Memo To Staff — Try New Slogan: “Congestion Pricing — It’s Not Just For Finger Lakes Wineries”

The State Assembly offers a traffic-mitigation plan without the promise of billions of dollars for the mayor of New York City and the truth comes out:

Missing from the rival bill is any trace of the mayor’s proposal to impose a fee on most motorists who drive below 86th Street in Manhattan during peak weekday hours — a proposal that has stalled in Albany despite broad support from environmental groups and some top state officials, including Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Instead, the new proposal, sent to Assembly members on Sunday night, would attempt to ease traffic congestion with tax credits for businesses that encourage employees to telecommute, for employees who use car pools and for commercial drivers who enter Manhattan before 6 a.m. and after 9 p.m. A $500 million program to expand express bus service outside Manhattan is also included in the bill.

Top Assembly officials said the proposal was being seriously considered by lawmakers. Its author, Assemblyman Rory I. Lancman, a first-term Democrat from Queens, said he hoped to introduce the bill this week.

Also released yesterday was a sharply critical Assembly report that described congestion pricing as a regressive tax that would disproportionately affect poor and middle-income drivers, and questioned the plan’s feasibility.

“I think the mayor’s plan, certainly in its current iteration, is not going to happen,” Mr. Lancman said in an interview. He said that state legislators had “a genuine desire” to tackle congestion problems, but that the mayor’s proposal offered few public transportation alternatives for the influx of commuters who would leave their cars at home.

“If you’re telling people you have to make a choice between a $2,000-a-year tax or use mass transit, I think it’s only fair that those people actually have a viable mass transit alternative, and we don’t,” Mr. Lancman said. (The $2,000 figure refers to an estimate of what drivers would pay annually to enter Manhattan under the plan.)

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg said that the mayor’s plan called for large-scale improvements to the city’s mass transit system before the start of congestion pricing. “None of the other potential plans provides a revenue stream to fund $30 billion in mass transit improvements over the next two decades,” the spokesman, John Gallagher, wrote in an e-mail message.

There — add “$30 billion in mass transit improvements” to “one million new people” in a growing list of gratuitously infalted numbers devised to scare people into accepting bold new initiatives. $30 billion for what exactly? Fourteen or 15 new 7 train stops?

Then again, maybe the Mayor’s people should point to the example of North Fork and Finger Lakes wineries, where congestion pricing has been tried and seems to actually help.

What’s This Economy Coming To?

Exactly how much money does the City make on recycling? Enough to want to protect its cut of the business:

A City Council official said the Department of Sanitation is picking up as much as 25% less in recycling materials on the Upper East Side than it was last year, due at least in part to people who are stealing bundles and cashing them in with recyclers.

The chairman of the council’s Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, Michael McMahon, a Democrat of Staten Island, introduced a bill last month to increase the fine to a minimum of $1,000 and to impound the vehicles of anyone illegally picking up recyclables in bulk and hauling them away. “It’s an enormous problem,” he said, adding that it was important to address because the paper and metal collected help pay for the city’s recycling program. “The taxpayer loses,” a vice president of the 13th precinct community council, Jon Schachter, said.

The counsel to the Sanitation and Solid Waste Management Committee for the council speaker’s office, Carmen Cognetta, said the area comprising Community Board 8, which runs between 59th and 96th streets, had 25% less recyclable paper this April versus the previous year. Lesser declines also appeared among the areas of community boards 5, 6, and 7.

The commissioner of the sanitation department, John Doherty, spoke in favor of the legislation in testimony last month before the council’s sanitation committee.

Mr. Schachter told The New York Sun that the sanitation department has issued too few summonses to scavengers removing bulk paper. A sanitation department spokeswoman said in a written statement that since last October, sanitation police have seen “an increase in reports of unmarked, out-of-state vans illegally picking up bundled newspapers and cardboard from buildings in Manhattan and Queens,” and that the department has been receiving an average of two complaints each week. “In fact, since that time we have written a total of 20 summonses to drivers who were charged with ‘unauthorized removal of waste’ punishable by a fine of $100,” she said.

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?

But Why Stop At $16? Charge Them $250 At The Tolls — And All Day Below 145th Street — And We’ll Be Able To Supply Everyone With Individual Jetpacks So That Anyone Can Zoom Anywhere Virtually Unimpeded!

OK, now you’re getting greedy:

With the threat of a fare hike looming, a free subway system might seem like a distant fantasy for New York City straphangers.

Some dreamers, however, are pushing to turn the concept into a reality that they say could stimulate the city’s economy and provide an incentive for more motorists to switch to mass transit.

Charging motorists $16 to drive into most of Manhattan at all times — double the amount Mayor Bloomberg has proposed in his congestion pricing plan — and levying $16 tolls on all bridge and tunnel crossings could bring in $3.1 billion annually to subsidize a free mass transit system, the early results of a $100,000 study by a nonprofit group, the Institute for Rational Mobility, show. The MTA currently takes in about $1.96 billion in fares from the subway and buses, the study says, and it could save an estimated $360 million a year that it spends collecting those fares.

“It’s a Platonic ideal,” the chief attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said.

When I Said “There’s No Room At The Inn” What I Meant To Say Was “There Is That Little-Used Guest Suite Which We Could Let You For The Right Price”

After earlier sounding an alarm about how they would handle all the additional commuters MTA president admits that it actually wouldn’t be that big of a deal after all:

Amid all the bad news, the president of NYC Transit feared an underlying message had been lost about the benefits of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed congestion pricing plan.

During rush hours, the busiest train lines — including the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and E — are running at or over capacity. Yet Roberts insisted the system could still “fully support” the increased ridership projected from congestion pricing. “In fact the current strain on parts of the system is a big argument in favor of congestion pricing, not against it,” he said.

Roberts believes the business-day toll could pay for subway improvements and for such big-ticket projects as the first leg of the Second Avenue Subway, which is already $1 billion short.

On Monday, Roberts proposed quick “fixes,” including adding more cars to trains and extending station platforms. But these remedies would take “four or five” years. More importantly, they all require money the MTA doesn’t have.

“Congestion pricing is critical to putting these fixes into place,” Roberts said yesterday.

The city’s Department of Transportation estimates congestion pricing would dissuade 94,000 current drivers over an entire day, but believes only 7,000 of them will shift to subways and buses at the peak morning rush between 8 and 9 a.m. “Other drivers presumably come from areas where it is more convenient to use commuter rail,” said DOT spokesperson Molly Gordy.

If half of that 7,000 end up in the subway, they would add just 1 percent to the current morning peak-hour load of 345,000 riders. Roberts noted they would also be spread across the subway’s 22 lines.

“This is a minimal bump that the system can unequivocally absorb,” he said.

But doesn’t that also actually kind of undercut one of the main reasons to support congestion pricing — that so many more people will use public transportation?

And what’s more, has everyone simply taken at face value the notion that there will be an increase of one million new people in New York City in just over twenty years? (Questions to ask include but are not limited to: Really? Who are these people? Where will they come from? Will New York somehow magically get more affordable? Will Manhattan turn from a neighborhood of pied-a-terres to a solid middle-class enclave of families exceeding replacement levels? Will there be some massive new industry that will move here?) Or I guess it’s to everyone’s benefit to just assume there will be that many people here:

NYC Transit President Howard Roberts has expressed concern about how the system will handle expected population growth of 1 million people by 2030. Some lines, including the Nos. 2, 3 and 4, already are grossly overcrowded and operating at or above capacity.

“We’ve got to begin to look at how we get to comfortable rides, comfortable capacities, for people in that time period . . . given how long it takes for capital projects to get done, we don’t have a lot of time to do it,” Roberts said yesterday.

The strain on the system is a “big argument” for congestion pricing, Roberts said. The city’s pricing plan would generate billions of dollars to fund mass transit projects by charging drivers to enter Manhattan below 86th St.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign agreed.

“The choice is clear: We either act now to handle the coming million . . . . or drown in the crush,” Russianoff said. “Congestion pricing is the answer.”