Feel free to ignore Davis.

But I don’t think you understand that congestion in Manhattan is already terribly expensive. As has been noted many times before, the question is not whether or not we want to pay for congestion — there is no choice on that — but rather how we want to pay. Do we want to do pay in wasted time, asthmatic children, and fatal auto accidents? Or do we want to charge the people who generate these things for the negative consequences of their actions?

People have to pay to ride the subway. There’s no reason city streets should be any different.

Here’s a plan: congestion pricing.

Here’s an article idea: why auto enthusiasts ought to embrace any and all efforts to reduce private-automobile traffic.

My thesis: Driving has become a numbing, dumbed-down activity. Most commuting is no more driving in the lace-back gloves sense of driving than watching a football game on television is exercising. Take cars off the road and make people pay for the privilege of driving and there will be more opportunities to really drive.

So they charge you eight bucks to come into Manhattan between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., maybe. A couple of years down the road, it’s 10, then 15, then 25. But is that a long-term solution? How does that help congested neighborhoods that aren’t in Manhattan, like the parking lot that is Flatbush Ave. during peak hours in Brooklyn or the slow-as-molasses Cross Bronx Expressway? In the book “The Road More Traveled,” traffic experts Ted Balaker and Sam Staley talk about steps nearly every city can take to reduce traffic significantly before socking it to the lower and middle class, who will be hardest hit by Mayor Bloomberg’s traffic congestion proposal.

On the other hand, I give credit to the Daily News for your investigative local reporting. Far better than the Times.

TSJM here. (The Same Josh Max)

Thanks for reading my writing in the Daily News. Just wanted to clear up something…

YOUR DRIVE is a weekly 5-article pullout section in the paper, but it’s not an advertorial. Autos, motorcycles and other vehicles are provided to me for testing by auto manufacturers, and I give my opinion, thumbs up or thumbs down. Nobody tells me what to say and I’m not in anyone’s pocket, so to speak. Not even the top guys at the paper tell me what I can and can’t write, nor the advertising department.

That said—

I wasn’t endorsing or not endorsing Balaker and Staley. I ran the excerpt because, to quote the spirit of another adopted New Yorker, John Lennon, “We’d all love to see the plan.”

Feel free to suggest one of your own…one we haven’t heard.

JM

The key to congestion pricing is that it is the only system that interrupts the formula of induced traffic. Any other decongestion will quickly be filled by traffic that experiences the created space.

It is the Yogi Berra rule, “no one goes to Broadway anymore, its too crowded.”

This blog post was the best I could find on short notice.

Anybody know of any others?

If you google Balaker and Staley, you’ll find a depressingly large number of positive citations in the mainstream press (George Will, among them) and next to no criticism.