Do New Jersey Republicans have some death wish for transportation's busiest corridor?

[nonperson]

New Jersey. The state that gets the LEAST back for every federal tax dollar sent in, year after year after year. The state where Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen (member of one of the richest families in New Jersey ((hell, they have everything from streets to arboretums to you name it named after them all over the state)) is proposing sweeping up some of the few of the crumbs that manage to fall on New Jersey back onto the plate of states like Mississippi that consistently get FAR MORE than they pay in federal tax dollars, year after year after year.

Frelinghuysen's idiocy seems to be in the same vein as that other Republican fool, Rick Scott, who refused federal transportation dollars for Florida. But New Jersey has been and is experiencing mass transportation problems from lack of adequate service to Chris Christie's killing the ARC tunnel. Republicans are short-sighted but what they're doing to transportation in the most densely populated state in the busiest corridor in the nation is absolutely suicidal. At least for the vast majority of us. I'm sure Christie, Frelinghuysen and the rest of the Republican wrecking crew have some angle to make a fortune off of destroying our already inadequate transportation system.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/06/nj_transportation_funding_thre.html

Federal transportation funding for N.J. is threatened by Mississippi floods

Published: Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 6:30 AM
By Mike Frassinelli/The Star-Ledger

WASHINGTON — During a grand presentation in the ornate rotunda of New York Penn Station last month, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was Santa Claus in a gray suit, handing out more than $2 billion for rail projects.

Nearly half a billion dollars was to go toward electrical upgrades on the Northeast Corridor between Trenton and New York City, bringing relief to beleaguered commuters on America’s busiest rail line.

...snip...

"It’s very discouraging that a congressman from New Jersey, although he has good motivations, should really rob Peter to pay Paul in this action," said New Jersey transportation expert Martin E. Robins, director emeritus of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University.

The money would presumably go to help problems such as the one that made Tuesday's commute a nightmare for thousands of passengers: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/06/nj_transit_service_is_suspende.html">A transformer fire early Tuesday in New Brunswick caused the loss of power on most of the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey.

Flood relief is flood relief and it should be funded as such. Infrastructure improvement shouldn't be sacrificed especially with the sorry condition of New Jersey's infrastructure and its ultra-high volume.

Read more at the link.