State control over the movements of individuals is a key element in the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s upcoming “Congestion Relief” toll.
Commentary
Control over your life is the overarching objective of politicians on the left, along with all too many of the dimmer Republicans. Global warming, race baiting, and class warfare are, when all is said and done, merely means through which to reach this end.
And one of the most important forms of the control they impose is in the sphere of transportation. It is an outrage that an American can actually, on a whim, get behind the wheel of an air-polluting, fossil fuel-powered personal vehicle and drive as far as his imagination can take him, even thousands of miles for an impromptu vacation if he and his family take the notion. Where someone like this belongs is in a well-regulated, bureaucratically designed bus or train system, standing armpit-to-armpit beside his fellow members of the community so he can learn all about their lives, taking a route settled upon by committee after years of study determining where the most people are the most likely to go for their work or play.
This state control over the movements of individuals is a key element in the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) upcoming “Congestion Relief” toll scheme for midtown and lower Manhattan. The term makes it sound like the city and state of New York are doing nothing more than clearing up the Big Apple’s thoroughfares with a giant Dristan tablet.
In June, a $15 toll will be
imposed electronically during peak hours on all passenger cars and commercial vehicles judged to be “passenger-type” that enter the “Central Business District” (CBD), which begins below 60th Street at the southern end of Central Park, plus $3.75 if the vehicles have been found to be remaining overnight. Trucks and buses get slapped with a $24 or $36 toll “depending on their size and purpose,” with their overnight tolls $6 or $8. Motorcycle tolls are half that of cars. Take a taxi or an Uber and you’ll be hit with $1.25, or $2.50 per trip for journeys “dispatched by high-volume for-hire services,” i.e., limos.
Lest you mistakenly expect some relief when the whistle blows signaling the end of your toil for the day and think you can relax over your
$27.45 pastrami on rye at Katz’s Delicatessen on East Houston Street, New York City’s peak toll rates will apply “from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends.” And the City That Never Sleeps will now have toll collectors who never sleep—rather than suspending the levies completely during vampires’ working hours, “Toll rates would be 75% lower overnight.”
Of course, there are the expected incentives offering to preserve a few pennies in your pocket when you behave in ways desirable to your overseers in City Hall, Albany, and Washington. Drivers are bestowed with “crossing credits” when they use the toll road tunnels from New Jersey and from the eastern boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. The non-toll bridges to the east of Manhattan, on the other hand, will not get credits, in what is being described as an “equalizer” to discourage drivers from rerouting to avoid the heaviest tolls. Meanwhile, those using the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey get no credit because that connection is not in the CBD.
Then there is the requisite pandering to the Democratic Party’s core constituencies: “Low-income vehicle owners who qualify and register with MTA would receive a 50% discount on the peak auto toll”—but only “beginning with the 11th trip taken in a calendar month.”
In addition to these crumbs from the table, not surprisingly, “qualifying authorized” emergency vehicles, “qualifying vehicles transporting a person with disabilities,” and local government buses and trains as well as “specialized government vehicles” will be exempt from the new tolls.
Surveillance Implications
The surveillance implications of sifting through which driver’s pocket to pick or not are chilling. Back in the 1990s, when the E-ZPass electronic toll collection technology was first installed in and around New York City, drivers might have imagined they were losing no privacy as they gained the convenience of not having to give over cash into the plastic gloved-hands of an attendant, or lob quarters into the automatic toll basket and hope the coins don’t land on the asphalt instead. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, however, rendered any squawking about privacy unseemly, and for years few dared complain about police powers.Beyond Islamist mass murderers and home-grown violent criminals, it wasn’t long before we found, would you believe,
divorce lawyers boasting of obtaining E-ZPass records during discovery to squeeze more money from spouses, one New York attorney gleefully
quipping in 2007 that E-ZPass is “an easy way to show you took the off-ramp to adultery.” Today, the technology has advanced beyond the need for a plastic thingamajig velcroed to your windshield; you are tracked through your highly reflective tag—which governments are on track to replacing with
“digital license plates” that emit “a tracking signal when a car is stolen, helping law enforcement officials track it more easily; display ‘amber alerts’ when one occurs in close proximity to the vehicle; allow car owners to automatically see and pay parking tickets, road tolls, and more.”
Much more. Digital plates, which the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will have the power to turn on and off, will collect data about how far you drive in the course of a day, how long you travel, at what times, and where, exactly, it is you go. (So get ready to dump your radar detector; government will know and store the evidence instantaneously if you’ve been speeding based on your getting from point A to point B a little too quickly.) A prototype of the plate contained a defect allowing hackers to track you, as well as access drivers’ “names, phone numbers, email addresses, and loan statuses.”
In 2015, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)
discovered that city and state transportation agencies have installed E-ZPass readers in at least 149 locations around New York City “far from toll plazas,” ostensibly to study traffic patterns.
The NYCLU commented: “The government should address the privacy concerns of its residents as it adopts new technology and tell the public when it is collecting information about innocent people’s comings and goings. … As agencies invest in new technology they must also be held accountable; New Yorkers deserve to know that any information the government has on them isn’t being abused.”
A Revenue Goldmine
Privacy concerns are not to be underappreciated, of course, but let us turn again to the tolls themselves. It was the never-elected, longtime New York City overlord Robert Moses close to a century ago who discovered that tolls are a revenue gold mine. As his acclaimed biographer, Robert Caro, described in his 1974 Pulitzer-winning “The Power Broker,” the interest and amortization on the massive bonds that financed a section of the Henry Hudson Bridge between the Bronx and Manhattan, which opened in 1936, were to be paid back via a temporary ten-cent toll. But over the next couple of years many times more money than was needed was found to be coming in through those tolls. The Triborough Bridge, which opened the same year, brought in unexpected windfalls of similar magnitudes.“Using the surpluses in the way the law required would therefore make the Henry Hudson Bridge and the Triborough spectacular successes—all the more spectacular in a city in which public works always seemed to cost the public more, not less, than had been anticipated,” Mr. Caro
explained. But this was not the kind of success that interested the prodigiously ambitious Moses. “Money—revenue, surpluses—was the key to accomplishment and power, but only if he could keep it and use it.”
And so by manipulating the system, taking advantage of bond contracts whose details were not fully known by the mayor and the governor, and alternately charming and bullying the elected politicians who supposedly were his bosses, Moses eventually “would have $81 million to use to create and realize dreams. Much more than $81 million, in fact,” as Mr. Caro put it—amounting to billions in today’s dollars—since the extra revenues translated into more confidence, and thus more investments, from bankers in future city projects. With virtually zero oversight from elected officials, Moses, at one point holding 12 different governmental positions, would in the following years dictate and control the construction of everything from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the Throgs Neck Bridge to Long Island’s Jones Beach, the most heavily used beach on the U.S. east coast, as well as the building of Orchard Beach in the Bronx.
In a sense, this exercise of absolute power was fine during saner times; aside from the costs there was nothing outrageously objectionable about a new, easier way into work or a taste of the tropical seaside a half hour from Manhattan. Today, however, as the federal and state governments
target the internal combustion engine for
extinction and public schools
encourage, assist, and celebrate the genital mutilation of children in defiance of their parents’ wishes, lots of additional monies in politicians’ and bureaucrats’ clutches is deadly.
Still and all, could it be that the new toll plan, touted as America’s first “congestion pricing scheme,” following in the enlightened, cultured footsteps of London, Milan, and Stockholm, will all be worth it to eliminate traffic jams in midtown Manhattan and the financial district? London, it turns out, whose program was the MTA’s primary model, had to
scale back its toll program after reduced traffic started devastating the city’s restaurants and other retail businesses.
In combing the bright promises of the Central Business District Tolling Program, or “CBDTP” as documents gracelessly refer to it, the prospects of “improved air quality,” more travel options for the poor, and fewer traffic jams are all dwarfed when it comes to governmental appetites by the allurement of “a reliable source of funding to improve and modernize MTA subways, buses and commuter railroads.” In other words, lots of cash. Like Moses, powerful government figures can’t wait to make their “dreams” materialize via other people’s hard-earned money.
But while Moses may have been drunk with undemocratic authority, he at least possessed some modicum of common sense in his taxpayer-financed visions. Compare him with the harebrained notions of former far-left mayor Bill de Blasio’s “streetcar czar” Adam Giambrone, who reviled subways as an anachronism and sought a $2.5 billion “Brooklyn-Queens Connector” (BQX) light rail—that’s greenspeak for trolley—that would hug the East River even though, as Baruch College law professor Jay Weiser
pointed out in the pages of City Journal, “For a fraction of the cost, these neighborhoods could be better served through improved bus service and direct subway access to Manhattan.”
As Mr. Weiser noted, “Streetcars went extinct because they snarled traffic. ... [A] grade-level streetcar system in New York City would face winter snowdrifts and intermittent torrential rains—not to mention hurricanes and nor’easters that could fry the entire system with seawater. Much of the proposed route runs through flood zones.”
Again and again, heady transportation expansions in New York City have devoured unforeseen sums of extra cash, as with the 2007-to-2015 single-station, 1.5-mile
extension of the Flushing, Queens No. 7 subway now expected to cost over $2 billion, well over twice the original projection.
“Once built, publicly owned projects become eternal, sucking up capital and operating expenses,” as Mr. Weiser stated, pointing to new tens of millions poured into the Roosevelt Island Tramway despite only about 8,000 passengers using it on a weekday in a city of 8.3 million.
The new CBDTP tolls will change the game, however, giving oodles of new play money to reckless, unelected fanatics.
There is some good news: opposition to the hefty new tolls is now
uniting some of the strangest political bedfellows in the city—from white middle-class Staten Island leaders to public school teachers union officials and even the NAACP.
In the end, it may take the actual experience of disaster as the tolls exact their damage on city businesses and their employees before truly organized opposition deploys itself. It might not be a wise bet, however, to think that even their united efforts can cut off the flow of so much in potential new revenues to the dangerously extremist Robert Moseses of the 21st century.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
