The Newark Bay Bridge will be replaced – but the planned expansion with two bridges and twice as many lanes has been scrapped.<\/p>\n
Will it improve the \u201cToll of Commuting\u201d in an area known for congestion?<\/p>\n
“It’s a great victory for New Jersey, for Hudson County, for transit, for the environment,” said advocate John Reichman, of Empower NJ.<\/p>\n
Many Hudson County mayors celebrated the news last week that Gov. Mikie Sherrill recommended a single bridge replacement over Newark Bay. It’s a major downsizing of the original plan. Critics had argued it would attract more drivers and create a bottleneck going into the Holland Tunnel and increase pollution.<\/p>\n
\tThe new bridge will replace the old one, which was built 70 years ago.<\/p>\n
\t“That bridge is structurally deficient and functionally obsolete,” said NJ Turnpike Authority Executive Director Kris Kolluri.<\/p>\n
\tThere are concerns from Bayonne. A handful of residents called into the meeting explaining the traffic woes they handle daily, and their disappointment that the new bridge is now essentially a replacement of the old one, rather than a traffic solution.<\/p>\n
\tThe project originally included a series of ramps to give trucks direct access to the Bayonne port without using exit 14A. That is still on the table, but isn’t included in this batch of funding.<\/p>\n
\t“The Turnpike Authority will continue to work with Bayonne to see how we can solve that problem as part of our program,” Kolluri said.<\/p>\n
\tThe previous plan was set to cost $11 billion, but the new $6.7 billion figure is still the costliest project in Turnpike history. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Newark Bay Bridge will be replaced – but the planned expansion with two bridges and twice as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[26226,41891,9,24,7607,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-158282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-bridge","tag-new-jersey-turnpike","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newark","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}