BenedictGomez
Well-known member
Is it nice there? I know Lehigh County and Bucks County pretty well (they're both beautiful). I dont know much about Northampton.
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Oil nearly falls below $80 on oversupply
- Thread starter Puck it
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Is it nice there? I know Lehigh County and Bucks County pretty well (they're both beautiful). I dont know much about Northampton.
or perhaps the correlation is due to the fact that states that are growing dont have to tax as heavily as states that are losing population. look at detroit for example, it has to tax its remaining citizens disproportionately because it has a government infrastructure for a population of 2m when now its down to 700k. If NY and NJ were growing like florida, it wouldnt have to tax its citizens as much.
there are a lot of reasons other than taxes that people move to florida. bottom line.
Not Sure
Well-known member
Not bad , financial woes like everywhere else. Northern part of county is rural. Bethlehem has ( Music mess ) I mean Music fest. Bethlehem to Easton corridor is filling in becoming one big town.
good luck with your property values when your state doesnt invest in future growth. fwiw-I live in westchester 35 miles from midtown and the train takes 45 minutes to grand central. from NJ, 10-15 miles to penn station takes an hour because there is no capacity in the lone tunnel that was built 100 years ago.
and you are misrepresenting the facts. the feds were paying 70% of the cost of the tunnel. I can't say in this public forum how I know this, but trust me, christie killed the tunnel to use the money to cover the operating deficit. typical republican shenanigans of shortchanging capital investments. looks good in the short term, though.
Rowsdower
Member
Yeah agreed, I hate the taxes in NJ as much as Benedict, but the tunnel has to happen. Killing it essentially means crippling rail service into NYC. It will be a huge problem in 10-20 years if nothing is done. I understand not wanting to be on the hook for the bill, but at some point its going to have to get done.
That said, I'll be moving back to PA this winter. I can't justify paying twice as much in COL for exactly the same things I'd have across the Delaware. It means a 45 minute commute into work, but to me its a fair trade off especially with gas prices falling like they are. Plus it puts me back within an hour of getting to a hill, albeit a mole-hill but its still better than the hour and a half or nothing drive I had here. NJ seems to have a captive populace in those who work in the NYC metro. There's a large tax base of relatively affluent workers that need that proximity to the city, and the state knows no matter what crap it pulls those people can't reasonably go anywhere else. Even when they do there's two more behind them to take their place. It just makes the state so horrendously inefficient. Like I said, you get the same quality of education in PA, the same infrastructure, etc. but for half the cost. No other state seems to have the expenditure issues NJ does.
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AdironRider
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Oh ok we'll just take your word for it...
bigbog
Active member
No BG, not that...not everyone is willing to party with everyone else in Big Oil, just as some are more willing to dive into other forms of energy...and "upset the cart"...Y/N?
BenedictGomez
Well-known member
I'm confident letting others here decide who is "misrepresenting the facts".
You who only pointed out the $3 Billion that New Jersey residents were on the hook for, or me who was pointing out the correct total construction estimate of roughly $10 Billion to $12 Billion to complete the entire project?
Oh,,,,,,,, but what's that you say?
Since the good people of Arizona, Vermont, Utah, Iowa, and Maine were paying for most of the costs of my New Jersey tunnel, I should be totally okay with it? Sorry. I dont roll like that. That's IMO a big part of the, "Me, me, me, me, me, me, me" mentality that has this country so entirely financially screwed in the first place. Someone else is on the hook? Soak em!
I grew up off of 78, and the 5pm traffic pattern is NOTHING like when I was a kid. Now it starts at 4:15pm, and whereas 78 West used to be empty, now it's nothing buy cars with PA plates heading home. New Jersey's high taxes have turned parts of Eastern Pennsylvania into something of a late-19th century wild west boomtown. Funny thing is, Pennsy isnt a low tax state, but compared to Jersey it seems like a dream.
It's really more of a horse race. California, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and a few others are all in an exciting race to see who will go bankrupt first. My roulette chips are on Illinois.
millerm277
Active member
Just chiming in as a NJ resident with a reverse commute: I-78 crawls for all 30 miles from the PA border to 287, for pretty much the duration of all the hours you would want to commute. It has gotten vastly worse in the last 5-10 years.
I know a few people who've moved back to NJ because when they went out there it was great and now it's a near-impossible commute unless you have an employer with flexible hours and you're willing to do things like working a 7-3 schedule.
From what I know of I-80, it's just as bad.
Sounds like you all need to invest in public transportation in a big way down in NJ. Boston does as well and there are plans to vastly expand T service to growing suburb areas. We shall see when the investment is made.
or people could move to the tax free promise lands of Charlotte or Atlanta and sit in similar traffic that's on 8 lane super highways with garbage public transit.
Yes, I live in low tax NH. Guess what? The amount of road infrastructure projects going on around the seacoast right now are the biggest in decades. Preparing for the future. Needs to be done.
or people could move to the tax free promise lands of Charlotte or Atlanta and sit in similar traffic that's on 8 lane super highways with garbage public transit.
Yes, I live in low tax NH. Guess what? The amount of road infrastructure projects going on around the seacoast right now are the biggest in decades. Preparing for the future. Needs to be done.
moresnow
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Exactly. Why should we invest in rail infrastructure when we can just drive?
Rowsdower
Member
The thing is, NJ has great public transit, but getting into NYC presents a massive bottleneck. You've got to get under the Hudson which means going down to two tracks in the old Pennsy tunnels. Plus, those tubes are 100 years old and should be taken out of service to be rehabbed. As it stands you've got to reduce speed and there's often shutdowns because of equipment failures in the tunnel.
I really don't mind the commute. I'm working on my PhD and I only have 2 years or so left on it, so its not like I'll be doing this forever. Afterwards I'll either look for a job in PA or move north.
Or maybe Switzerland... I hear its a great place to be for biotech, but I suppose I'd have to learn German...
exactly. One can live in Poughkeepsie and have the same commute to midtown on the train as from Montclair in New Jersey. Which may explain why Long Island and WESTCHESTER are growing while nj is not. So while Bg is applauding the extra 3b added to the nj operating budget, his property value are being negatively effected for long time. And tunnels don't get built in a week a month or even a year, so that short term boost for Christie, is going to damage the state for many years.
VTKilarney
Well-known member
I'll contribute to this thread being way off-topic:
A) New Jersey needs more train tunnel access to Manhattan. I am a fan of improved public transportation. Spend some time in Europe and you will see how awful our infrastructure is.
B) It's an unfortunate reality that we don't have regional (non-political border) taxation mechanisms for this type of project. In other words, tax the region that would benefit from the link regardless of where state lines lie.
C) As far as highways are concerned, there is ample research to show that they are self-defeating. When highways get clogged, people stop moving to the affected area. When you build more capacity, more people move in and eventually clog the highway just as much. This is one reason we have so much sprawl. Blindly building extra highway capacity just doubles-down on prior poor urban planning decisions. I'm not saying that it should never happen. I'm just saying that adding capacity should not be automatically assumed to be a good idea.
D) Does the failure to build an extra tunnel really affect property values that much? I'm not convinced that it affects it as much as people think. With extra rail capacity will come extra construction. Real estate values depend on supply and demand and it's naive to think that supply will remain the same.
A) New Jersey needs more train tunnel access to Manhattan. I am a fan of improved public transportation. Spend some time in Europe and you will see how awful our infrastructure is.
B) It's an unfortunate reality that we don't have regional (non-political border) taxation mechanisms for this type of project. In other words, tax the region that would benefit from the link regardless of where state lines lie.
C) As far as highways are concerned, there is ample research to show that they are self-defeating. When highways get clogged, people stop moving to the affected area. When you build more capacity, more people move in and eventually clog the highway just as much. This is one reason we have so much sprawl. Blindly building extra highway capacity just doubles-down on prior poor urban planning decisions. I'm not saying that it should never happen. I'm just saying that adding capacity should not be automatically assumed to be a good idea.
D) Does the failure to build an extra tunnel really affect property values that much? I'm not convinced that it affects it as much as people think. With extra rail capacity will come extra construction. Real estate values depend on supply and demand and it's naive to think that supply will remain the same.
Smellytele
Well-known member
As far as C is concerned couldn't the same be said for rail capacity?
VTKilarney
Well-known member
Yes and no. Yes as far as more people moving into the area and more people using the rail network. No in that a rail network is a much better network to absorb the extra use than a highway network. If people are going to exist, we want more of them using the most efficient forms of moving people.
Although... I am not a fan of building huge parking lots at the outlying commuter rail stations. That encourages sprawl. I am a proponent of cluster housing. But that's a whole different topic...
Smellytele
Well-known member
How about tax the people who are using the infrastructure?
VTKilarney
Well-known member
A better way is to tax the people that derive the benefit from the infrastructure. If you tax only the people who use it, the people who get a benefit but don't actually use it get a free ride.
The other problem with taxing the smaller subset (actual users) is that the tax would need to be higher. Assuming that the "tax" came in the form of ticket prices, the higher ticket prices would discourage people from using the rail network. We want to encourage people to use it, not discourage.
To be fair, I struggle with the concept of subsidizing mass-transit. But IMHO, the benefits of mass-transit warrant some level of subsidization. The key is to have a set of policies (zoning, etc.) that create actual benefits to public transportation. I'm not sure our policies do that.
Smellytele
Well-known member
Mass has talked about actually taxing people by how many miles they drive to pay for roads which does not play into this thinking well at all.
VTKilarney
Well-known member
Indeed. It falsely assumes that the only people deriving a benefit from the roads are the people who drive upon them. That's quite myopic.
For example, let's say that I own a restaurant in the Back Bay that serves all sorts of office workers during the lunch hour. I make a good living from the money they spend at my restaurant. How did those office workers get to my location? Did they drive? I bet you a large percentage did. If they didn't have a road to drive on, I wouldn't have my customers.
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