New Jersey is making history again. We are building what will become the poorest performing rail route in the country. It's not even done yet, and already it stinks worse than any rail route in America – worse than rail routes that actually exist and have had crashes.

We already knew our nearest competitor for this title isn't nearly as bad as we'll be. While routes in Dallas and Galveston, Texas, annually make back only one-tenth of what it takes to run them, the 34-mile South Jersey Light Rail line between Camden and Trenton will make back about one-seventieth.

But now NJ Transit officials have realized also that if they charge $1.10 like they plan to, not only will they make just $1.1 million a year to offset the annual expenses of $70 million, it may even cost them more than $1.1 million a year for the staff and equipment to collect the fares.

We have somehow figured out how to lose more money by charging money!

Now some officials are talking about building another light rail line, in Gloucester County. But don't worry, it'll be much better than all New Jersey's previous public works projects: better than the E-ZPass toll collection system that costs more than it earns, better than the emissions testing program that broke down the first time the weather got cold, or hot, or whatever it was, better even than that costly virtual reality ride for the Camden Aquarium that the Delaware River Port Authority paid for and didn't get.

And gosh, remember all those other past projects that the next project will be better than?

THE ANTI-GRAVITY PARK

We were supposed to have a park where all the physical properties of the universe no longer applied. People's bodies would be inside out. Mannequins could follow you around asking what you were doing. And of course, everybody was weightless.

People said it was impossible. But we didn't believe them. Then the state of New Jersey spent $64 million on a feasibility study that proved it was impossible, but by then we'd invested so much, we couldn't back out. We sank another $100 million and all we actually built was the parking lot. It was an unpaved vacant lot, and the first time someone tried to park there, it broke.

REBUILDING ROME

We spent about $300 million trying to reconstruct the ancient city of Rome next to the Camden County incinerator, and the resulting debt burden is the reason why schools no longer can afford to teach children any fractions except two-thirds and, purely by chance, one-seventieth.

Most of that money went toward importing parts of the Coliseum from Rome. But as is typical in New Jersey, there had been no competitive bidding on the shipping contract, so pieces ultimately arrived in 16,000 separate FedEx envelopes. Officials gave up after about two years of this, and all that remains now – somewhere just off Interstate 295 – are two stone arches and an aqueduct.

THE CITY RUN BY DOGS

Some governor – possibly Christie Whitman, possibly Richard Howell (1792-1801, Federalist) – declared that if you could teach a dog to catch a Frisbee and stay off the couch, you also could teach it the basic functions of running government, such as issuing bonds and quietly rewarding its friends.

So the state spent about $70 million to build a little town with a loose freeholder government system it thought dogs might like, then it dressed the dogs in tutus and sweaters and fishing caps and made them walk around on their hind legs with little toy bubble pipes taped to their mouths.

But the experiment collapsed as soon as the dogs were let into city hall. Two of the border collies immediately tried to refinance the municipal debt using some crackpot mortgage company they'd found on the Internet. And interest rates were still at 8 percent. I mean, all those finance charges, and they were only going to save a quarter of a percentage point. Stupid dogs.