The MTA is touting first-week data as proof that congestion pricing is “working” — but the numbers really prove nothing, and are irrelevant to the tolls’ true purpose, which is simply to bleed the public.
Yes, the agency needs cash, but Albany didn’t want to find the money elsewhere in the near-$240 billion it spends each year, so it opted for the toll plan — and the pretense that it’s somehow good for us.
And the folks who work for the state-run MTA are obliged to support that fiction.
So the agency “proudly” announced that first-week data show that the average weekday total of vehicles entering the central business district was 7.5% lower than the estimated average for the same timeframe before the tolls kicked in.
First off, that first week was far from average: The metro area got hit by a polar vortex, with snowfall and temperatures dipping into the teens, for the coldest January in years.
More people took buses, reports the MTA, and some of them may indeed may not have been able to stomach the $9 charge.
But it’s just as likely that it was the bitter freeze, not the tolls, that kept the majority of these missing drivers off the road.
Anyway, the long-term impact may well not be reduced congestion but redistributed pain: The MTA’s own studies suggested that parts of the city outside the zone would suffer more, thanks to the tolls.
The real test of “success” would be: Did the toll receipts match projections?
Unsurprisingly, the MTA isn’t blaring those numbers, as that would be admitting the program’s simply a cash grab.
From the moment then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo got the Legislature to OK the plan, through his successor Kathy Hochul’s steady support for it (and despite her pre-election “pause”), it’s been about balancing the MTA’s books by soaking the general public in a new way.
Cuomo, Hochul and the Legislature have no interest in (or guts for) reducing the MTA’s insane expenses, such as overtime abuse and lavish pay, or in seriously cracking down on farebeating.
Tackling those issues would require actual leadership in confronting special interests or facing down crime-enabling ideologues.
It’s much easier to just force commuters to bail out the agency with a new toll — then tell them it’s for their own good.
By the way: Fewer people entering the toll zone means fewer people spending their money below 60th, too: Where the MTA profits, the businesses of lower Manhattan get squeezed.
If congestion pricing is “working,” it’s only working for the MTA’s masters in Albany.
Everyone else is getting screwed.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
