Hochul isn't imaginative enough to be corrupt. Politicians are just afraid of people who drive.
I am too. The nice thing about having an 18-year-old car is that most people realize that playing low-speed chicken with me is a bad idea.
How many working class people commute to Manhattan by car each day? Six? Sixteen?
Probably some corruption, probably also that weird mindset that doesn't believe the actual residents of New York City who will be benefited are people with the vote. Upstate politicians think of the city as a weird combination of crime-beleaguered non-voting immigrants and a very small number of rich people who are either donors or annoying hipsters who should ignored. The fact that we are literally half the population of the state does not get through.
I'd have to look up numbers, but car commuters into downtown Manhattan are plausibly largely highly paid workers who are still coded as working class: cops, senior teachers, senior nurses. That kind of thing.
The reminds me that when I retire, on my taxes I'm going to list my occupation as "gentleman" or, if I still own land, "gentleman farmer." It's all in how you code it.
Economist reckons it's pressure from the national party:
"Back-seat drivers may have influenced the governor's thinking. Democrats, including Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, are worried about the congressional races in November on Long Island and in Westchester County, where voters are not happy about the pricing scheme. Republicans won key seats in those suburbs in 2022. Democrats do not want roadblocks in New York that could tip control of the House."
Never heard of it. Where is the Economist published?
I'm kind of annoyed with Maura Healey about something similar. She reprimanded her transportation secretary for suggesting a toll road at the NH border as a way to fund transportation. Note that NH's turnpike is right at the MA border and is basically a tourist tax. This was less about congestion per se. it was more bout recognizing that if we switch everybody to electric cars, the gas tax won't fund our transportation infrastructure, and our public transportation infrastructure desperately needs expansion and investment.
I don't want the stick approach just yet, because the MBTA needs some work to get back to 1980's and 90's reliability, and I don't think people should be punished for that when they can't rely on the T, but some reasonable tolls strike me as just charging people for the road in the way that we charge people to use the subway/bus.
Since when does the NY Democratic Party care about the House?
Not too many commute every day, but lots of middle class people drive into Manhattan more than a few times a month. Doctors offices, museums that have kids' progranmming, movies, Broadway and off Broadway, etc. Where I gew up in the unfashionable New Jersey suburbs, several families drove into Chinatown on Sundays for church and Chinese language classes (not sure how common this is now). On weekends most mass transit sucks, and there's plenty of parking in Manhattan if you pay.
For those people, the toll is less than paid parking would cost, and about what lunch for one person someplace reasonable would cost. Thinking of it as an unreasonable imposition on suburban weekend visitors is an odd framing.
Presumably paying is something you could also do for the congestion price.
Weekends were supposed to cost about $3.50, which is admittedly less than 4 people taking a train. In my town 4 people on the weekend taking the train round trip would cost $40. Weekdays it's $10.50 each way.
My godmother used to drive from Boston when her son was a postdoc at Columbia so that she could help with childcare. She would park the car on the street which you really can't manage in Boston as a non-resident. I think she left it on the street for like a week at a time. I don't know how they would have calculated the fee. Not completely sure why she did not take the bus. Was driving a Prius there cheaper?
About to drive into my city for an evening at someone's house. I'll probably skirt the congestion zone and park illegally on the street. My old prius used to be exempt from the entry charge, but it's aged out for lower carbon vehicles. I think my older and junkier car will no longer be allowed to drive into the greater city at any price in a few more years. Unlikely to make it that long, though.
Parking illegally is a local past time here. The real problem is what is legal. People with fucking garages park their junked cars on the street for years. Collectors are assholes. A Chevy station wagon from the 80s is not a thing of value and you know that because you only keep it if it's in other people's way.
17: My wife used to routinely take the train to NYC with the kids for spring break/Passover to visit her parents (Bergen County NJ just across the GW Bridge--I'd often drive over later and we'd drive everyone home). My FIL (a consistent paragon of impatience) would be almost angry at the extra hours it took, seemingly never internalizing how much better 4 extra hours on the train with kids was compared to driving or flying.
Oops, 19 is actually to 165 in the other thread....
Bergen County New Jersey is off topic.
Wait. That's just Hackensack, which is fine.
Nowhere in New Jersey is fine, so long as the threat of great herds of migrating Chris Christies persists.
It's a little rich to hear NY Dems complain about at-risk seats when they had a perfectly legal opportunity to redraw districts and make them much safer than any bullshit flopping on tolls is going to do.
Someone at the other other place pointed out that congestion pricing is always lowest in popularity just before it's implemented, so NY Democrats in their infinite wisdom are going to permanently keep it in that state.
12: I agree and I favor congestion pricing. Since the tunnel toll is $13.75, everyoen in New Jersey has been paying extra to drive into Manhattan since forever.
Other middle class people more likely to drive into Manhattan are everyone working in live theatre, and almost eeryone working in bars and restaurants, since there's almos no mass transit to the suburbs after 9 pm. Not that they can't pay, but they would feel it.
New Jersey should have to pay more. Make it an even $20.
And charge $20.00 to leave New York by way of Connecticut.
I'm a little confused by the proposed pricing scheme - I thought the point of congestion pricing was to be variable, as a function of congestion. Like uber pricing, or tissue usage.
The whole thing has been downhill since they stopped running Cats.
I don't think the backlash is from the middle-class of the New York metro (only about 2% of commuters into the city are estimated to end up paying the charge) - it's the upper class suburbanites who make enough to zoom around downtown uncaring of the already hefty cost but still call themselves middle class. Realtors, doctors, etc. Of course, there is also a car-dependent middle class that doesn't live or work in the congestion zone whose ire Hochul might be considering even though they wouldn't be hurt. And then the status quo bias as communicated through Schumer and Jeffries who apparently weighed in on this.
I thought the point of congestion pricing was to be variable, as a function of congestion. Like uber pricing, or tissue usage
It doesn't have to be - or the variability can just be year to year rather than day to day as they reevaluate. Manhattan is in more or less continuously high traffic demand and a mostly fixed charge reflects that. (The peak $15 is 5am-9pm weekdays, 9am-9pm weekends. Off peak, $3.75.) The slight benefit of adjusting everything in realtime has to be weighed against administrative costs and end user comprehension; you aren't necessarily getting real bang for the buck by making it $13 one day, $17 another.
The thing I remember most about my family's regular visits to NYC to see my dad's relatives are the horrible endless traffic jams that started when we got anywhere near the city and the hours of anguish as I tried desperately to "hold it in".
On the other hand, if it wasn't for the arguments over "bridge or tunnel" would they have had anything to say to each other?
Otherwise isn't it just a tollway?
The distinction does become a bit arbitrary when the congestion zone is an island with few entry points, though of course you only pay the toll once a day no matter how many times you cross the boundary (I assume that also applies to NY). But somewhere like London there are hundreds of roads permeating the boundary. The point is to disincentivise people from driving into the zone (and raise revenue while doing so), and the best way to do that is to get people to switch to alternative travel modes permanently.
The best way if you're going to rule out beheading people.
Yeah, you could just as easily think of it as a toll for all the surface streets of the congestion zone, the difference is that tolls were traditionally more to pay for the bridge with some addition over time of elements of demand management & subsidizing transit, while this is purely for the sake of demand management & public transit.
Apparently the "peak period" for the highest congestion price was 5 am to 9 pm weekdasy, and 9am to 9 pm weekends. In other words, almost all possible times.
Is it bad that the Democratic leaders of both the House and the Senate are from the same state, and its also the state with the worst Democratic party?
Basically every member of the New Jersey delegation minus Andy Kim also signed a letter against congestion pricing.
Meanwhile Asm. Dana Levenberg, who represents Cortlandt, Croton-on-Hudson, Ossining, Peekskill, Philipstown, and Cold Spring, is in favor of the charge.
40: Are you sure it's worse than the Mass Dems? Our state-level politicians can be pretty bad.
A lot of blue-state Dem parties are bad, but New York's probably is the worst just because it's such a big, important state so their bad decisions have major consequences.
Say what you must about New Jersey commuters, but some of the Garden State Parkway rest stops have cool names.
Montvale: James Gandolfini Service Area
Brookdale North: Larry Doby Service Area
Brookdale South: Connie Chung Service Area
Vauxhall: Whitney Houston Service Area*
Cheesequake: Jon Bon Jovi Service Area
Monmouth: Judy Blume Service Area
Forked River: Celia Cruz Service Area
Atlantic: Frank Sinatra Service Area
Ocean View: Bruce Willis Service Area
Apparently Brucce Springsteen and Toni Marison's estate were chosen but declined the honor.
*Whitney Houston was an open air drug market when I was in high school, so that works.
Most people think their own state is the worst because who bothers to follow corruption in other states. New York (and to a lesser extent New Jersey) have the national-media magnifying glass. I do think it's interesting that slight Democratic majorities in the Midwest are being a lot bolder than huge ones in the Northeast.
The New York Dems lost a House seat to George Santos.
It's almost seeming like it might not go through? Inasmuch as it blows a hole in next year's budget and the payroll tax she proposed to make up for it "is already dead in both chambers, says City and State reporter Rebecca C. Lewis."
Apparently the legislation that paved the way for congestion pricing 15 years ago also gave MTA official independence in this regard; not sure if they are actually prepared to use that independence. But it's a bigger deal to accept a budget gap in the hundreds of millions just because someone not on your board said to.
They were planning to use the revenue to leverage federal grants, so the budget gap is actually billions.
This is such a spectacularly bad move by Hochul that I do actually think she'll eventually back down.
"Multiple legislative sources say that Governor Hochul's new offer to lawmakers is to raid the general fund for up to a billion dollars to patch up the capital plan, and then to find a congestion pricing revenue replacement when legislators come back in 2025."
I will gladly tax you Tuesday for a no-congestion-charge today!
37 Apparently the "peak period" for the highest congestion price was 5 am to 9 pm weekdasy, and 9am to 9 pm weekends. In other words, almost all possible times
Have you not seen Delancey Street approaching the Williamsburg Bridge from 10pm to 2am ?
I agree with 49 that this move by Hochul is an unforced blunder, rather than a careful tradeoff of within-NY interests.
It's hard to tell because I don't have as much local knowledge of anyplace else, but I think NYS and NYC politics may be unusually irrational, not just under more scrutiny. I'm not a real political insider, but by virtue of where I work I end up on the phone with people who are insiders, so I know some things. And it doesn't help -- nothing in politics happens for comprehensible policy/ideological reasons, it's all jockeying for power in a way that's completely non-transparent until it actually happens.
It really is a bummer that the kind of person who goes into politics is the kind of person attracted to going into politics.
You have to live in Albany and I've heard that can be dull.
I'm thinking she's getting ready for the full heel turn, where she pardons Trump.
When I hear people talk about local politics other places, it sounds less byzantine and incomprehensible than it is here -- more about people being allied because they agree on policy, and less about startling things happening for no immediately visible reason. I don't think it's the same "yeah, politicians suck in general" thing you see anyplace: there's some peculiarly broken local dynamic.
There is a long heritage of that, going back to Tammany Hall.
56: I didn't mention here that time in 2018 when the main opponent of my supported candidate, within a month of Election Day, abruptly lost the mayor's endorsement with no explanation, & within 24 hours dropped out with no explanation?
49: Like I said, I don't know anything, but I kind of agree -- there's something about the tone of the response that makes me think this won't stick.
Speaking of California, I just learned that the first known person killed in California by a black bear was just last year. It's a new story because they only now figured out the bear killed her as opposed to scavenged her. I think brown bears must have killed someone in California first, so that's why the "first" is qualified.
Anyway, California probably needs more rural pathologists if it takes them six months to figure out if you were alive when the bear started chewing.
We had a legislators in the lower rung of leadership vote against the will of their districts so egregiously that one (Byron Rushing) finally got voted out.
We have so few Republicans that I think it would be useful to have separate progressive and centrist parties who could campaign against each other in the General election.
We just had my favorite candidate for our open congressional seat bow out. She is a great progressive state senator with an amazing record who was ultimately unable to compete in the fundraising game against National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's wife.
And in recent developments, an anonymous Facebook troll is now calling me out as a genocide supporter for being photographed at a meeting with said Jake Sullivan's wife.
Gosh, Spike, it must be awful to have anonymous internet trolls baselessly accuse you of supporting genocide. What sort of terrible person would do that sort of thing? Just unspeakably horrible behaviour. Imagine.
66: Reaching out to folks like that is definitely the key to re-electing Biden in November. (I'm sure the troll is wound up about Ethiopian forces committing genocide in Tigray.)
45: Stares in Louisiana.
64: That's a lot like Southern politics before the Civil Rights era. It was all intra-party, and in some states there were long-running factions that kinda re-established party-like competition. Sometimes these were issue-based (oligarchich vs populist, for example) and sometimes they were just personal.
Maybe black bears have killed lots of people in California before last year, but the officials just assumed it was scavenging without checking because they didn't know how to check?
Stares in Louisiana
That's a good point.
it must be awful to have anonymous internet trolls baselessly accuse you of supporting genocide.
Nah, its fine. There is an actual genocide going on and I appreciate the energy of people willing to lift a finger to stop it. I'm mostly amused that they clearly don't know me or what I've been up to.
The deadpan of 66/67/71 made me chuckle.
So it looks like the state legislature is ending its session & getting the fuck out of Albany with no funding solution passed that would replace the congestion charge. If there's no path to making up the money, it definitely seems against MTA's fiduciary duty to decline to implement.
Reinvent Albany is citing a law from 2019 that says the MTA "shall" implement it, and it seems there are groups gearing up to sue to enforce this law.
Here's to hoping Hochul fails on all fronts here.
For anyone who's interested, here's Yglesias on NY congestion pricing: https://www.slowboring.com/p/new-yorks-congestion-pricing-disaster
75.link is not the first person I've seen saying "But X other place is doing toll lanes and they're basically uncontroversial! What is NYC doing wrong?"
They're very different things! The toll lanes fund new lanes, critically new car capacity, so car-brained folks are more open to there being conditions on their existing at all. The equivalent for NYC is probably tolls on bridges/tunnels. The congestion charge is against usage of existing capacity unrelated to using particular infrastructure. Of course it inflames status-quo-ists more; NYC is the pioneer, not the laggard (at least in the US; it's objectively long overdue for NYC).
Sort of. He steps into other matters quickly and suggests adding highway-miles is helpful in its own right.
61: the "peak" designation refers to time entering Manhatan, not time leaving Manhattan.
It's a very crowded island. Lots of people don't leave.