Yes, driving is a privilege, not a right.
Driving imposes huge externalities on the people around you, and the denser the place, the bigger the externalities. DMV fees are administrative, they don’t begin to cover it. Gas taxes don’t begin to cover it either. The EZPass $3 toll on the Henry Hudson Bridge doesn’t neither.
Congestion pricing schemes are, fundamentally, about setting this in better balance, about not letting people get away with imposing these costs on others scot-free. Full stop.
If you mean Manhattan - according the article, it’s for entering the island below 60th street.
Not sure what they’ll do about people that come over the GWB instead…
I meant people who live in the pricing zone itself.
Thank you for the correction. With all the construction I saw from afar, I assumed it was new. But still, they could have added light rail. And when they build the #TurnpikeTrap new bridge over Newark Bay - lets see if they consider rail and pull the idea at the last moment due to “cost”.
The pricing zone is Manhattan below 60th - if you’re already there with your car, you’re good, if you come into the city from one of the other boroughs or Jersey with your car, that’s when you’d get dinged for the fee.
But if you live there & travel else& return- do you get charged?
Also - would like to see a handicap exemption. It was expensive enough for a friend to buy an adapted van.
If it’s anything like the other cities that have done this, people who live there will get a 90% or so discount
I agree, there should absolutely be an exemption in cases like this.
Only 45% of households in NYC own a car, so a good chunk of the little guys/regular joes aren’t that inconvenienced.
Fabulous idea, but the Uniformed Murderers Club will never go for it.
Also note the $13M that was just lost forever with the failed ferry landing at Coney Island.
I would be shocked if the load capacity of the existing spans would accommodate light rail, that kinda has to be designed into the bridge from the start. I could be wrong!
I bet what would work out the best honestly would be a parallel light rail structure for connecting the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail to the (dream, reactivated) SI North Shore light rail line. Sorta like how out in southeast Queens the A train tracks go over Jamaica Bay parallel to the north and south Broad Channel bridges but not colocated with them.
When the lower deck was added no railroads wanted to use it. However, the space still remains for tracks to be built. The bigger problem is laying rails on the approaches to the bridge.
In central Tokyo, they get around this problem by simply not having anywhere to park.
They found a way to make NYC worse. It’s all a cash grab for failed democrat policies.
Are you under the impression that midtown Manhattan traffic is a good thing?
Former (long-ago) Manhattan pedestrian here. Our California dad’s Jeep was inherited by my sister, a NYC transit system supervisor. She lived above a mob funeral parlor near police HQ and thus could fairly safely park the Jeep on the street. I doubt she drove much in the city but a US$23 annual fee would not have stopped her – that’s about the price of a hamburger, right?
How many other Noo-Yawkers would be equally unbothered?
Not annual. Per entrance.
I doubt she ever drove off the island. Nowhere interesting to go in Bronx, Brooklyn, Newark, et al. And why drive to Canarsie (coastal Queens) when cheap subways go there?
