{"id":959,"date":"2011-08-23T09:09:01","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T13:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=959"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:28:09","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:28:09","slug":"zee-public-authority-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/08\/23\/zee-public-authority-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Zee Public Authority Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yevgeny Shrago<\/em><\/p>\n

NPR\u2019s Planet Money has an interesting\u00a0story<\/a>\u00a0about why the Tappan Zee Bridge is in the wrong place, on a much wider part of the Hudson River than if it had been placed a few miles farther south. \u00a0Essentially, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had a monopoly on all bridges within a 25 mile radius of the Statue of Liberty.\u00a0 If then-New York governor Thomas Dewey had put the bridge farther south, he couldn\u2019t have used the money from toll revenues on the bridge to fund the New York State Thruway. \u00a0Naturally, libertarians have a\u00a0story<\/a>\u00a0about how this illustrates the inferiority of public infrastructure.\u00a0 Matthew Yglesias ably\u00a0rebuts<\/a>\u00a0this claim, but I think his second point about the problems with federalism in a metro spread between several states doesn\u2019t go far enough.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Yglesias suggests that the federalism story and the Port Authority\/NYS Thruway competition stories are separate, but as anyone who has read\u00a0The Power Broker<\/a>\u00a0can tell you, they are intimately related. \u00a0While Dewey was putting the Tappan Zee in the wrong place, Robert Moses was at the height of his corrupt power at the Triborough Bridge Authority, building bridges and highways either out of spite or an obsession with straight lines, but always with an eye toward maximizing the power vested in the authority\u2019s he ran vis a vis the other ones.<\/p>\n

Public authorities exist because metro areas cross city and state lines, so projects have to as well. In metro areas without a strong metropolitan planning organization (almost all of them), these projects get done piecemeal, whenever state governments can agree, and create centers of power and money for state politicians to fight over and hoard.\u00a0 Ultimately, authorities that are supposed to be run for the public good operate in ways that don\u2019t make sense in either a private or public market: case in point are the vicious fare increases the Port Authority\u00a0enacted<\/a>\u00a0on its PATH commuter system to go along with the more loudly bemoaned, but far more logical toll increases of all the other Hudson River crossings. \u00a0The Port Authority ends up worrying about its own budgeted bottom line, instead fulfilling its duties as an element of the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yevgeny Shrago NPR\u2019s Planet Money has an interesting\u00a0story\u00a0about why the Tappan Zee Bridge is in the wrong place, on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-ft","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}