(p. A18) For decades, urban planners, economists, city officials and business leaders have revived again and again some version of a toll system both to manage the city’s worsening traffic and provide more revenue for public transit. Over and over it was batted down, only to be resurrected, most recently in August when Governor Andrew M. Cuomo declared that “congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come.”
Now a state task force, called Fix NYC, has been assembled with the goal of developing another congestion pricing plan. It has been nine years since the last major effort by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg died in Albany after state legislative leaders refused to bring it to a vote. Mr. Cuomo, after once expressing doubt about congestion pricing’s chances, is expected to unveil a plan early next year and make it a centerpiece of his legislative agenda.
This time congestion pricing is back at a moment of crisis — above ground, streets are becoming increasingly snarled in large part because of the boom in ride-hailing apps, while below ground the problem is even worse as the city’s aging subway system is riddled with delays and in dire need of money. The state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, faces a litany of problems, including antiquated signals and overcrowded cars, that have led to frequent breakdowns — much of it documented by smartphone-toting commuters for the world to see.
For the full story, see:
WINNIE HU. “A Solution to Gridlock, Years in the Making.” The New York Times (Weds., NOV. 29, 2017): A18.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 28, 2017, and has the title “New York’s Tilt Toward Congestion Pricing Was Years in the Making.”)
Wonderful. Let’s go for strict temporal gating as well as spatial gating. Exile everyone not made of money to the anti-social hours of the clock as well as the monster commutes of the far reaches of Queens and Staten Island.
How about fixing the subways, and abolishing the nonsense that makes it take 90 years to build one small 2nd Ave line? How about dispersing the overconcentration of people a bit? It’s a huge country and modern communication exists.
How about paying for same by taxing the living daylights out of the billionaire rentier class who create the problem by forcing ever more people to cram into highly dysfunctional megacities as the price of having any income at all?
You gotta love the nexus between airheaded liberals who want to pile everyone on Earth with a sob story into a few US-ian megacities (rather than fix their own governments and problems), and economics types who then want to punish the very same folks by blocking off absolutely everything with an extortionate toll gate.
Not.