Congestion Pricing 2.0

I notice in the plan that the parking tax exemption for Manhattan residents is eliminated. If I'm not mistaken that tax is 21%. I don't know if the people who live there are going to go for that so fast because it can easily amount to over $100 a month and if some of them who live above 60th St. are going to be tolled for driving south then it's adding insult to injury.

The vast majority of Manhattanites don't own cars.

But those of us who do own cars are highly motivated to oppose these blatant attempts to force the few (car owners) to subsidize the many (mass transit users). Hear us ROAR!

Why shouldn't transit riders pay for the entire cost of mass transit?

Alternatively, let's license bicyclists, and use the license fees to subsidize mass transit. Also, why should bicyclists not be affected by congestion pricing? Let's charge bicyclists $2 each time they cross the East River bridges (and all other bridges), and apply those fees to subsidize mass transit. Ditto pedestrians, especially those with strollers, baby carriages or babybjorns.

Not true. Not everyone can afford four wheels, plus gas, insurance, tolls, tags, etc. Also, the difficulty of finding free parking, and the extreme expenses of paid parking, will dissuade many prospective drivers. I'll take that risk if it means I don't have to subsidize other people's rides on buses and subways. And I'll gladly pay the increased costs of my own subway and bus rides.

Perhaps the tolls will stay the same, and maintenance of bridges and roads will increase to safer levels. Currently, our roadways resemble those of war torn impoverished nations... More potholes and bad joins than flat roadway... And drivers pay the price in suspension failures, blown tires and damaged alloy wheels.

We did see a peace dividend. Didn't happen right away but it surely contributed to the budget surplus we had under Clinton. Of course that all went into the crapper after 9/11 and we decided we better start spending more on defense.

Of course you were asked....at the voting booth., Democracy in action. Although the 2000 Bush-Gore election might not have been the best example of that.

But those of us who do own cars are highly motivated to oppose these blatant attempts to force the few (car owners) to subsidize the many (mass transit users). Hear us ROAR!

Beyond that, we do sure give away a lot of Manhattan real estate (the most expensive land in America) to you driving types. But for some reason that doesn't register as a subsidy?

Every citizen benefits from the provision of roadways, just as every citizen benefits from the provision of high-quality mass transit. But every citizen doesn't benefit from giving private drivers unlimited free access to every one of said roadways— in fact, private drivers congesting Lower Manhattan slow police, fire, and EMT responses as well as Sanitation services, which means degraded service and higher taxes for everyone. Likewise, many buses in Manhattan are nearly useless because congestion renders them slower than walking.

And that isn't even mentioning how much of Lower Manhattan roadways are dedicated exclusively to parking for private vehicles for free or at highly discounted prices, which doesn't benefit anyone else at all (just compare the price of street space to what garage operators ask for on the private market).

And transporting freight through the core of the most congested business district in the US is nuts, unless it's ending up there. But the current toll setup incentivizes hauling freight originating on Long Island via Canal Street and the avenues in Manhattan!

Finally, it's not unfair to ask drivers to pay for their negative effects on others, especially their disproportionate use of scarce urban space and the dangers they cause to others around them. Likewise, it's fair to ask everyone to subsidize mass transit, since it's the engine that drives the enormous agglomeration economies that make Manhattan such a productive place to work. The specific mechanism of MTA funding via bridge tolls perhaps isn't ideal, but it's political reality. It would be fine by me if bridge tolls went into the general fund and mass transit were paid for out of it, but that's as much an aesthetic question as anything else.

Ferries aren't a very productive form of transit, but that's a whole 'nother issue. And cyclists and pedestrians don't directly pay for the resources they use, but they use far fewer resources (in terms of land and maintenance required) but they pay sales, income, and property taxes in prodigious amounts.

dupe.

Communities east of the Hudson can also get their freight via the Verazzano and GW and Triborough instead of Canal St. and Amsterdam Ave, as the current toll structure incents.

And no one is proposing we ban personal vehicles from lower Manhattan, just that we realign the incentives so they use existing infrastructure more efficiently, and drive in/out of the region via expressways outside the CBD unless they have a $10 reason not to. Is that really so crazy?

That Salon article is dumb. It's just a list of annoyances without any real pattern. Yes, American mass transit could be a lot better, but the fact that the MTA needs to adjust service patterns on nights and weekends to facilitate weekends is hardly a sign of failure— it's a fact of life with a 24-hour system. Most other rapid transit systems do maintenance when they're fully shut down overnight.

If American mass transit were dying, why are people up and down the eastern seaboard (and in SF and Seattle and, increasingly, even Los Angeles) paying enormous amounts of money for modest homes near mass transit stations in neighborhoods that, until recently, they would have been afraid to set foot in?