So, yeah, I couldn’t go even a month without having to air a complaint. This time it’s “congestion pricing.” It isn’t that I’m against lowering the traffic volume in midtown and below, it’s just that the means they’ve devised to do it is doomed to failure.
The devisers, not satisfied with just lowering the volume of traffic have also decided to raise money for the disastrous MTA. Now you have one action that is supposed to produce two results and will end up not satisfying either.
Look, it’s very simple. If collecting a toll to fund the MTA is your goal, that’s fine, but if you expect to also clear the streets of traffic, no way. If you clear the traffic, there will be no one to pay the toll, so no dough for MTA. But continuing to collect tolls to fund the MTA means there is still traffic on the streets, so you still have congestion, so that won’t work. It’s very simple; you can’t have it both ways so why not work out a plan that settles each problem separately because they are both serious problems.
Let’s look at congestion first because there are lots of ways to raise money and many would be available to the MTA if it were a functioning entity.
Anyone who has ever taken a ride around Manhattan understands that there are too many cars for the amount of square footage available. That is partly due to the policies of the Bloomberg administration which, this blogger finds to have been the best administration in memory, but still not without flaws. The biggest of those flaws was the desire to turn Manhattan in a bike city. It seems that Mike and his traffic czar, Janette Sadik-Khan both made unfortunate trips to Paris and discovered that some people in Paris rode bicycles. They thought this was a good idea for a much busier, crowded New York. It isn’t.
Now, I’m not advocating any plan to cut off bike riding in the city, but the accommodations made to bike riders have been catastrophic for everyone who doesn’t ride a bike. By encouraging bike riding, the Bloomberg and subsequent administrations have created a tsunami of peddlers that are completely unregulated, uncontrolled and as unsafe as any entity in the city, even as they take up valuable road space that adds immeasurably to the city’s traffic congestion. But they aren’t the only ones. Delivery trucks and legally parked cars also subtract from driving lanes. It used to take ten minutes to go from 110th Street to Lincoln Center on Columbus Ave. It now can take upwards of 45. It’s even worse on Amsterdam Avenue where construction, that seems to have been going on for a decade, blocks at least two lanes in most areas, adding to the loss from bike lanes, double parked delivery trucks and legal parking on both sides of the street. What was once a five-lane boulevard is now a one lane parking lot. BTW bike riding in Paris is just as disastrous as it is here!
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Saw an interview with Scott Galloway recently. This is one of the smartest men I have heard speak. He is a professor at NYU and a millionaire investor who sees the current President elect and his cronies as a serious threat to the economy and the stability of the nation. Galloway’s comments come on the heels of Trump’s ravings about seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. This is a man who is about to occupy the most prestigious office in the world and he’s raving about nonsense. This is a sociopathic criminal who we have elected to the Presidency, and he seems only interested in how much money he can make out of the win.
In order to attain the Presidency, Trump had to appeal especially to the segment of the population that was failing financially or at least was not succeeding up to their expectations. These are people who looked at billionaires who were supporting Trump and thought they could achieve that kind of success if Trump were President. They are about to discover how foolish they were.