The only good thing that comes out of this is the NYPD will be able to track every vehicle coming in and out of the city.

oh and also more traffic on cross-bronx and verranzo bridge because the millions of people who live east of manhattan wont be able to go through manhattan to get to the rest of America.

Discouraging walking and encouraging driving causes much more harm to the environment than having cars idle a bit more.

You think the bicycle riders would like that?

Make the cross harbor tunnel multi-model and extend it to JFK airport.

Better than Westway, we should spend our money on the Cross-Harbor rail freight tunnel. If those cosmopolitan truckers are boycotting us elitists, we should get some real shipping.

Despite spelling "new urbanist" incorrectly, and apparently not having a clue as what it actually means, I don't really see the point of your campaign. Congestion Pricing will actually make your business easier.

No more mass transit bureaucratic welfare.

Truckers should boycott elitist areas of DC and NYC!

http://cos-mobile.blogspot.com/2008/03/truck-strike-needed-to-educate-elites.html

Albany is the real villain here (and to a lesser degree the city).

I agree with you 100%. One quibble:

There are actual people in these cities who were responsible for these cuts. Their names are Pataki and Giuliani. Maybe Silver, Brodsky, Vallone and Bruno had a hand in it, but if it hadn't been for those two cutting the MTA contributions every year - even through the surpluses of the Internet boom and the housing bubble - the agency wouldn't be in such deep debt.

Even after one MTA budget cut after another, Pataki and Giuliani got the endorsements of major newspapers for their re-election campaigns, and people continue to think of Giuliani as a hero. Pataki is now languishing in some obscure sinecure, and Giuliani's presidential hopes have been dashed - deservedly so, but nobody says why.

Pataki did two good things for the environment: vetoing right-on-red for Staten Island and buying Sterling Forest. Other than that, it was twelve years of intense frustration for anyone who cared about transit or liveable streets. These transit cuts have names: Pataki and Giuliani. Use it, so that these jerks can never get elected to anything again.

I think it's important to understand the cards dealt to the MTA...

Albany is the real villain here (and to a lesser degree the city). Not the MTA. The relentless MTA browbeating is really unfortunate as it does nothing towards advancing better transit service. It's just lazy scapegoatting.

For the past 15 years the MTA has been faced with the tremendous task of overhauling a system that suffered years and years of Robert Moses-styled neglect. While New Yorkers all demanded better service, our "leaders" in Albany and City Hall all saw to CUT the MTA's funding.

So the agency had to borrow. And borrow... and borrow... and borrow some more...

Now that bill is coming due and the MTA's finances are about to fall off a cliff. The issue isn't "the MTA sucks!" the issue is: for more than a half a century the city decided we should accommodate cars instead of trains, and now, it's time to pay up for that grossly shortsighted decision.

When the funding won't be there to complete the 2nd Avenue Subway, or the 7 extension or whatever... Understand where the money really went. It went into roads, it went into parking garages, it went into gas tanks - it went exactly where it should not have gone for a city the size New York.

The frame I see is that we spend a far smaller portion of our collective wealth on transit than cities that have better transit (cleaner, more reliable, with electronic signs that tell arrival times for freaking incoming trains) at all levels of government. So there is the mysteriously ignored, obvious answer to why the MTA performs rather badly. We beat up the authority constantly, claim that money goes "into the bottomless hole," a popular opinion that doesn't seem to require any evidence. Would the salary of someone to mop piss off the floor be a bottomless hole? I guess that's what people think, because it's not being mopped (Chambers St, downtown end).

I'm for "fixing the broken MTA", whatever that entails, because my uninformed instinct is that its structure is not ideal, but understand that massive reorganizations have a massive cost in themselves. The bottom line is, our transit is crappy because we are too miserly with taxes to fund it like a first world city. The robotic argument against funding transit proves its own illegitimacy.

In addition to other infrastructure improvements like dedicated bus and bike lanes, and traffic enforcement, a holistic congestion pricing plan has got to go hand in hand with fixing the broken MTA.

Don't trust the MTA and call your council member and tell them not to trust them either.

Great, they've basically discouraged any increase in transit funding. Kind of undermines the stance they took of "we want to see more funding for transit, but ..."

Speaking of which, where's that increase in state aid that Brodsky promised?

"[Do you trust the MTA]...the council members who support congestion pricing do. Every dollar in fees goes to the MTA. As for the promise that funds will only go for improvements, the MTA admits that 67% will be spent on everything BUT new bus and subway lines. Also, the MTA just cancelled new improvements promised when fares were raised. Don't trust the MTA and call your council member and tell them not to trust them either."