tled land-owners who were still resisting the gigantic Incadel
project).
item’, the tolls. The Authorities were creations of the states,
usually acting in pairs, and as such en)oyed legal protections
not available to other private firms engaged in interstate com-
merce. Among these protections, in the typical enabling act,
was a provision that “the two said states will not . . . diminish
or impair the power of the Authority to establish, levy and
collect tolls and other charges . . .” The federal government
helped; although the Federal Bridge Act of 1946 required that
the collection of tolls must cease with the payment of amor-
tization, Congress almost never invoked the Act against any
Authority. Conseq.uently, the tolls never dropped; by 1953
the Port of New York Authority was reporting a profit of over
twenty million dollars a year, and annual collections were in-
creasing at the rate of ten per cent a year.
Some of the take went into the development of new facili-
tiesmost of them so placed as to increase the take, rather
than solve the traffic problem. Again the Port of New York
Authority led the way; it built, against all sense, a third tube
for the Lincoln Tunnel, thus pouring eight and a half million
more cars per year into Manhattan’s mid-town area, where
the city was already strangling for want of any adequate
ducts to take away the then-current traffic.
Item: the Port cops. The Authorities had been authorized
from the beginning to police their own prertises. As the Au-
thorities got bigger, so did the private police forces.