Once More Unto The Breach!

Despite the agreement of the three metropolitan-region Governors and Mayor Wagner to create a new interstate committee to well, after all these years to--study and report on the crisis in transportation, they don't yet seem to have their heart in the job. The next order of business will be a meeting later this month on the New Haven's state of chronic shock, and from this Governor Meyner will absent himself. It's none of New Jersey's business. And when Governor Rockefeller was asked about a plan—another plan, but let's not be bored by the subject—for tri-State creation of an agency to own or lease and operate a metropolitan transit system, he sounded as indifferent as does Mr. Meyner about Mr. Ribi-coff's transit problems:

Basic to any solution, of course, is the problem of financing, and I do not see at this stage how a tri-State authority would be able to raise money for any substantial program.

"At this time" is the point of the objection. To be sure, no one now has on paper the blueprints of the high-speed commuter network that would solve the Metropolitan Area problem–or the corporate structure or the rate schedule or anything else. That's why the new study committee has been set up, one takes it.

Despite repeated discouragement, we choose to look forward with warm interest to this committee's attack on the question. In the last few years we have run enough tests in the laboratory to know a great deal about what won't work in the long run, from such arbitrarily apportioned tax financing as the Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission's to such line-holding emergency operations as the New Jersey rail division's contract program. The question now raised is whether the same States as created the Port of New York Authority, plus Connecticut and New York City, cannot devise another interstate agency to do for the commuter what interstate effort has done for the airline, the trucker, the shipper by water, the passenger motorist. Man devises his government and its agencies to serve him. The question at this time is not whether but how the service shall be done. It's our common problem, and it should be met head on, for the immediate fun of it and perhaps with an eye on the ultimate record to be made by the Governor who first cuts this colossus down to size.