: Port Authority Official Said Christie Team’s Lane Closure “Violates Federal Law”

At last week’s press conference over the George Washington Bridge lane closings that left the New Jersey borough of Fort Lee gridlocked in September, GOP Gov. Chris Christie told reporters, “Whether there was a traffic study or not, I don’t know.” But whether or not the closures were part of a legitimate study—a Christie aide ordered the lanes closed without mentioning one—the resulting gridlock was analyzed by the Port Authority. The results were a bit obvious: If you close lanes to the George Washington Bridge, you cause traffic.

The post-jam analysis was released last week by a state assembly committee investigating the scandal. It focused on what would happen if two of the three access lanes reserved for Fort Lee residents were shut down and instead made available to other drivers. Fort Lee, according to the Port Authority, provides about 4.5 percent of George Washington Bridge traffic. The remaining 95 percent or so got to work a little quicker: The 11,592 non-Fort Lee vehicles saved about 5 minutes each during the closure, resulting in about 966 vehicle hours saved. That wasn’t nearly enough to outweigh the cost—Fort Lee traffic resulted in 2,800 vehicle hours of delay. And the analysis noted that even if the traffic queues were half as long, the outcome would still be a net loss. Also, many vehicles sat so long in traffic that they missed peak toll hours, resulting in a revenue loss of $550 a day (or $137,000 over the course of a year).

A review by the Bergen Record found that the actual results may have been even worse than this analysis suggests. Other towns’ residents also use the Fort Lee access ramps, so the closed lanes delayed as much as 25 percent of the bridge’s motorists. But Port Authority political operatives used the 4.5 percent figure to try to convince nearby Republican lawmakers that the study was legitimate and that Fort Lee didn’t need three lanes, according to the Record. An email from former Port Authority official and Christie high school classmate David Wildstein to recently fired Christie aide Bridget Kelly includes talking points for Republican assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon and Jeff Bader, president of a trucking trade group, about how the closures benefited many New Jersey drivers:

Although Wildstein and other Christie allies tried to paint the closures as part of a necessary study, some Port Authority employees were suspicious. One general manager wrote in an email before the closure that the study could be done without leaving Fort Lee with only a single lane. He asked, “What is driving this?” Another supervisor replied, “A single toll lane operation invites potential disaster…It seems like we are punishing all for the sake of a few.”

As the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog points out, traffic studies rarely affect traffic at all. Engineers can measure normal traffic, simulate a closure or other change, and plug the numbers into formulas provided by the Institute of Transportation Engineers to yield the likely outcomes. When traffic does need to be altered, agencies typically do limited trial runs with a public review process to minimize the impact.

Moreover, it does not take a traffic engineer to realize that taking two of three lanes away from Fort Lee would lead to long lines and lots of waiting. But the ultimate conclusion of the post-gridlock review was not so definitive: It reads only “TBD.”

See the full report here:

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Port Authority traffic study assessment (PDF)

Port Authority traffic study assessment (Text)

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Here’s the Traffic "Study" Chris Christie Wasn’t Sure Existed

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New Christie Bridge Scandal Email: Cops Forced to Direct Traffic Instead of Responding to Emergencies

by Ivan Nutter Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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New Bridge Scandal Emails: Port Authority Official Said Christie Team’s Lane Closure “Violates Federal Law”

The massive, four-day September traffic jam orchestrated by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff as an act of political retribution caused police in Fort Lee, New Jersey to spend their time directing traffic instead of responding to local emergencies, according to an email released on Friday by state investigators probing the scandal.

On September 9, the first day of the traffic problems, Robert Durando, the Port Authority’s general manager of the George Washington Bridge, wrote to Cedrick Fulton, the Port Authority’s director of tunnels, bridges and terminals: “Traffic conditions required Ft Lee police to remain out on corners, managing traffic instead of attending to public safety issues.”

The email is more evidence of the public safety consequences of September’s traffic jams. On Wednesday, a Fort Lee borough councilman told Mother Jones that the traffic slowed the police search for a missing 4-year-old child. NorthJersey.com reported that the traffic doubled EMS response times in two emergencies on September 9. In a third instance, emergency responders “took nearly an hour to arrive at a building where a person was experiencing chest pains.”

Members of Christie’s inner circle appear to have considered the potential public safety ramifications of the traffic jam while it was ongoing. In one exchange released on Wednesday, Port Authority official David Wildstein, a Christie appointee, waved away complaints from the Fort Lee mayor that school buses filled with children were stuck in traffic. “Bottom line is he didn’t say safety,” Wildstein wrote.

Durando’s message was part of an email thread, “Angry Patron,” describing locals’ reactions to the traffic problems. In a separate email, Lisa Herrera, an employee of the Port Authority tunnels, bridges and terminals division, said she received a complaint from a woman whose husband arrived 40 minutes late for his first day of work at a job he landed after being unemployed for a year. The women accused the Port Authority of “playing God with people’s jobs,” Herrera wrote.

A New Jersey legislative panel investigating the bridge scandal released these emails Friday as part of a collection of hundreds of private emails and text messages related to September’s lane closures. Read those documents here.

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New Christie Bridge Scandal Email: Cops Forced to Direct Traffic Instead of Responding to Emergencies

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New Bridge Scandal Emails: Port Authority Official Said Christie Team’s Lane Closure "Violates Federal Law"

by DarellUXTK Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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New Bridge Scandal Emails: Port Authority Official Said Christie Team’s Lane Closure “Violates Federal Law”

In a September 13 email released Friday by the New Jersey Assembly panel probing Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s George Washington Bridge scandal, Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye wrote that the decision to shut down access lanes to the bridge violated state and federal laws.

“I believe this hasty and ill-advised decision violates Federal Law and the laws of both States,” Foye noted, explaining his decision to reopen those lanes to traffic. “I am appalled by the lack of process, failure to inform our customers and Fort Lee and most of all by the dangers created to the public.”

Foye sent his email after four days of heavy traffic jams caused by the closures to nearly a dozen officials at the Port Authority, including chairman David Samson, a Christie appointee.

Private messages released on Wednesday strongly suggested that a top aide to Christie orchestrated the lane closures as an act of political revenge. Samson’s role in the scandal remains unclear.

Screenshot from new emails released as part of an investigation into politically motivated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge

On Thursday, Christie expressed confidence that Samson played no part in causing the Fort Lee traffic disaster, saying, “I am convinced that he had absolutely no knowledge of this, that this was executed at the operational level and never brought to the attention of the Port Authority board of commissioners.” Yet when Foye ordered the lanes reopened on September 13, David Wildstein, a Christie appointee at the Port Authority official wrote to a Christie staffer, “We are appropriately going nuts. Samson helping us to retaliate.”

Another email released on Friday shows an effort to keep the story from going public. On the night of September 13, Foye received an email from Bill Baroni, a Port Authority official appointed by Christie (who resigned in December as the scandal was unfolding). It read, “I am on my way to the office to discuss. There can be no public discourse.”

And another email released on Friday indicates that the Christie crew was worried about Foye. On September 18, Samson wrote Scott Rechler, the vice chair of the Port Authority Board of Commissioners,* that he strongly suspected Foye of “stirring up trouble” by speaking anonymously to a Wall Street Journal reporter about the Fort Lee traffic debacle. He went on: “This is yet another example of a story—we’ve seen it before—where Foye distances himself from an issue in the press and rides in on a white horse to save the day In this case, he’s playing in traffic, made a big mistake.”

These emails were released as part of a collection of hundreds of emails and text messages that journalists and investigators are now scrutinizing. Read them here.

Correction: An earlier version of this article failed to note Rechler’s position in the Port Authority. He is the vice chair of its Board of Commissioners.

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New Bridge Scandal Emails: Port Authority Official Said Christie Team’s Lane Closure "Violates Federal Law"

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Chris Christie: I Am "Heartbroken" And "Embarrassed" About Bridge Scandal—But Not Guilty

by LaurelBos Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fired a top aide who ordered lane closures that caused a weeklong traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge and in nearby Fort Lee. Christie also forced his former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who was aware of the lane closure plans, to drop out of the running to chair the New Jersey Republican Party, and told Stepien to cancel a lucrative contract with the Republican Governors Association, which Christie chairs.

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Bridgegate Edges Closer and Closer to Chris Christie Himself

In a press conference Thursday morning, Christie apologized to the people of Fort Lee and New Jersey and to the state Legislature for the lane closures. He said that his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, “lied to me” about her role in the traffic mess, while insisting that he knew nothing about the decision to cause the traffic jam. “I am heartbroken that someone that I permitted to be in that circle of trust for the last five years betrayed my trust,” Christie said.

Emails and text messages released Tuesday strongly suggest that Kelly, the senior Christie aide, ordered the traffic debacle as political retribution against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who had declined to endorse Christie in his 2013 gubernatorial race. “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Kelly wrote to David Wildstein, a Port Authority official who resigned in the wake of the traffic jam.

Christie has denied that he personally made the call to close the bridge lanes that caused the traffic jam. “I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge,” he said on Wednesday.

At his press conference, Christie reiterated that he had no role in the bridge debacle and that he first learned about it Wednesday after his morning workout. “I was blindsided yesterday morning,” he said. “I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or its execution, and I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here.” But he added that the responsibility for the scandal is his. “Ultimately, I am responsible for what happens on my watch, the good and the bad, and when mistakes are made, I have to own up to them and take the action that I believe is necessary to remediate them.”

In response to critics who said Christie sent the tone of his administration, he said the bridge scandal was “the exception, not the rule.” He said he would visit the borough of Fort Lee to apologize for the bridge scandal, and he pledged to “work cooperatively” with state and federal investigations into the scandal.

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Chris Christie: I Am "Heartbroken" And "Embarrassed" About Bridge Scandal—But Not Guilty

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