Gov. Christie kept arguing that there may yet have been an actual traffic study that precipitated this whole mess. He said a number of times that he would know a traffic study if he tripped over it. .Without working for the Port Authority of NY & NJ, I can tell you without any equivocation that there was no traffic study. Below the fold, I will explain.
Any one who has ever worked in government, and anyone who has ever been an activist regarding governmental services knows that government, no matter what the entity is, doesn't decide to "just do" something. This is especially true when it comes to an agency like a Department of Transportation, or in this case a Port Authority.
First of all, there would be meetings, and someone in those meetings would have taken notes. There would have been emails to all of the "stakeholders" who would have been involved. There would be emails to set up the meeting(s) and there would be emails to recap the meeting(s). We are confident that the Ft. Lee stakeholders don't have such emails and never attended any such meetings because they have told us so, and THEY were definitely blindsided by four days of traffic jams. So apparently were all the other stakeholders, the state police, the NY side of the Port Authority, the NJ DOT, Bergen County, etc. I have not seen any reps from any of these organizations come forward and say, "Oh, yah, we were at meetings to set this up".
Also, where is the actual study? In the NJ Senate hearings, we know Mr. Baroni didn't provide data from the study. The reason is there is no data.
There is no data because there was no written study. Governments do not do anything, especially DOTs without it being written down. There would be a purpose for the study, as for now stated to see if Ft. Lee needed three access lanes. There would be a methodology comprising more than traffic cones and shutting those lanes down. There would be the personnel who conducted the study, where are they, who are they? There would be the equipment to do the actual study. There would have been contingency plans for the clusterfuck that would result from shutting down two access lanes to the busiest bridge in the world. And there would have been a report with the corresponding data.
Until all of this information is presented, then it is safe to say that there was no traffic study. So, Gov. Christie, stop blowing sunshine up our collective asses about there being a possibility that there was a traffic study. If there had been, we would have seen it by now.
UPDATE: As was mentioned in comments, there would be a money trial. Where is the budget analysis? Also, out here in Portland, when traffic is going to be messed up for something like this, there are announcements in the local papers so people can plan. They don't do that in Jersey?
UPDATE: Adam B, points out this article that says there was a study.. I hadn't seen it until know, but after reading it, I am still not convinced. It looks sketchy at best. And as far as I am concerned raises even more questions vis-à-vis what I have written above.
UPDATED 1:58 PST: I know I am not always the sharpest tool in the shed, so can someone explain something to me? If there was a "real" study which would have supported that this was a legit act, 1) why didn't Wildstien produce this earlier, 2)why did he take the 5th, and 3)how come Floye wouldn't have known about it through a regular investigation?