Alternative Traffic Patterns

So the mayor wants to clean up our environment-apparently, it seems, at least one tax payer at a time. As AMNY pointed out on Saturday, Bloomberg reacted to the alternative congestion relief proposal advanced by our Congestion Tax Free NYC Committee, with the following observation: "Bloomberg ridiculed the coalition's proposal on his weekly radio show Friday, saying that it only addressed part of the overall issue. The advantage of his congestion pricing scheme, he argues, is that it not only reduces traffic but pours all the extra revenue from the fees into mass transit improvements."

Cha ching, cha ching! The shekels are out of the bag-it's all about the Benjamins for the billionaire Bloomberg. And has he really looked at the congestion tax's revenue projections-and compared them to the capital needs of the system? Here's his take on this: "So people that come up with a solution say they'll be fewer cars coming in -yeah that's great, but that's half the problem," he said. "Where's the money come from for the other side?"

And, once we determine that the revenues produced by the congestion tax-reduced astronomically by the ridiculous top-heavy administration cost-are inadequate, you can bet the the fees will rise like bakery yeast. Which means that-as we've said all along-the mayor's congestion plan is little else but another one of his revenue enhancement schemes, which is why the NY Times and the DMI crowd are so enthusiastically cheering him on.

So we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss alternatives to the congestion tax. In fact, we shouldn't be quick to do anything here-and especially because of the way in which the mayor has tried-in Bob Barker fashion-to bum rush us all to accept a poorly vetted idea, one that would never pass an independent smell test.