Another excellent idea. I would also add the Flushing Chinatown, Yankee Stadium, and make entire length of Canal Street subject to double-charges (if technically feasible, which it probably isn’t).

there’s a lot of truth to what you wrote but for those of us who live in manhattan the defeat of the bill is definitely a bummer.

it failed because bloomberg sucks at building a consensus for his ideas. it passed the city council where he can bully people but upstate they didn’t even bother bringing it to a vote. basically, albany flipped him the bird. still i applaud him for trying. something has to be done.

(namely: politically connected city workers make up a majority of car commuters and a significant fraction of total drivers)
This statment is totally wrong! NYC administative offices and other building are spread out throughout NYC. The total of City workers that work in lower Manhattan is not large enough to make it a REAL issue.

it may not be a real issue but in my downtown neighborhood about 25% of all parking is taken by city workers using those annoying placards.

That’s a great idea. I’ll push for that on the next go-round.

I guess you missed that New York Times article about how there are 142,000 placards outstanding (not counting fraudulent ones). Considering there are approximately 260,000 people who commute to Manhattan by car regularly (also from the Times), I’d say city workers with placards are a substantial fraction of the driving population.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/nyregion/06parking.html?st=cse&sq=city+parking+placard&scp=2

There are no tolls for manhattan-bound bridges, except for the George Washington bridge from New Jersey and the Triboro bridge from Queens/Bronx. In the end, this congestion charge was seen for what it was: an effort to put tolls on east river crossings which there is a long-standing opposition to.

There was actually very limited or zero support for this plan in the outer boroughs of NYC because the politians know that with Congestion Pricing Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and upper Manhattan would become the parking lots for all of the drivers that would still drive into NYC but would switch to public transportation for the last mile or two of their commute. I grew up in Queens on the Queens/ Nassau boarder and now live in the Bronx onthe boarder with Westchester County and Yonkers. This situation has always existed and CP for Manhattan would only make it worse.

Not for nothing but New Yorkers just aint that stupid. While Manhattan does have a population of over 1 million the majority of those residence live in the areas that would NOT benefit from this plan. NYC is a city of over 8 million and the vast majority live inthe outer boroughs that are now experiencing a new boom in growth and developement and dont need any of Lower Manhattan’s existing traffic problems. Trust me the outer boroughs already have their own.

(namely: politically connected city workers make up a majority of car commuters and a significant fraction of total drivers)
This statment is totally wrong! NYC administative offices and other building are spread out throughout NYC. The total of City workers that work in lower Manhattan is not large enough to make it a REAL issue. The truth of the matter is at least 95% (or more) of NYC employees that work in Manhattan (DURING BUSINESS HOURS) commute on public transportation. Those placards are NOT that easy to get and people do get find and lose jobs for mis-using them.

The public transportation network in metro NYC is already at capacity. The commuter rails and subways are already crowded at a dangerous level.

Not for nothing but there are many other very congested areas of NYC that would only get worse with this plan. Downtown Brooklyn (right across the river from lower Manhattan) is also a very busy business district with more traffic than necessary. Why no conjestion pricing there?

In reality the failure of this plan was actually a victory for all other NYC interest outside of the Mayor favortie part of town. The key benifactors of this plan would have been the real-estate interest of Lower Manhahttan that would have seen their property value rise once again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/nyregion/08congest.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/nyregion/08bloomberg.html

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/4/7/19499/55685