The New Tappan Zee Bridge Isn't as Innocent as It Looks
More than 30 years after state planners began to contemplate the future of the Tappan Zee Bridge, a new crossing is being built just north of the current bridge in the Hudson River Valley.
It wasn't supposed to happen that way. In his new book about the new bridge, Politics Across the Hudson: The Tappan Zee Megaproject, author Philip Mark Plotch relates how the state at first wanted to avoid building a new bridge and also relieve congestion. But transportation experts expect that the new bridge, by having more lanes than the current one, will likely increase traffic. (Gov. Cuomo’s special adviser on the bridge, Brian Conybeare, said that idea is “simply absurd.”)
It is just one of the many ironies that Plotch, a political science professor at St. Peter's University in Jersey City, N.J., relates in his detailed account of the project's convoluted history. He asserts it was only by employing various questionable strategies did New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally manage to get construction on the new bridge underway. Plotch writes that Cuomo exaggerated the number of jobs construction would create and portrayed what had been designed as a bus lane as an "emergency access lane," thereby streamlining the environmental review process. Cuomo also, according to Plotch, inflated the cost of an express bus route across the bridge from $1 billion to $5 billion in order to dampen the public's support for mass transit, which would have added years onto the planning process.
"There are some people who think something is so important that you need to take the liberties with that truth," Plotch said in an interview with WNYC Host Soterios Johnson.
To listen to WNYC's interview with Plotch, click on the audio.
UPDATED: With video and comment from Gov. Cuomo aide 10 p.m. July 7, 2015.
