Drivers Protest Verrazano Bridge Toll with Pennies

Well I wish the state would cut them loose, no love lost. The MTA would no longer have to be responsible for the MTA Staten Island Railway and that would mean more money for the subway in the other four boroughs.

No, I don't.

awww, curmudgeonry. hope that works out for ya champ.

These people are whiners and you support them? They only pay $5.14 one way with EZ Pass. These people are assholes. And if they don't have an EZ Pass then they obviously don't take the bridge enough that 11 dollars one way is going to kill them.

You can't put your car on the ferry.

Or they could take a local MTA bus over the very same bridge to Bay Ridge for $2.00.

They sure can...if they live within walking distance of those particular local bus routes (there's two) and are willing to deal with the infrequent, unreliable schedules and slow service. And if they're going to Bay Ridge, or maybe somewhere in Brooklyn along the N train, and those areas only.

I am in no way defending this selfish stunt or Staten Islanders' silly conceit that they get shortchanged from the city (it's 7% of the population...what do these people expect?), but public transit on SI is a joke, and anyone who says otherwise either a) doesn't know what decent public transit is or b) has a Jesus-like amount of patience.

Seriously, let's say I want to from, I don't know, Park Slope to Westerleigh, SI: I'd have to take the N train to 86th, and transfer to the S53 bus, take that to Clove Rd. and transfer to the S62. Or, I could take the N to Whitehall St., catch the Ferry, and then take the S62 down Victory Blvd. Doing this would take an hour and a half if - and this hardly ever happens - I make all the connections, AND I'm traveling during peak hours. More likely, it would take two to two-and-a-half hours.

Or, I could drive. Even accounting for traffic and parking, this would take no more than forty-five minutes, and probably less.

Look, Staten Island is tiny compared to the rest of NYC and the population is not dense. That's the reason it's like this. And the public transit is generally adequate at getting people to and from day jobs in Manhattan. But the idea that someone who lives on SI can just get on a bus or the ferry and go anywhere else in the city, no problems, is absurd.

FYI . . . The N train doesn't go to Bay Ridge. It's the R.

Viva Triboro!

You know, I should've thought of that....I take back my previous comment about the toll being excessive. However, I stand by my remark about Staten Islanders' insufferable persecution complex.

Ok, so instead of talking out of my ass, as of 2007 there were 597,896 bridges in the USA (Bureau of Transportation Statistics website), and of those 139 were toll bridges. Now math is not my strong point but I believe 597,575/597896=99.976%

A majority of those bridges are what the average person would call an "overpass" or maybe a small bridge over a small river.

Those bridges are nowhere near the size and cost of maintenance for the Verrazano.

Suburbia in some other state looks better every day.

In other words... Staten Island?

It was a pretty ineffective protest, doing nothing but inconveniencing other people crossing the bridge. As the article says, the toll collectors didn't even bother to count the pennies, so it didn't even inconvenience them. At the end of the day, somebody had to dump them along with all of the other change collected into a machine to be counted.

A boycott of the bridge would make more sense.

You can't boycott the bridge, how are you going to get around? Drive to Jersey and through Manhattan?

"And weren't bridge tolls originally set up to pay for the construction costs of bridges?"

That's an urban myth that's been debunked many times (even Brian Lehrer addressed it), but web forums like this keep it alive.

Yay generalizing!