Does anyone know where Weiner was coming from or going to? Maybe he came from his girlfriend's house in Long Beach and left to go visit him mom in Sheepshead Bay. Who knows.

Who knows indeed? Maybe he was coming from a fundraiser in Port Richmond and heading to a meeting in College Point.

Joan's point is that he didn't say, "the transit system in this city is so fucked that it takes me more than three times as long to get from one end of my district to another as to drive it." He complained about parking. To me that suggests that if Weiner is elected mayor his first transportation priority will be to make it easier for people to drive.

A strong leader who cares about the environment could change the city so that someone without a car could get from Middle Village to Midwood in a reasonable amount of time. The Peñalosas have shown that it's doable. Weiner is either not that strong, or doesn't care that much. Probably some of both.

Does anyone know where Weiner was coming from or going to? Maybe he came from his girlfriend's house in Long Beach and left to go visit him mom in Sheepshead Bay. Who knows.

Here are two well-known intersections that both lie within his district: Metropolitan Ave & Fresh Pond Road, on the border between Ridgewood and Middle Village, Queens; and Nostrand Ave & Kings Highway, Brooklyn. According to schedules, it takes an hour and a half to get from one to the other on mass transit (two buses, change at Williamsburg Br Plz). It takes 27 minutes to drive between them.

Cut the guy some slack for choosing the most time-efficient way to get around and serve his constituents.

A notion not worthy of even 10 seconds of discussion by adults.

I really dislike it when they leave as soon as you refute the talking points made by C.P. opponents.

I don't dismiss naysayers like Brodsky and Weiner as whackos, but I do think they are choosing the incorrect side in a misguided bid to gain populist cred. It's annoying when these guys keep hitting the regressive note on CP when Bruce Schaller's research, which seems mostly independent to me, clearly refutes these arguments. Our electeds and Plan does not impress need to spend a little more time reading up on SB and elsewhere.

I for one like it when contrarians pipe up around here, but it's usuallly anonymous, disappointing and fleeting.

Weiner is obstructing good ideas for political reasons, like Brodsky he doesn't have any real solutions to an immediate problem.

Then you've yet to look for it. Part of what distinguishes pricing's political proponents from its opponents is having conducted research on solutions to congestion. Opponents have come to the table with little more than pricing doubts and distractions. Many of us grassroots supporters used to drive and have given it up. We see daily driving as the product of a series of bad decisions. It can and should be discouraged by having a price levied on it that is some fraction of the one it costs society. We see this as we walk around the city, without the aid of statistics. Besides, brandishing figures in a comment thread is hardly a good way to make sense of them. Much better to just read the PlaNYC transportation pdf if you need convincing. Ignoring it because it was prepared by people that ended up supporting pricing, based on the very research it contains, is an argument for ignoring everything and doing nothing.

As for distractions, blaming MTA is a classic one. We'd all like to eliminate corruption and get better transit for less money. But did you notice that the MTA is (necessarily) a huge bureaucracy with a unionized workforce? I'm surprised it works as well as it does on the money we give it. Perhaps we should compare it to nicer subways in other cites; do we allocate as high a percentage of our wealth to public transportation as Paris, for example? I don't know (doubt it!), but then I'm not advancing a "simple" argument that oiling the MTA machine is all we need to solve auto congestion. Perhaps the people whose blood boils with contempt for MTA corruption should just get in there and start cleaning things up. Incidentally,

"All the pro-congestion price guys want is more goverment, so perhaps they can finally get that government job."

that is a pretty hilarious idea. I can barely suffer the limited contact I have with government "work," but I do recognize that better things cost more money, and the money has to come from somewhere. I'll pay more taxes, fine, but I won't sit by while a few parasites drain city resources by insisting on driving their transportation welfare-mobiles to work every day. I and the rest of the non-car-owning NYC majority are finally demanding that daily motorists pay their own way.

"I have a right to my opinion without some smart a comment back."

If those bother you, come up with a new moniker instead of making up rights you don't have. "Plan does not impress" is a smart comment magnet.

I would like "plan does not impress" to come back and continue a dialog. Perhaps we can get a better understanding of our positions.

In that regard the degraded and childish mocking of the guy's name is not particularly helpful IMHO. But, I'm sure he has heard all those jokes before.And, ultimately, it would be nice to find some middle ground to stand or better a center of political gravity that would put this thing across.

Doing mock-battle with political demons and straw men, vanquishing their advocates from the site will not change the fact that the Mayor's thrust has been to attach a lot of trinkets to the Christmas tree here only one of which is CP. The Mayor has been politically ham-handed and tin-eared and has left a wide field open to Weiner's well-known political ambition. Brodsky, on the other hand, has been around mass transit politics for a long time and will be around for a long time. He will continue to be a force to be reckoned with and building up permanent enemies and opponents is not the way to make good policy.

For six years Bloomberg was the Mayor of Wal-Mart, IKEA, the Jets stadium boondoggle, Atlantic Yards and a Home Depot on every corner. Not forgetting the Mayor of the mass-arrests and show-trials at the Republican convention, nor the anti-free-speech harassment of Critical Mass. He didn't mention a word about congestion pricing in is "landslide" re-election victory. In short, he did nothing to build a "critical mass" that would support a big change like Congestion Pricing.

Yet for some reason people like Brodsky and Weiner, who have long been in the corner of mass transportation in a big way and safe streets in some small ways, are pushed off into the fringes and any hint that they might have some legitimate arguments that merit debate is treated as some sort of mental deficiency to be mocked.

In response to JT - I am giving my support to A.W. in what appeared to be a one sided comment section.

Aaron can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding this forum is deliberately "one-sided" on some issues. It's for people who agree that pedestrians, cyclists and transit are more important than cars, and if you want to dispute that assumption you need to have a very good reason.

If you're the same person who's posted before under the handle "Plan does not impress," your comments have been repetitions of the same crap we've heard from Weiner, Weprin, Brodsky and the gang. We don't trust them - they seem much more interested in avoiding fees for their car-commuting contributors than in reducing global warming, solving congestion, reducing deaths and injuries, cleaning the air or financing transit. Most of us aren't "policy guys"; we're real people who want safe streets and clean air.

All of your alternative suggestions are things that the mayor could have done already. Do you really think it's all a failure of political will? Clearly he's gotten some stiff opposition on those fronts. How do you plan to overcome that opposition?

See Chris's point 4 in comment 32. I couldn't put it better.