Quote:

Fair nuff, I confused the dates of the Tappan Zee and the Verrazano in my head. But while it's true the state wanted to keep the money, it was experience with the PA never giving any up that made them so adamant.

From "Empire on the Hudson"

By the early 1950s, however, the Port agency's coffers brimmed with auto and truck tolls, while suburban rail lines faded Financially; and now commuter groups and local elected of?cials began to target the Port Authority as both a cause of the transit problem and as a solution-particularly if it would transfer a substantial share of its ?profits? to the needy rail lines.16 ln responding to the public demand for action, Tobin and his aides showed elements of the strategic skill displayed in the earlier airport and bus-terminal battles: They encouraged the creation of a bi-state commission that could study the transit problem; and then they provided most of its funds, but only after the commission agreed to give the Port Authority an important role in shaping the studies. As a result, its of?cials were able to ensure that the reports would not propose that the Port Authority have a major role in nancing the commuter rail system. Instead, the 1957 and 1958 commission reports recommended that the citizens of the 17 counties in the study area form a transit district and tax themselves in order to subsidize and improve the commuter rail system.

The study part is quite similar to the study in N Hoboken that also somehow came out exactly how the PA wanted it. Some things never change.

The Tappan Zee Bridge far pre-dates the old WTC. It was opened in 1955, while the WTC wasn't even started until 1966. You're right that it was built there to avoid Port Authority control, but that was not out of anti-PA sentiment but because the state wanted the money for itself and wanted to make sure the New York State Thruway had no competition.

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Why you may ask would NY go to all that effort? It was because it knew the bridge would be a cash cow and the PA was notorious for keeping all it's revenue in house, despite having a huge surplus and the local mass transit being in desperate need of funds. It's no coincidence the Tappan Zee and WTC originated at roughly the same time. The WTC was the PA's way of keeping it's cash out of the hands of NY & NJ, it's supposed masters.

In no way am I a defender of anything the Port Authority does, but NY State wanted all that toll revenue for themselves. And as I recall some in NY wanted the PA to get involved with the new bridge to pay for it this go around.

A footnote as to why the bridge is located bizarrely there at the widest point to begin with. It was to keep it out of the greedy mitts of the Port Authority, whose charter gave it dominion over Hudson crossings within a 25 mile radius from the Statue of Liberty.

PA=Vampire squid.

The replacement for the Tappan Zee
Bridge will carry eight lanes of traffic
between Rockland and Westchester
Counties.




By JOSEPH BERGER
January 19, 2014

David Capobianco was a
toddler in 1964 when the
Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge slowly soared
over his neighborhood
of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,
and tethered it to Staten
Island. As he grew up,
the improbable notion of
assembling something so
big and of such
gossamer design
propelled him to become
a civil engineer.

Now after years of
public argument and
indecision, the first new
colossal steel bridge in
the New York area since
the Verrazano is finally
beginning to rise over
one of the most spacious
stretches of the Hudson
River, a replacement for
the decaying Tappan
Zee, the longest bridge in
the state, and Mr.
Capobianco, 51, is its
project manager.

?All other projects I?ve
worked on are dwarfed
by this ? the size of the
equipment involved, the
enormity of what we?re
doing, the number of
people involved,? he
said.

From a small boat on the
gunmetal waters of the
Hudson, weaving among
an archipelago of stout
barges and giraffe-like
cranes, the scale of the
work in progress is
impressive. The eight-lane bridge ? actually
two parallel spans ?that will stretch across a
3.1-mile breadth of the
river between
Tarrytown in
Westchester County and
South Nyack in Rockland
County will by some
measures be the widest
in the world.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/nyr ... se-across-the-hudson.html