Driving from New Jersey to New York is about to get even more expensive, thanks to the cash-sucking Port Authority.
Passenger-car tolls are heading up tomorrow on the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the Staten Island crossings by 75 cents for motorists with E-ZPasses and $1 for those paying cash.
The long-planned hikes, effective as of 3 a.m., push cash tolls to $13 and E-ZPass to $10.25 in peak hours and $8.25 in off-peak hours.
And starting in 2013, PA tolls are to go up three Decembers in a row.
College of Staten Island finance professor Jonathan Peters thinks drivers should be upset with the PA, which makes a 46.9 percent profit on its bridges and tunnels in a region where wages haven’t risen nearly as much as tolls have.
“This is a recession,” Peters said. “I don’t know if the Port Authority has heard.”
AAA is challenging the hikes in a federal suit it filed in 2011, a month after they were approved. Win or lose, it hopes to unearth details about how the PA sets tolls and what it does with the money.
Federal law requires interstate tolls to be “just and reasonable,” said AAA spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. “We think these toll increases are neither,” he added.