In actuality, the only future growth that Goethals Twin is sure to encourage is an explosion of truck traffic traveling Staten Island and Brooklyn roadways. Port Authority and NYMTC documents describe the Goethals twin, together with a widened Staten Island Expressway, as an essential component of a major new truck priority route from New Jersey and the port areas to east-of-Hudson markets. But freight planners have only just begun to envision what a more aggressive rail freight strategy for the NJ ports and the metropolitan region might be able to achieve (see story, next page).

Moreover, the Port Authority seems caught between its contention that its road pricing plan will help to manage and ease peak traffic, and its message to Staten Island that the toll plan's chief benefit will be construction of the new bridge to accommodate more cars and trucks. Staten Islanders, long opposed to the Goethals Bridge project, may not buy it. The Staten Island Register wrote this week that the toll increase is simply a sideshow designed to distract attention from the PA push for the unwanted bridge.

The Goethals twin budget would be better spent on long-needed upgrades to the rail freight network on both sides of the Hudson River. Aggressive investment in new rail- and barge-based intermodal distribution centers would allow growth in port business without flooding the region with additional truck trips. The $345 million plus in the agency's capital program ear-marked for the misbegotten Goethals twin could, for instance, fully fund the needs documented in the New Jersey Rail Freight Master Plan, with some left over for the laundry list of rail freight needs in New York State. This shift in investment would be a strong complement to the Port Authority's adoption of congestion pricing, further increasing rail freight's competitiveness.