Westway was killed by EIS and with it we'd have a LOT less traffic on the west side and a park instead of a bike lane where at least two bikers have been run over and killed.

What do I win?

"But the real goal of the proposal is to provide a new revenue source from the middle class and working poor."

No. No no no a thousand times no. The middle class and the working poor do not drive to work in lower Manhattan. The middle class and the working poor take public transit. If you can afford to buy, insure, maintain and fuel a car in New York City, you are not poor.

Jan: How many of those cars are registered and insured in the neighborhoods where they park? How many of them are rarely used but kept only because the cost of use is practically zero?

Charge people to drive into Manhattan during rush hours, implement RPP and I think you'll see some of those cars go away. That's a good thing.

Why should anyone who lives in the city have a city-owned car without official plates? If the car is used on official business I assume the CP fee will be exempt or reimbursed. If you use it to commute you pay.

While the poor are less likely to drive in NYC than elsewhere, Jan is right that some do at great cost to their families. Elsewhere in the country, most poor people and almost all middle class people drive.

They drive old, used cars, with minimum insurance, or are illegally uninsured. So gas is a much bigger share of their auto expenditures than most people, and it's killing them.

What is also true, however, is that most poor and middle class people do not drive TO THE MANHATTAN CBD.

Unless they have placards and can park for free.

Or they are driving a vehicle they need for their occupation, such as a repair person, in which case the CP fee will be passed on to their customers if it is not entirely offset by savings from less time in traffic.

Or they are nuts.

Most other poor and middle class people who drive to work in NYC do so because they work in places outside the CBD where transit is inconvenient. I've argued that a dynamic carpooling system is the best choice to allow such people to get rid of the car and save money, unless they are in bicycle distance.

BUT THEY ARE NOT AFFECTED BY CP!

CP is all about Manhattan -- those who live there, those who take transit there, those who drive there but can afford the fee and would gladly pay it to have less traffic, and those who drive and park with placards. The latter group is opposed, and includes all the state legislators.

Jan,
Whether or not low or middle income New Yorkers have cars is irrelevant to this discussion (FYI, only 51% of all outer Borough households own cars -- which is not to say that all those households are lower or middle income by any means). What matters is whether those who have cars drive them into Manhattan's CBD during the charging windows. The fact is that less than 5% of all NYers who commute to the CBD during the charging window get there by car, and those who do drive earn 30% more than those who take transit.

"Westway was killed by EIS and with it we'd have a LOT less traffic on the west side"

We all know that building bigger freeways is the best way to reduce traffic.

SEQRA does not apply to actions by the State Legislature (such as CP would be). SEQRA is a State Legislature-enacted rule, and no State Legislature can govern the actions of a future one, as expressed in the SEQRA guidelines. So SEQRA is not applicable here.

However, the bill being introduced specifically states that a full EIS will be completed prior to September 1 implementation, if the State would just approve the g-damn money to do one.

(Pass those fees on to customers Larry and guess what? Fewer customers!)

You're not paying attention to something. How much do these folks get paid? And how much of the time they are getting paid spent sitting in traffic? And if they work for themselves, how much revenue do they lose sitting in traffic? I doubt there will be anything to pass on.

"The issue that Ed rightly raises about SEQRA exemptions."

So do you advocate revoking the SEQR exemption for new schools in NYC? The legislature put it in knowing that if it took three years to approve a school, followed by three years of lawsuits, none would be built.

Those state legislators have been there forever. Here is an interesting resarch project. The legislature approved a SEQR exemption for the project that added lanes to the LIE on long island in the 1980s and early 1990s. Who voted for that?

If you're say, a locksmith or plumber who does one job at one site all day in Manhattan then the time saved from traffic isn't going to be much, especially if like most tradespeople you're driving to your job site at 7AM or even earlier.

And I don't much care about SEQRA exemptions for school, but I would like to see CP subjected to full SEQRA review before it's implemented.

Then anyone who may be harmed by it should just live with it for three years and pray someone does something about it at the end of the "pilot" phase of the project? I've been hearing mixed messages lately about whether CP may be subject to SEQRA review or not, LL. Is it or isn't it?

There's some ambiguity in how much the reduced congestion will offset the fee for businesses, but no ambiguity in the fact that we accept the cost as appropriate. It's a non-starter, tossed out by motorists hoping to scare everyone that doesn't drive but does buy things. Must we really point out that trucks carry a lot of things, and that $21 divided by "a lot" equals a very small number? Even without reduced costs from time savings, paying a few cents "congestion charge" for eggs would be worth it for the quality of life and transit improvements. Go ahead, ornery businesses, pass on the charge. And hope that your competitors don't find a way to receive their shipments at night and do outgoing deliveries by bicycle or handcart.

Your locksmith or plumber is also probably driving a commercial van and would pay the $8 charge, not the $21 for larger box trucks.

I used to be a carpenter's assistant and would drive the van all over the city from the workshop on Murray St. A lot of times we would make several trips from the workshop to the upper west or east side and back. And we spent a lot of time sitting in traffic, it usually cost us time from the site. So yeah, I think the $8 a day he'd spend would easily be earned back. And when we spent all day at once site, a rarity, it was because it was a big job with a big price tag.

"As a Manhattan resident, Doc, I can't say I'm looking forward to nighttime truck deliveries."

You're not in the zone though. Can't trucks reach your stores without passing through it? Anyway, if they deliver at night you don't have to worry about costs going up; you have to pick one exclusive potential outcome to complain about.

My hope is that if we're bold enough to regulate automobile use with congestion pricing, the can-do spirit will not stop there. Semis are designed to deliver to the back of suburban warehouses and gigantic stores, half a mile from innocent ears. Here we're a few feet above them. But we're also New York City, the most important market in the country, and we can tell them, "Actually, guys, for us you're going to have to find a way to do this without the piercing beeps and loud engine idling." The city will be able to tackle those kinds of second-tier problems once it's free of daily traffic triage in streets well over their capacity.

My dad was a locksmith in Bklyn and made the occasional trip into Manhattan for a job. And yes, he did drive a van. The $8 would still hurt him as he couldn't haul his tools on the train, but point taken.

Doc, I'm not in the zone but I doubt that delivery trucks looking to avoid the $21 fee would split their daily runs so as to continue making uptown deliveries during the day.

Yes, I'm up late tonight. A two-year-old will do that to you sometimes. later......

"I doubt that delivery trucks looking to avoid the $21 fee would split their daily runs so as to continue making uptown deliveries during the day."

And if 93 percent of trucks act as you expect, the program is a success. Congestion pricing doesn't need or want to change the average case.

If the city continues growing the city's economy will continue to grow. The shrinkage or stagnation of the city will be horrible from a quality of life issue, as we'll have trouble funding parks, transit, police, schools etc. If the population stagnates or shrinks the economy will stagnate or shrink.

That's why CP is necessary: To allow the city to have a greater carrying capacity.

jmc - that sounds a lot like the model capitalism is based on - grow or die. is that sustainable?

When peak oil makes it impossible for increasing numbers of people to continue driving, NYC's mass-transit infrastructure will attract many new citizens. That's why we need to build more mass transit -- because the future demand for it will be strong among former suburbanites seeking refuge in the city. And that will be true even if economic growth stalls in the U.S. as a whole.

((He should be put on the spot by local community and City Council members Simcha Felder and Domenic Recchia to do the right thing and it must be broadly known that he is totally wrong.

He is betraying his constituents and doing a grave injustice to the people of this city.))

Simcha Felder has gotten an ear full from the local Rabinical powers in Boro Park, and is almost afraid to stick his nose out of his office since the vote and it's clear he's going to be tossed from office....

Just saying, a bribe is a bribe.

Thanks Doc.

question: It's not matter of whether capitalism is sustainable, it's what we should do to make the best city in our environment. We're all going to die someday, and our civilization will collapse. It's just a matter of time.

However, it's better for the environment if more people move from higher energy sprawl to lower energy cities. It's better for New Yorkers if more people move to New York (in a controlled way, living in housing... I'm not talking about booming shantytowns in Bombay). If we have more people here, and more wealth, it will be easier to pay for services. Some day we might have to build a giant dyke to protect the city from rising sea levels... in that case it will be better to have more people here.

Successful cities that are pleasant to live in and have good economies do not shrink, especially when there's freedom of movement. As much as people complain about the environmental impact of a new apartment building (or "luxury condo building"), the impact to the environment is much worse if those people are spread out in balloon frame houses along an access road with three cars per house.

Congestion pricing is about increasing the carrying capacity of New York by efficiently allocating road space and by building up the transit network that's much more efficient.

What improvements will be made for the D, B, Q, N and R trains in the current congestion pricing plan? Oh, none have been considered.

These trains all serve Mr. Colton's district.

Actually, JF, only the first two of your bulleted items are directly connected to congestion pricing; the other projects were in the capital improvement pipeline before Mayor Bloomberg first made his proposal public. And extensive work was done on what is now the D and M line (first it was the B, then the W) back when the Manhattan Bridge project was under way— why wasn't "structure" addressed at that time, during the four years riders were severely inconvenienced? What, precisely, does the MTA mean by "structure"? (Rehabilitate West End D & M Line Structure from 9th Ave. to Bay 50th Street.) Does it encompass tracks, ties and signals, or merely girders and paint? Which 56 miles of track, and which 150 signals? Why should station rehab ever come before track and signal improvements? When, exactly, will travel times improve?

But let's say the current plan passes—do you really believe that all the projections are accurate? All indications are that revenues and traffic reductions will be lower than those claimed.

I take mass transit almost exclusively, so perhaps I should support this bill in any incarnation, but after a lifetime of broken promises, I simply don't trust the MTA.

So maybe the bill will pass as a pilot program; a start is better than nothing, but I really believe New Yorkers deserve a much better plan than this one, one that addresses driver reform, traffic law enforcement, and makes the MTA directly accountable to the public. And to really be effective, the fee needs to be higher; the fee in London is about double.

JF—What scares me is that this will pass and will be left as is, with all the politicos patting themselves on the back, declaring what a great job they've done... and then doing no more.

If it fails, pro-transit and pro-pedestrian groups will be so outraged that a better plan may become inevitable.

I don't claim to know the answer, but failure may be our best hope. Let's hope that you're right, and I'm wrong.