From the cliffs of Paterson Plank Road, you can see almost all the great public transportation projects that transformed New Jersey from a farm state to the nation’s most affluent.

South is the Pulaski Skyway, high above the PATH and NJ Transit rail lines leading to Hoboken. West is the New Jersey Turnpike, and the Northeast corridor rail lines, now saturated with NJ Transit trains. The horns of those trains wail over the din of truck traffic, just as they disappear into their century-old rail tunnel.

Below the cliff, hardscrabble Route 1 & 9 links the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. Just over the hill, the spires of the George Washington Bridge skyscrape over the Hudson.

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From this spot on Paterson Plank Road, you can see all these architectural triumphs, monuments to an ambitious society that never let a little water, swamp or rock stand in its way. Across the Meadowlands, the hills of the suburbs rise. Montclair, Glen Ridge, Short Hills, Summit.

All that wealth came from access to The City.

That is New Jersey history, as in wistful past.

Here is our modern history: from the very same spot on Paterson Plank Road, you can see the preliminary work of our transportation monument — a monument to failure.

There is an empty lot where a McDonald’s was leveled a few months ago. Next door is a not-yet-leveled storage unit business, vacant and chained-off by barbed wire fence. A sign says the property is now owned by NJ Transit.

Underneath Routes 1 & 9 is a new bridge overpass, or at least half of one, to carry traffic over the train tracks that now won’t be built. The dig through the 200-million-year-old bedrock of the Palisades had not yet begun.

And now it’s dead.

After 53 years of talking, 17 years of actual studying and planning, and $478 million spent, this is what we got: a dirt lot, a shuttered storage center, and a new concrete overpass.

This saga is convoluted, to say the least, and everybody has their own version of why this won’t happen. Cost, cost overruns, empty transportation funds, politics as usual.

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It’s sad, and it speaks to what we’ve become: 53 years of talking, studying and spending, lead only to a Tunnel to Nowhere.

In the first 50 years of the last century, here’s what was built: The first railroad tunnel under the Hudson was completed in 1908. The second opened in 1909. A third in 1910. The Holland Tunnel opened in 1927. The George Washington Bridge, 1931. The Pulaski Skyway, 1932, The Lincoln Tunnel’s first tubes, 1937. The second, in 1945. All took about 10 years from drawing board to ribbon cutting, some less.

You get the idea.

There was a spirit then that seems to have died. Look at those years, and think of all the excuses those leaders could have used to fail. World War I, The Depression, World War II.

Still, it got done.

There was vision, and growth.

And now, we have dysfunction and inertia, no matter whom you blame.

And a Tunnel to Nowhere.