On the heels of the news stories on the Port Authority's extended wish-list, the Staten Island Advance launched the editorial equivalent of an atomic bomb at the PA's proposed Goethals twin bridge on Wednesday.

The piece, entitled "Traffic Fantasies," was a strong statement on the potential of new highway capacity to generate new traffic: "The phenomenon is simple: If a new highway works to speed up traffic flow in a previously congested area, more and more drivers will choose to use it until it is itself congested...That pattern has been replicated in countless other traffic plagued areas of the country, which have increased highway capacity with costly and much-ballyhooed new projects only to find that within years or even months, traffic itself has increased, turning a jammed-up six-lane highway into a jammed-up 12 lane highway, and doubling pollution and congestion on local access roads."

The writers also unloaded on Assemblymember Robert Straniere and S.I. Community Board 2 transportation chair Joel Traube, who voiced support for the proposed bridge in a Tuesday news article. "The fantasy that just one more new bridge, just one more new highway will solve the traffic problem, which is fundamentally a matter of too many vehicles, is one that dies hard. But it should be pronounced dead by responsible planners. This idea has gone nowhere for years. There's a reason for that."

The Port Authority's environmental impact statement for the Goethals bridge project shows in fact that peak bridge traffic will increase significantly once the twin is in place.

The Advance called instead on the PA and other transportation officials "to consider more sensible, less dramatic means to reduce traffic congestion such as varying toll prices to reduce peak traffic on bridges and tunnels."

The continuing unpopularity of the Goethals twin project poses some problems for the NY State DOT's "major investment study" for the Staten Island Expressway. The scenarios the study is considering assume that the Goethals twin project will proceed. But DOT's analyses may turn out to be mostly hypothetical unless this assumption is changed.