By Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger
on December 08, 2016 at 6:28 AM, updated December 08, 2016 at 6:29 AM
You don’t need Wikipedia to tell you that New Jersey is the most densely populated state. Just go for a drive.
That brings up a question that hung over a joint legislative committee hearing on transportation Tuesday:
What will the effort to build transportation infrastructure look like under President Trump?
The Donald may have gotten elected with the votes from people who live in states where driving is a perfectly fine way of getting around. But he is a New Yorker and therefore congenitally inclined to understand the transportation needs of this part of the country.
The Donald’s No. 1 boast is that he knows how to get around the bureaucracy that stalls construction. In his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal,” Trump tells of how the city of New York began in 1980 to rebuild the Wollman ice-skating rink in Central Park but still had not completed it six years later.
“If it took me two and a half years to put up a major skyscraper,” he wrote, “surely it was possible to build a $2 million ice-skating rink in a matter of months.”
Trump took over the project and finished it in six months.
Compare that to the attitude of the many conflicting government entities that throttled the predecessor to Amtrak’s Gateway Project, which would add two new rail tunnels to Manhattan.
The original Access to the Region’s Core plan in the 1990s was to build two new tunnels that would be shared by NJ Transit and Amtrak trains.