Gov. Paterson: Tolls for East River Bridges a Consideration

Did anyone see the ABC News investigation on the track workers spending most of their workday running side businesses, working out, and reading in the park? Roger Toussaint actually denied on-air that they needed to cut the number of workers and perhaps make them work more than 15 min-1 hr a day. Amazing.

It looks like 2009 won't be a good year for this city.

As long as we're doing bridge renaming, why not rename them for corporate sponsors? If it'd close our budget gap, I would live with a commute over the Capital One Bridge every morning, and going over the McDonald's on the way to Brooklyn...

And why stop there? Highways, tunnels, major streets and avenues...ripe for the picking!

@kissel, you are correct. Fuck the MTA and fuck you too Paterson and your wondrous solutions. Who elected this asshole anyways?

Well lets at least spend $14 million renaming them all before we toll them.

How much does the state take in from lotto and scratch cards? Wasn't that supposed to pay for education?

These are the most uncreative, non innovative people you can imagine. Just raising fares and adding tolls to the east side bridges to make up for gross mismanagement since the 70s of the MTA.

The are the largest landholder in NYC and this is the best they can come up with? This is going to affect small business in and around Manhattan to the point where people just won't bother trying to come into the city anymore because it is so prohibitively expensive.

Gosh darn lack of editing on Gothamist.

I don't understand why conservatives are opposed to bridge tolling. We're asking users to pay for it, so the city can afford maintenance. How can one simultaneously froth at the mouth over government handouts, then decry free bridge access?

Also - mainstream economists believe strongly in the concept of externalities, i.e. that market participants (drivers, e.g.) should pay the cost of adverse effects to which they contribute: congestion, air pollution, noise pollution, maiming risk. I understand that bridge tolling isn't endorsed for this purpose, but any burden that can be shifted to drivers is an appropriate first step . . .

Conservatives believe in classical economics. In classical, Adam Smith economics you cannot tax and regulate; when you do you prevent equilibrium. That's the answer in a nutshell.

Furthermore, new taxes always hurt the poor and middle class. It's not a progressive tax, thus the rich will not at an eye while the poor will have to sacrifice in another area.

Lastly, externalities bring about Pigouvian taxes. As I mentioned, these "sin taxes" always hurt the poor and creates crime and a black market. A black market for a bridge is not as easy as cigarettes may be, but some ways to circumvent the tolls will come about.

Manhattan is going to become a ghost town... people will stop coming to the city as much and stop spending as well..

http://www.yellowcabnyc.com

tax, tax, tax...

these A##holes cant cut the budget even to levels we were running with just a few years ago which would be a double digit decrease and a deficit of 0?! The unions in this state are out of control, the patronage jobs, preponderance of useless employees, programs that should never have been created to start with, corrupt city councilors, etc, etc. I don't even drive, and I am fully against this just because I cannot stomach these leeches taking another penny in taxes from us. We are already the highest taxed people in the country and get close to no value for it.

I guess we are going down the road we did in the 70s where people couldn't afford to live here due to the huge expenses (taxes being a major part since everything here has a hefty tax on it) and couldn't sell their places, so guess what happened -- insurance claims - burned out buildings, crime, etc. Cant wait to get out of this state.

#3 - It's arguable that the biggest expense for most car commuters in, through, and to/from Manhattan is time, not dollars. If somebody's average hourly productivity is "worth" $50 but they spend an hour each day sitting unproductively in traffic, it follows that assessing tolls and clearing gridlock is an economic good so long as the total burden of tolling is somewhere between $0 and $49.99.

Though I understand the difficulty of converting true believers. So keep telling yourself that New York City relies on a healthy level of vehicular traffic . . .

You have it wrong on the no new subway cars. In the short term this will be cost effective, but those old cars are rapidly failing and the investment in conductorless trains on all lines could easily close quite a bit of the gap. Of course the MTA union froths at the mouth over the idea of conductorless cars.....

Yet, Patterson allowed for a costly bridge renaming. What an idiot.

I don't understand why conservatives are opposed to bridge tolling. We're asking users to pay for it, so the city can afford maintenance. How can one simultaneously froth at the mouth over government handouts, then decry free bridge access?

Also - mainstream economists believe strongly in the concept of externalities, i.e. that market participants (drivers, e.g.) should pay the cost of adverse effects to which they contribute: congestion, air pollution, noise pollution, maiming risk. I understand that bridge tolling isn't endorsed for this purpose, but any burden that can be shifted to drivers is an appropriate first step . . .

It's the 1950's all over again.

Do it! Approve tolls for the East River Bridges! I want to see the misery on the faces of NYers!

Whenever I see track workers in the subway, there's usually one guy actually doing something and another five or six standing around watching.

No wonder the city and state budgets are so bloated if this is how they operate. I have no doubt there's an administrational equilavalent of these do-nothings on the public payroll as well.

Cut all the new subway cars. Cut the contractors. If you are going to have 5 or 10 or 15 year projects, hire in-house. Cut the consultants who make more than lawyers. Cut the LIRR disability and "show up to work, clock in then immediately clock out, and you got a day's pay". Cut the pointless cosmetic station rehabs. Cut the NYPD standing around searching bags during rush hour (all cops in the subway who aren't there because a specific crime happened (assault/murder/stabbing/robbery) are paid hourly by the MTA). Kill the failed "FDNY and NYPD Radios underground" project and just give dual mode radios the next radio replacement time. Kill the multi million/billion dollar robo-trains with robo signalling project, change policy to allow manual keybys again for more capacity, if you have some budget, install higher speed switches rather than replace every last signal, kill the new hybrid buses, old ones still run, stop buying the Greyhound busses for the Express busses that can't be used for anything else, get normal buses with normal seats but padded (think local ex-Queens Surface that had padded seats, but not airplane seats). I wonder how much goes towards pensions. Fire some of the car cleaners and make the other ones work faster, or get a contractor (yes) who will hire mexicans that know how to move their ass and not lean on garbage cans and chit chat all day with other cleaners while dirty trains come in and go out. Have drivers report to East Side Access to be manual labor from 10AM to 4PM rather than pay them 1/2 time. Most MTA drivers get part time jobs from 10AM to 4PM. So MTA 1/2 hourly wage+part time job=6 figure salary. Shit, have drivers go and clean subway cars while they aren't driving trains. And this post is a $20K consultation contract too.

#3 "I hope this ushers in an age in which we return to thriftiness and sensible money management."

Thank you for giving me my first laugh of the day.

That said, I wish it would happen too. This is how mighty empires fall. Fiscal promiscuity.

Time for businesses that can implement 'telecommuting' and working from home to do it, pronto. Between congestion fee pricing, rising tolls, gas prices (they'll start rising again) and fare hikes it will soon be unaffordable to travel to work, unless wages rise at the same rate -- which never happens.

We'll become a nation of even more people staring at lighted screens in isolation than it already is, but if taxes, fares, etc keep going up that's what will happen.

I hope this ushers in an age in which we return to thriftiness and sensible money management. Perhaps the Age of Debt can end once and for all.

www.forgotten-ny.com

NYC is heading for another era where working people just say 'fuck it' I can't afford to live in this city anymore and go live somewhere else where they're not being pickpocketed by the government every five seconds.

Times are tough for retailers too so to stimulate business, they have a sale. When government hits a rough patch it raises its prices.

Every single government entity should be mandated to run a balanced budget.