If you’re a FreshDirect customer, get ready to pay more for your meals.
As part of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s congestion pricing scheme for the lower half of Manhattan, commercial vehicles will be charged $21 per day should they enter the borough below 86th Street between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day (non-commercial vehicles will be charged $8). And since no business in the world ever just eats the cost of any new charge, expect what you pay for delivered goods—be they groceries or anything else—to go up if that company also does business in Manhattan.
But there are real benefits to the outer-borough dweller should it pass—at least that’s the case being made by advocates of the plan. At a forum on the congestion charge proposal last Thursday, panelists from the City’s Department of Transportation and two advocacy groups, Transportation Alternatives and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, did their best to sell the scheme to a handful of attendees at a meeting in Astoria, most of whom didn’t seem to need any coaxing in the first place.
As part of Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, $50 billion in transportation improvements will be made between the time it becomes law and 2030. A recent argument has sprouted from the mouths of advocates that the $30 billion funding gap between what the city has and what the city needs can only be made up one of two ways: either through a subway and bus fare hike or enacting the congestion charge. However, panelists made it clear that a 40-cent fare hike would only keep the MTA operating at normal levels, and that none of the planned improvements could be made without the congestion charge. So could you say that even with a congestion charge the MTA might raise subway fares anyway? No one on the panel was equipped to answer, but if anyone believes the fare won’t rise—whether the new charge passes or not—have I got a bridge to sell you.
Speaking of bridges, one of the more commendable goals of the congestion charge is to get people out of their cars and into other modes of transportation, be it mass transit, walking or riding a bike. But you’d have to be a goddamn lunatic to ride your bike, in traffic, over one of the city’s bridges. One woman in attendance summed it up perfectly: People are scared to ride over the bridges. I can’t blame them. Unless those transportation improvements include building a titanium cage around the bike lane, you couldn’t pay me—and a lot of other people—to ride over them. Barring serious, extremely serious, safety improvements biking into Manhattan will have to remain the domain of our most adventurous citizens.
In their material, Transportation Alternatives discussed another drawback of high traffic levels, that being the lack of positive feelings towards your own highly trafficked street. The group pointed to a door-to-door informal survey it had done of Astoria residents on traffic, and found that those with homes on streets with less traffic felt better about their street while those living in high-traffic areas did not. As an example of the highest traffic, Transportation Alternatives examined 33rd Street between 28th Avenue and Astoria Boulevard. People in that zone were less likely to sit outside on their stoop. They were found to be less likely to interact with their neighbors. They might do more activities in the back of their homes to avoid traffic. And they did not hold their street in as high regard as some of their Astoria neighbors.
Hey, traffic sucks. That’s not being questioned. But this particular intersection just happens to be how Queens residents make their way on and off of three major thoroughfares: the Triboro Bridge, the Grand Central Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. None of these highways popped up overnight, which means that the people who live there chose to live there knowing full well that they moved onto an access ramp. And that’s without mentioning the police precinct just a few feet away. If they don’t like the traffic, they should have thought of that before they moved there. They can probably cry on the pile of money that they saved in rent—the real benefit of living on an undesirable street in a desirable neighborhood. And since congestion charge advocates expect traffic at the Triboro Bridge to increase as part of the plan, things aren’t getting any better. Suck it up.
