Tastes Great . . . Less Filling . . . No, Tastes Great!*

Ken Livingstone op-eds aside, it’s pretty clearly just about the money:

In promoting his sweeping traffic reduction plan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his aides have stressed one provision: drivers who enter Manhattan below 86th Street would be charged an $8 fee.

But what has not been widely mentioned is a measure that could startle some Manhattanites: those who live within the zone would have to pay $8 to drive out.

The congestion pricing program was devised to cut traffic, chiefly by persuading people from the other boroughs and beyond to leave their cars behind and take public transit into Manhattan. But planners say that those who live inside the congestion pricing zone also contribute to traffic when they drive out, and should pay their share, too.

That means a man from Greenwich Village who drives to visit his grandmother in Queens would pay the fee. So would a C.E.O. who has a reverse commute, driving from the East Side to Stamford, Conn., each morning, and an Upper Eastsider who likes to drive to the Fairway supermarket in Harlem.

It might seem that anyone taking a car out of the congestion zone ought to be rewarded instead of penalized, but officials disagreed.

“We’re not trying to get people to leave the zone in their cars,” said Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff, who played a leading role in fashioning the plan. “Overall what we’re trying to do is get people to use their cars less.”

. . .

At a Mobil station on 11th Avenue and 51st Street, Susan Kaplan, a filmmaker, was putting gas in her Lexus hybrid in preparation for a weekend trip to the Berkshires. She lives north of the zone but said she would soon be moving to the West 70s.

“I’m all for it,” Ms. Kaplan said of the mayor’s plan. But she was perplexed by the idea of an $8 charge for drivers leaving the zone.

“If people below 86th Street want to leave Manhattan instead of driving around below 86th Street, then doesn’t that reduce traffic by leaving the city?” she said.

*Did anyone really drink Miller Lite because it tasted great?