You and everyone else on the LIE at rush hour, apparently.

When you’re talking about people who drive to Manhattan every day, you’re not talking about subway riders – you are talking about LIRR, MetroNorth, NJ Transit and express bus riders. People who drive into Manhattan from the boroughs do so because they don’t live near a subway stop, and their local express bus service is unbearable because of solo drivers clogging the roads.

I won’t even try to cite data, but speaking anecdotally, many NYC subway trains at peak hours are often packed to the gills. Often you have to wait for the next train or two before you can battle your way in. I don’t object to a plan to increase mass transit ridership, but MTA has to be able to run more efficiently if the plan has any hope of succeeding. I think anyone whose ridden NYC trains for a while will tell you the system doesn’t run like a Swiss watch. Or a Swiss mass transit system, for that matter.

One way to make something expensive and worthless at the same time is to have the government start giving it away.

What striked me however, the last time I was in NYC (in 2006), is how disagreeable bicycling has become. And I spoke with several people who told me they have given it up in recent years.

Another thing I don’t really understand is why scooter and motorcycle parking (and therefore driving) is discouraged in New York. In Italian and French cities, you use public transport or cabs or you take your Vespa. Nobody drives a car because you get stuck in traffic and can’t find a parking space.

Besides, even if mass transit is at capacity, private cars are NOT – very few people here carpool. Much congestion improvement would come from simply encouraging solo drivers to group up, with no impact on mass transit usage.

Or the 4,5, and 6 trains! Those are the only trains that run north-south along the east side of Manhattan, and they are packed every day during rush hour. I don’t think putting in the Kheel plan will help relieve the congestion on the public transportation side.
The MTA has also been racking up deficits with a lot of people paying $2-4 a day, and he wants to make public transportation free. That’ll work. *rolls eyes*

Mass transit is at capacity. Most folks on the road don’t have it as an option (this isn’t europe).

The plan as sent down by the federal government requires a fee, and as a result, mandates Orwellian surveillance, ostensibly to collect the fee.

The upper counties are fully against this. Other than a vociferious bicycle group, no one is thrilled.

I will be honest, though. It can take you a half hour to cross manhattan. The streets are also at total blockage.

Still, this is a huge tax, and a level of government observation on a mass scale that should disgust any American.

A plan to reduce congestion, without the tax or the surveillance, would be a good idea. Sadly, under the proposed plans there’s a huge TAX idea under the false cover of environmentalism.