So it now costs $5.80 just to sit down in a yellow cab in New York City — $6.30 in the evening. That’s up $2.50, courtesy of Gov. Cuomo and the Albany Legislature — and this, officials explain helpfully, is because traffic is tough in Gotham.
Startling news, to be sure, but so far their only concrete action is an attempt to crush an industry that has been serving the city since it was called Nieuw Amsterdam.
Thus, Cuomo’s collaboration with the Legislature to impose the surcharge on for-hire rides south of 96th Street in Manhattan. A second, more general congestion-pricing plan is simmering in Albany; the governor is treating the details as a state secret.
Taxi drivers say the surcharge alone could cost them as much as $10,000 annually in lost business and tips. Officially, its point is to raise $400 million for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, now suffering one of its periodic bouts of the cash-shorts.
So there are two problems here: The congestion, which also dates to Nieuw Amsterdam, and the MTA’s persistent inability to live within its means. An obvious first step for the MTA — extracting more value from the billions already poured into its decaying hardware — is dismissed in favor of nicking the public one more time.
Also rejected is enforcing existing law — for example, by cracking down on the fare-evasion epidemic that cost the MTA some $215 million last year. As it stands, more than half of Cuomo’s meter-drop fee, or $1.25, effectively will go to subsidize fare-beating.
Plus revenues could be goosed by periodically removing the derelicts, dopers and shakedown artists that so often make subway commuting such an unpleasant experience. Here, Mayor de Blasio demurs.
But in the best New York tradition of never telling the truth when a euphemism will do, Cuomo & Co. term their subsidy a “congestion fee.”
But for-hire and other cars aren’t close to being the sole issue — which is why it is egregiously unfair to tax them out of the city and declare the problem under control. Yes, embracing panaceas is the least painful approach to intractable problems, and politicians like easy almost as much as they like taxes.
It would be harder to grapple with the officially imposed traffic-clogging that began with Mayor Mike Bloomberg and expanded under his successor: lane-grabbing bike paths, those intrusive blue rental racks and pedestrian promenades imposed on critical Midtown intersections.
Less tractable, but equally significant, problems are the construction sites now spilling into streets and avenues all over Manhattan; the deplorable, traffic-slowing condition of many of the streets themselves; the officially illegal but widely tolerated double-parking that, exacerbated by bike lanes, often reduces avenues to one crawling traffic lane — and the increasingly common congestion caused by FedEx and UPS delivery trucks off-loading packages of online purchases.
Congestion fees alone, no matter how ardently advanced, won’t begin to address those issues — that is, there is no practical way New York City can tax its way out of jammed-up streets.
Which is why, especially, Cuomo’s secret congestion scheme will do little beyond fattening government revenues.
And, just assuming that taxes would cut traffic, once the cars are gone, so would be the revenues — leaving the subways to fend for themselves once again. Better they should address their spending issues now.
In that regard, it’s been almost 14 months since The New York Times published its illuminating — and damning — essay on the cost overruns, delays and bureaucratic boondoggling that have turned the MTA’s East Side Access Tunnel into what the newspaper termed “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Tunnel on Earth.”
And Cuomo, statutorily responsible for the MTA, not only has failed to address the astonishingly wasteful practices laid out by The Times, but he has vigorously defended some of them. Mustn’t offend the unions and campaign-contributing contractors, after all.
So what hope is there for capital-construction reforms elsewhere in the MTA? None.
Let’s be clear: Congestion pricing, as it is being proposed for New York City, essentially is an artifice, promoted to solve a real but extraordinarily complex problem that politicians otherwise are too terrified to touch.
That is, it’s just another tax increase, and its effect on congestion will be marginal — because Albany and City Hall haven’t the guts to do better.
This piece originally appeared at New York Post
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Bob McManus is a contributing editor of City Journal. He retired as editorial page editor of the New York Post in 2013 and has since worked as a freelance editor, columnist, and writer.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post