In 2004, a sex scandal led the Portland media to reveal to people that the city was run by a light-rail mafia. Since then, I’ve told people in other cities that, if their region builds rail transit, they better hope for a sex scandal so they can find out where their money went.

Artist’s conception of proposed LaGuardia AirTrain provided courtesy of the office of the soon-to-be ex-governor.

New York City residents are lucky: a sex scandal there may derail a wasteful 2‑mile-long “people mover” (automated guideway) project that I critiqued a year ago, noting that it “will cost $2 billion, make traffic congestion worse, dump 87,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and probably isn’t necessary due to the pandemic.” The project was supported by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who this week agreed to resign due to sexual harassment claims.

Cuomo’s imminent departure has made it safe for project opponents within the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which would have built the project, to publicly raise their objections to it. Less than six hours after Cuomo’s announcement, dozens of Port Authority staffers signed a letter sent to the agency director asking him to kill the project.

“For too long, Gov. Cuomo and his staff have repeatedly pushed the agency to make non-transparent, politically motivated decisions, including decisions that squander the trust and money of our bondholders, customers, and the general public,” said the letter. The letter suggested that Cuomo had exerted “undue influence” to get Port Authority planners to “manipulate the federally-mandated Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] process” to favor the project over alternatives including bus-rapid transit or extending an existing subway line so passengers wouldn’t be forced to change trains.

Based on the EIS, the Federal Transit Administration agreed to help fund the people mover last month. But the authors of the letter (who asked to remain anonymous until Cuomo has left office) call into question that document’s reliability. For example, the EIS estimated that, if the people mover is built, it would increase transit’s share of travel to the airport from 6 to 10 percent, a number that is especially questionable considering the pandemic’s affect on peoples’ willingness to ride transit.

Even without knowing about possible manipulation of the data, my reading of the environmental impact statement revealed the project was inane. The EIS admitted that, even with the projected increase in transit usage, traffic congestion around the airport would increase if the project is built. Since congestion relief was supposed to be the biggest goal of the project, that should have been enough to kill it.

Thanks to Cuomo’s planned resignation, New York City has a chance to save taxpayers $2 billion or more on a wasteful and irksome project. Too bad taxpayers in Portland and other light-rail cities didn’t have the same opportunity.