I see a HUGE difference between paying a fee designed to pay for at least part of a service [subway fare] and a fee which is part of structure created as its stated purpose the restriction of access to a core [or any] neighborhood.

Lew, how do you feel about laws against dogs in restaurants? Don't they restrict access to particular spaces?

Please stop with this nonsense about "restricting access." No one is restricting anyone's access to any neighborhood. We just want to discourage people from bringing their cars with them.

If congestion pricing would restrict access to Manhattan, then the lack of subways restricts access to your neighborhood. But I don't see you trying to get a subway built.

Reading up on the Queensboro Bridge's history, it seems to me that once the 2d Ave elevated was shut for teardown (1942), the 60th St tunnel (built 1920), was the only through link between Queensboro Plaza and the subway system. In order to maintain transbridge rail service, the IRT would have had to build a station at the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Plaza station at a minimum.

The Q60 bus (16-page PDF schedule), which is the successor to the trolley lines, runs from South Jamaica to 60th Street & 2d Ave.

So my conclusion is that once the el was closed, some kind of capital improvements were necessary to continue using the rails, such as the Second Avenue Subway or a 20th-century form of East Side Access that would have brought those tracks into Grand Central. And that ties in with your point about the motorcar being the technology of the future; why invest more dollars to build new unneeded capacity in the legacy system of rails when there are new and exciting technologies to support?

JF & Hilary, remember that those 1907 diagrams predate most of the subway tunnel construction. Subways run through routes, unlike the trains on the Queensboro and Brooklyn bridges, and are more convenient.

Give it a closer look; the only 1907 diagram is the Brooklyn Bridge. Some of the bridges did have through service, on the Nassau Street Loop and the Second Avenue El. Overall you're right in that many of the "peak" diagrams are from right before or right after the construction of a parallel subway tunnel.

Still, it's still surprising that people thought, "Hey, we've just added capacity to relieve crowding on this bridge. Okay, let's reduce the capacity on the bridge!"

I don't know for sure, but my guess is that the for-profit companies that ran the trains and trolleys either didn't anticipate that demand for the crossings would ever rise that high again, or they didn't have the savings to wait for it. There was also a feeling that trolleys and subways were outmoded technology, and they needed to make way for the future - cars!

I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but it's probably less than the cost of repairing the damage from half a million cars a day.

At what cost? Capital acquisition? Drivers? Gasoline? Maintenance?

Please. I'll just wait until my pad is available on the transporter.

Lew from Brooklyn

The Queensborough Bridge hasn't had trains on it since 1943. It hasn't had trolleys since 1957.

Time to link to one of my favorite transit images: East River Bridge capacities, opening, peak and 1989.

The DOT's Queensborough Bridge webpage doesn't mention subway tracks the way its article on the Manhattan Bridge does, either.

And I looked at the subway map on the MTA's website and there are no trains that run on the Queensborough Bridge.

Can you tell me what train you're referring to, Facts, and maybe provide a webpage?

That's what was written. Now tell me again who's setting up straw men?

Queensboro has trains, too.

The negative externalities of motor vehicle transport in NYC vastly outnumber and outweigh the negative externalities of subway travel. It's not even close.

Of course subways are noisy below ground, and elevated trains are noisier. Of course subways require electricity. Of course people get hurt and killed on subways. But the actual below-ground subways don't cause anywhere near as much noise above ground as cars do. They don't require anywhere near as much energy. They don't kill anywhere near as many people.

Similarly, yes, the reason why motorists should pay for the bridges is because they're choosing one of the most wasteful, polluting and destructive forms of transportation available to the average citizen. Eventually they should be dissuaded from driving with punitive fee structures, but right now I'll settle for them paying for the upkeep.

We all pay all kinds of taxes to pay for services we don't use. That's the whole point of government. If we only paid for the services we used, we wouldn't need governments. It makes no sense to object as a matter of principle to not being treated fairly by a particular combination of taxes/fees/subsidies. They're ALL in some way redistributive, which is another way of saying "unfair on purpose".

It does make sense to say that a particular schema is in some way counter productive, but it's absurd to object to paying for government-provided services that you don't use simply because you don't use them. I'm not saying that the current schema is effective, merely that the argument posited by the prior poster (and you) is not particularly logical.

"Our taxes (city, state or federal, it doesn't matter, because the city pays more in taxes than it receives in services, so nobody in Oklahoma is paying for them)"
Point taken.

"[assume you meant to say "we"] pay for these bridges, even though we hardly use them. The people who drive over them every day pay the same amount."

Last time I checked, there were subway lines on three of the four ERBs. An awful lot of subway riders do in fact use the bridges. On two out of those three, multi-hundred-million-$ repairs had to be done to the structures because of stresses caused by the subway tracks. How much money did the MTA farebox contribute to those projects (beyond the track work itself)? Zip. How much does the MTA pay the city for use of those bridges? Zip. How much does the MTA extort from the city in "force accounts" for working on streets under or above rail facilities? Millions a year. The subway system is nowhere near as financially virtuous as you make it out to be.

"Why is it utopian to ask that the people who
drive every day over the "free" bridges pay more of the cost of their upkeep than the people who take the subway?"

It's not, but that's not the argument made in the post I responded to. That argument said subways don't make noise, cause pollution, or have any health/safety impacts, and further argued that drivers don't pay _anything_ for the upkeep of the infrastructure they use. All of these points are completely counter-factual. Basing policy arguments on such is utopian.

"Why does it deserve an epithet to suggest that our tax money might be better spent on subways, which move more people and don't require you to bring your own internal-combustion engine?"

As long as the argument stops there, it deserves only rational consideration. But as soon as you start saying that subways don't make noise, cause any problems in society, and cost nothing, and people who drive cars cause all the problems in society and pay nothing, you sound like an idiot. People who make such arguments are, not surpringly, the recipient of rolled eyes and epithets.

Most of the people crossing the ERBs are NYC residents who pay NYC taxes, too. They don't pay direct fees for using these crossings, but they don't pay nothing. And by the way, a huge chunk of money has been pumped into the overhaul of the ERBs by the State and Federal governments, a much greater share than the City's funding, so NY'ers in fact do not exclusively bear the cost of keeping those bridges in the air.

The point is that there are millions of people who cross the same river and never go over those bridges. They pay subway fares to use the subway tunnels. There are millions more who cross it maybe a couple times a month.

Our taxes (city, state or federal, it doesn't matter, because the city pays more in taxes than it receives in services, so nobody in Oklahoma is paying for them) pay for these bridges, even though we hardly use them. The people who drive over them every day pay the same amount.

Why is it utopian to ask that the people who drive every day over the "free" bridges pay more of the cost of their upkeep than the people who take the subway? Why does it deserve an epithet to suggest that our tax money might be better spent on subways, which move more people and don't require you to bring your own internal-combustion engine?

You're kidding right? A lot of us took the opportunity to vent there, and talk about what we thought would make the subways more pleasant, but since it apparently wasn't clear I'll try to make it so: the most stressful part of my morning commute is crossing my neighborhood streets that commuters from Connecticut take over by threat of violence. Subway scheduling inconsistencies are nothing compared to that. (And, I'd like to think that the drivers wouldn't be pushed to such nihilistic behavior if they weren't themselves feeling the stress of the congestion they cause.)

"This is not to say that it's not better on balance to have a subway system than a completely car-dominated transportation system, but it's silly to argue that subways have no negative impacts."

Let's be clear on this too: a "completely car-dominated transportation system" would not only be far worse for New York, it is strictly impossible. Cars can not carry the 5 million people within the city that the subway does. Along those same "numbers matter" lines, the noise imposed by elevated tracks, the nonlocal pollution caused by their electricity use, and the occasional random deaths, these are vastly lower per traveller than for cars. It's silly to argue that subways and cars are in the same ballpark for negative impacts.

As for Staten Island, the city and the Port Authority keep trying to add benefits (third bus terminal, Great Kills ferry terminal, Richmond tunnel) but local NIMBYs keep fighting them. The express bus lane has been built however.