Great infrastructure projects — bridges and tunnels, airports, the PATH and the nation’s first container port — characterized that empire that unified the bi-state economy, but it wasn’t without political strife.
“The Port Authority has been a factor in bringing the economies of New York and New Jersey ever tighter together, to the benefits of both states,” said Martin Robins, director emeritus of the Voorhees Transportation Institute at Rutgers University. “The Port Authority has played a very valuable role. We’d be far less advanced and satisfied with the way the interstate economy works if we hadn’t had the Port Authority.”