There is no Moses on the road to Secaucus

By ALFRED P. DOBLIN

TWO WEEKS ago, I attended one of NJ Transit’s public forums on its proposed rate hike.

The average increase is expected to be 9 percent. The forum I attended was inside the so-called Secaucus Transfer, which is officially named after the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

The senator was a champion of Amtrak and, in most political circles, that made him a champion of mass transit in general. I can’t say I know if Lautenberg ever used NJ Transit. But he is now forever linked – pun intended – to New Jersey’s oft-maligned rail and bus agency.

Commuters venting at the microphone rattled off complaints I am all too familiar with – late trains, poor service and increasing costs. Since 2001, I have slogged through the NJ Transit system five days a week. About three of those years on buses, the rest on the rail.

Most days the system works, but it works with little aggravations. Complete system failure is not an everyday occurrence, but it is not uncommon. If I were to cite NJ Transit’s greatest institutional challenge it would be to communicate with its customers quickly and honestly during those failures, and to have in place alternative plans to move commuters.

The hard reality about mass transit in New Jersey, in New York, and probably Connecticut as well, is that we are the lost children of Moses. Not the one with the Ten Commandments, but the once-overlord of all things transportation in New York and its environs: Robert Moses.

I confess to having never finished Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, “The Power Broker.” The book is just too heavy for me to lug around on mass transit. That is ironic because Moses hated mass transit. He loved the automobile even though he did not drive, and his expansion of roads and bridges was at the expense of mass transit. That disdain for a mode of transportation that put the common man shoulder to shoulder with other common men became ingrained in the suburban psyche. Maybe not consciously, but it was there.

So the Chris Christies who grew up in middle-class suburbs have little use for mass transit as public officials, because they had little use for it as private citizens. Rail lines in New Jersey disappeared as people opted to drive. The private companies that ran the railroads went out of business, and public entities were created to keep mass transit going. I was reminded recently at a conference on regional rail that NJ Transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Amtrak were created out of necessity.

Moses ensured that 21st century New York and New Jersey would be car-centric, gridlocked places. There is no political will in either state to invest broadly in new infrastructure. The fight is to just keep existing bridges from falling down. We need an anti-Moses, an ego-driven public official who will champion mass transit.

Oddly this is where Governor Christie could play a part. Assuming he realizes the road to the White House for now is blocked by more than orange traffic cones, he could confront the beast. The governor who killed a trans-Hudson rail project without offering any alternative, who has sat on his hands for more than five years as the state’s Transportation Trust Fund runs out of money, has the outsized personality to bring the governors of New York and Connecticut together to create something that could address the regional transportation crisis confronting the metropolitan region.

The governor is as unlikely an ally of mass transit as Saul was of Christianity before he took the road to Damascus. But sometimes events can be transformative, and Christie – if he wants to be president someday – needs to do something transformative.

The current mass transit model is not working. There is little political capital to fund big projects, and when there are big projects, they rarely make sense. Take one look at the Frank Lautenberg Rail Station. Besides no link to Amtrak, once you pass through central turnstiles, there is no easy access to restrooms. When an agency can’t even get the toilets right, there is little hope for building new trans-Hudson tunnels.

Whether the tri-state region would be better served by a tri-state transportation authority is worth exploring. Commuters would appreciate seamless ticketing between multiple rail and bus systems, if nothing else. And the big stuff – the Robert Moses building of bridges and tunnels, but this time for mass transit – could be funded more easily if the costs were shared across a wider area.

Christie has the Robert Moses ego, but he does not have his attention to detail. And elected officials are quirky when it comes to infrastructure projects. They are more interested in cutting the ribbon than taking a ride on the train. That might have added to Christie’s lack of enthusiasm for ARC; it would not have been completed during his term. There was no ribbon-cutting photo-op.

Robert Moses found a way of building the big things and getting his name of some of it as well. Big things only get built with public money when someone as big as the project is pushing for it.

Current transportation models are not working. I don’t think Christie cares much about commuters or mass transit, but I believe he wants to be president – eventually. Build something, then. The currency of commerce is not just money, but the movement of goods and people. If you can literally move both, you have the power. Robert Moses understood that. The biblical Moses parted the Red Sea; the New York Moses could have paved a road through.

Transportation is a powerful thing. Lautenberg loved Amtrak. I don’t think he was that informed on NJ Transit, but his name is on a commuter rail station and so for the ages, or until someone sells naming rights, he has a building.

Christie should look to mass transit and see a legacy marker. Even a rail station with poor toilet placement is a better monument than orange cones near a bridge someone else built.