From Chris Christie’s radio interview about Bridgegate yesterday:
You still don’t know at this point whether there was a traffic study?
Well, what I’m saying, Eric, did this start as a traffic study that morphed into some political shenanigans, or did it start as political shenanigans that became a traffic study?
Oh come on. If this started as a legitimate traffic study, there would be two pieces of routine evidence for it. First, there would be some kind of planning document from the Port Authority engineering department. Second, there would be some kind of report on the results of the study. This is the absolute bare minimum that would accompany a genuine traffic study, especially one that involved a major lane closure.
If either of these documents exists, Christie would have produced it long ago. He hasn’t, and it’s simply not plausible for him to continue pretending that we don’t know if there was a real traffic study that prompted this affair. There wasn’t.
POSTSCRIPT: Robert Durando, general manager of the George Washington Bridge, has testified that data was collected during the days when the Fort Lee access lanes were closed. This is meaningless. It was tolls data, which is collected routinely every day. The fact that this is the only data that was collected is evidence against the the notion that there was a real traffic study being conducted, not evidence for it.
