“Our highways, our bridges are unsafe,” President Donald Trump said at a meeting of the National Governors Association Monday. “Our tunnels — I mean, we have tunnels in New York where the tiles are on the ceiling, and you see many tiles missing. And you wonder, you know, you’re driving at 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour through a tunnel.”
“Take a look at the Lincoln Tunnel and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and you’re driving, and you see all this loose material that’s heavy,” the president continued, taking a break from his previous target, LaGuardia airport. “And it was made many years ago, so it’s heavy. Today, it’s light. It used to be better. The problem is, you got to hold it up. And I say to myself — every time I drive through, I say, I wonder how many people are hurt or injured when they are driving at 40, 50 miles an hour through a tunnel, and the tile falls off.”
“So,” Trump concluded, “we have to fix our infrastructure.”
No doubt America desperately needs to fix crumbling roads and bridges, but apparently the MTA, which runs the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, did not take kindly to being singled out, or to the accusations that pieces of ceiling are falling on drivers’ heads. “Not a single person has been injured by any falling tiles because no tiles are falling,” Beth DeFalco, the communications director for MTA, said in a statement. “They are being replaced by workers as part of an infrastructure project to repair the tunnel from Hurricane Sandy damage.”
The Port Authority, which oversees the Lincoln Tunnel, also promised the public that they didn’t have to worry about tiles raining down. “The tile structures in the various Lincoln Tunnel tubes are intact, regularly inspected and pose no danger to the public,” a spokesman said. “In the last 12 months there have been no reported incidents involving falling tiles.”
Trump has, so far, been short on specifics about his $1 trillion infrastructure plan, besides what his “trucker friend” keeps telling him.
