Jammed if we do elect Blas
TO the many reasons why New Yorkers should fear giving Mayor de Blasio a second term, add this one: Congestion pricing. After Gov. Cuomo summarily declared it an “idea whose time has come,” the mayor insisted he doesn’t like it, opposes it, doesn’t think it will happen, blah blah blah. But if we’ve learned anything in his first term, it’s that de Blasio’s positions are as flexible as his ethics.
If he gets four more years, it will take him about four days to embrace the ultimate tax-and-spend scam. He won’t be able to resist all the goodies that would flow to him and his pay-to-play cronies.
Consider that the phrase “congestion pricing” is a triumph of language over reality. It sounds like a friendly, reasonable idea — until you realize it would siphon more than $1 billion a year out of residents’ and commuters’ pockets and into political slush funds and bureaucratic black holes.
The only thing certain is that de Blasio’s socialist heart will warm to anything that brings that kind of cash and command and control over everything that moves — and doesn’t. After all, this is the guy who said he wishes the city could do away with private property rights, recently telling New York magazine, “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see.”
Such lust for power can’t be limited to buildings. He’s often hinted he’d like to sock it to cars, too — but can’t admit that now.
His support could turn a sleepy mayoral race into a hot contest once voters realize that “congestion pricing” is government speak for the Big Screw. It’s not just the tolls that would pop up on East River crossings, though that could be a third rail all of its own.
It’s also the bureaucracy that would be created to limit parking in Manhattan neighborhoods to residents with permits, which they would have to buy. Otherwise, the streets just outside the likely congestion-pricing zone — north of 59th Street, for example — would become clogged with thousands of cars looking for street parking.
And, of course, there would be all kinds of exemptions and placards for sacred cows and political cronies. If de Blasio can give building permits, vendor and union contracts and even whole buildings to donors and get away with it, imagine the action he could get out of controlled parking spots. No corruption worries there, not a smidgen.
Yet there’s something even more perverse about congestion pricing as a solution to the snarled traffic in the heart of Manhattan. It would reward the very officials whose policies have helped to make traffic worse year after year.
Take bicycles — please! While they are a desirable form of exercise, even frustrated Europhiles cannot claim with a straight face that they are a form of mass transit in a city of 8.5 million.
And there is no denying that bicycle lanes are helping to create congestion. Basic math tells you that less space for motor vehicles plus an increase in the number of vehicles competing for that space means slower speeds.
And don’t bother arguing that congestion pricing will cut the number of vehicles. Former mayor Mike Bloomberg’s plan envisioned only about a 6 percent reduction — and that was before the explosion of Amazon deliveries and Uber and Lyft added to the traffic tangle.
Had the state approved Bloomy’s plan, motorists would be paying higher costs, and getting even slower speeds for their extra money. Remember that before falling for any pipe dreams about the benefits of taxing drivers.
Congestion pricing, then, is a fake solution to a real problem. Real solutions would include limiting bike lanes to parks and returning traffic lanes to their original purpose.
Real solutions would mean making side streets at least two lanes, mostly by limiting parking to one side only. They would include better timing of traffic lights to keep vehicles moving steadily, instead of the wasteful stop-and-go that contributes to air pollution because cars are less efficient at crawl speeds.
Real solutions would involve incentives for building and keeping garages. A manager in the Radio City Hall area tells me that four garages in the surrounding blocks have closed in recent months to make way for new high-rises. “That’s thousands of cars — where are they gonna go?” he asks.
In circles, that’s where, looking for parking. Or, even worse, many of those drivers will look for jobs outside the city.
It is a fiction that higher taxes on drivers will lead significantly more of them to take mass transit. Driving around Manhattan is already so expensive and stress-inducing that anybody who has a reasonable alternative has probably taken it. It is safe to assume that the drivers in the cars and trucks going nowhere have no other way to get there.
Then there’s this: Does anybody really believe that the MTA, the intended recipient of the congestion-pricing windfall, would be better off as a result? Me neither.
All the more reason to be afraid, very afraid, of de Blasio 2.0.