The Needs of the Many
by Felipe De La Hoz
With the long-awaited and long-delayed New York City congestion pricing toll going into effect in recent days—$9 per day for most vehicles to come into Manhattan at or below 60th Street—came the expected deluge of recriminations and mewling from a cross-section of political figures and commentators. This was big-government taxation, it was part of the war on cars, the existing transit options were bad or unsafe or had poor people in them, and so on. The one that irked me most was taking up the mantle of the poor against the toll.
Opponents of the toll had long invoked the specter of its crushing weight on working-class New Yorkers. The union for emergency medical workers—who are, beyond doubt, underappreciated and underpaid among the city’s uniformed workforce, bringing in fractions of the salaries of their firefighter and cop colleagues—suggested that responders would leave their Manhattan-based posts if they couldn’t be exempt from the congestion area toll.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul unilaterally paused the program when it was originally about to take effect because, she insisted, the then-$15 surcharge could “break the budget of a hard-working middle-class household.” She glided past the facts that most New Yorkers don’t own cars, that those who do tend to be wealthier, and, most significantly, that toll revenues were earmarked for capital investments into the public transit system that the vast majority of lower- and middle-income New Yorkers do use. Hochul’s position was more or less what one might expect from a liberal politician facing a tough reelection race in which the cost of living promises to be a defining issue. Still, it’s been bewildering to see “progressive” activist types joining the fray against the toll making arguments along similar lines.
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