I want I had talked about the indisputable fact that the M.T.A. tends to overspend its budgets. The connection between the Lengthy Island Rail Street and Grand Central, which opened a 12 months in the past, is spectacular, nevertheless it was costly: $11.1 billion. In 2017, The Occasions reported that an accountant discovered that 200 individuals who have been being paid $1,000 a day to work on the tunnel appeared to don’t have any motive to be there. (They have been laid off.)
Readers tended to be fairly cynical concerning the metropolis’s intentions. Bruce Grossberg is a member of the transportation committee of a neighborhood board in central Queens. Talking for himself, fairly than in that official capability, he wrote, “I proceed to see congestion pricing as a land seize masquerading as a transportation coverage.” He predicted it’s going to primarily profit Manhattanites. “In return, the residents of the outer boroughs get a promise that maybe, possibly, someplace over the rainbow, the revenues from congestion pricing can be ample to implement a capital plan” — that’s, funding in mass transit.
Susan Paston, who lives contained in the congestion zone, wrote: “If residents of the rich Higher East Aspect and Higher West Aspect don’t should pay, neither ought to we; visitors from sixtieth Road to ninetieth Road is extra congested than visitors beneath thirtieth Road. As well as, in one other presumably unintended consequence, many or a lot of the physicians in non-public observe in our downtown residential areas are stated to be in search of workplace house above sixtieth Road for concern their out-of-zone sufferers will discover new medical doctors fairly than pay to enter the zone.”
“Each metropolis that has ever launched congestion pricing improved mass transit first. New York Metropolis didn’t,” Steve Ross of Revere, Mass., wrote. “Each main metropolis sharply restricts taxi cruising in its congested midtown. New York Metropolis doesn’t and won’t.” He added, “My prediction for New York Metropolis: Simply one other tax, and don’t count on any subway enhancements.”
Tim Schwartz of Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., wrote: “Until mass transit is handy for everyone, together with New Jersey and Connecticut residents, I’m towards the congestion tax. I’m additionally positive the M.T.A. will nonetheless be in monetary bother and trying to find extra income streams.”
