I warned people that the congestion pricing in NYC was only the beginning of the taxation on free travel in America. NYC had long wanted to put a toll on the Queensboro Bridge and used congestion pricing to do it. People actually believed they just missed that huge bridge when planning. It would have been easy to either put the readers south of the bridge or refund people who went from the reader to the bridge within a certain amount of time.
They knew what they were doing.
Now that the city and state are rolling in congestion fees. The people that advocated for it are now talking about putting it elsewhere. I knew this would happen because the logic used to enact it, exists in other parts of NYC.
Now is the time for New York to go even bolder with congestion pricing. The three big levers I see to supercharge the toll’s impact are to:
Raise the overall toll price to further motivate drivers to switch to transit and discourage low-value trips
Increase tolls on taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts, to fix the surprisingly low per-trip tolls that we currently charge on this large share of Manhattan’s vehicles
Create additional toll zones, to expand congestion pricing’s effects to Upper Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn
And there is is. Higher toll (which we knew was coming anyway) and additional toll zones.
Ha.
That whole saying about an inch and a mile.
Yeah, that.
Wait till they put their sights on the Van Wyke and Belt Parkway.
But it's not just about creep on this issue. It's more.
I remember writing about how eventually thse tolls on highways would be used to u issue tickets to speeding drivers using the time it takes to go from toll to toll. Here's Connecticut:
“It's been a slow, methodical process, in terms of implementing automated enforcement technology here in the state,” state Department of Transportation spokesman Josh Morgan said.
I bet it has.
“It's not like, ‘speed cameras coming to I-95 tomorrow’ type of legislation,” Morgan said.
Of course not.
Another strategy is what’s called a corridor system, that tracks the time a vehicle passes through a section of roadway.
Ahh..exactly like I said.
See the technology is here. The state no longer needs to station a person on the road. There are cameras and radar everywhere. They see money driving down the road every day. If you object it's because you want people to die of course.
Strange how vehicles are way safer than at any time in history and yet the state feels compelled to be more onerous with it's "enforcement". Meanwhile, after you get dinged for doing 80MPH on a clear hightway (and lets be honest, that's the only time you'll be doing that), The person camped out in the left lane looking at their phone will be A-OK.
