Aerginous

Aerginous

@Aerginous

Making game

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Aerginous
@Aerginous
mrhands
@mrhands
mrhands
@mrhands

The latest report from the War on Cars is actually insane

Listen, I'm just some orange-pilled Dutch guy who likes to listen to podcasts while cycling, so this is the first I've heard of New York's planned congestion pricing policy. It was a planned $15 surcharge for any car driving into Manhattan, and it was expected to raise $15 billion/year to improve public transport. An extremely unlikely coalition was pushing for congestion pricing in New York, ranging from groups promoting social justice to landlord organizations (!). And it sounds like they did everything right and did literal years of study on the benefits, producing a 4000 (!!) page report on everything from fiscal to environmental impact in an extremely wide area.

And then three weeks before the policy was supposed to go into effect, after years of pushing it, after the local government had spent close to a billion dollars implementing it, the Governor said: Naww, I just don't feel like it. 🤷‍♂️

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in reply to @mrhands's post:

PotionSale
@PotionSale

Dunno if it's in the podcast but as an new yorker I'm excited for the rest of this shit show cuz it looks like Hochuls demand is illegal and opens up the MTA to being sued by proponents if they follow hochul -- and they're already being sued by opponents lol. I'm hoping the potential revenue stream outweighs the political pressure bc they can't afford the proponent lawsuits if they follow hochul but they CAN pay for the opponent lawsuits if they don't lolol.

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in reply to @mrhands's post:

npilon
@npilon

It’s not really less absurd but I believe the finances was $1 billion a year - which was going to be leveraged to immediately fund $15 billion of bonds, which would then be used for a huge range of transportation upgrades. Which is why this is such a disaster; Hochul’s proposed replacements are all single year one time funding sources rather than recurring revenue, so all these projects went from fully funded to totally impossible overnight.

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morayati
@morayati

it's even worse than this -- the congestion pricing plan would have accounted for about 30% of the MTA public transit budget (the MTA is a weird entity in that it is largely a NYC service but also largely under the purview of the governor), which was already extremely, notoriously underfunded. the MTA apparently just found out about this with maybe a few days or hours' notice

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