The Democrats' brazen lies to push a 'congestion tax'
New York tried to engineer traffic problems in order to tax it. It hasn’t worked, but the tax is coming anyway.
Another relic of the Covid-19 era became permanent this month when, near the four-year anniversary of lockdown, New York City announced that dining sheds are here to stay.
The structures that spill onto roadways never made any sense—you can’t eat indoors unless you build a new indoors outdoors, the reasoning went—but their usefulness wasn’t about public health.
New York Democrats have spent years trying to put the squeeze on cars and hoped the Hochul Huts, which occupy vast stretches of traffic lanes and parking spots, were another tool to engineer congestion in Manhattan and turn public opinion in favor of the left’s anti-car fetish.
It’s Democrat Leadership 101: create a problem, swoop in with a government solution. In addition to surrendering street space to cafe tables, the city has installed over 650 miles of bike lanes, about the distance from New York to South Carolina, with most of them in Manhattan—the smallest and most walkable borough. Major thoroughfares like 14th Street have been shuttered to all traffic except city buses. Some of the biggest intersections in Manhattan—from Herald Square to Times Square—have been closed to vehicles entirely, forcing inefficient and roundabout navigation of the island for cars.
But, surprisingly, none of it has worked to create the traffic nightmare Democrats hoped for. Congestion in the Big Apple is going down. Traffic peaked in the 1990s with about 1.3 million vehicles a day entering the proposed congestion zone. In 2022, that number was down to 600,000 and continues to decline. Today, traffic in Manhattan is about at the same level it was in the 1960s, when the population of the metropolitan area was 15 million people, compared to nearly 20 million today.
According to the MTA’s own data, car ownership has increased in New York City since 2015, but the number of cars entering the congestion zone—an area encompassing all of Manhattan below 61st Street—has decreased. Bus travel time in Manhattan also has remained virtually the same.
Every line the Democrats have used to push for a congestion tax has been a brazen lie. Even though, as of late March, the congestion tax scheme has not reached a final vote, the city has already installed 109 of the proposed 110 cameras it will use to tax drivers. Translation: Democracy be damned, we’re doing this whether you like it or not. The fines are expected to start rolling out on June 15.
Pushback has come from unlikely places. Last week, the NAACP joined the chorus of residents who oppose the tax and filed a federal lawsuit against the MTA. The United Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union, has also filed suit in opposition of a congestion tax.
Enter Big Tech, loyal dungeon slave to the Democrat party, to throw its support behind the tax, which would be the first of its kind in the U.S. and is modeled after similar schemes in European cities.
According to one ex-NYC Department of Transportation boss, ride share vehicles like Uber account for 43.9 percent of all traffic in the congestion zone, with Uber drivers spending about 40 percent of their time cruising around waiting for a fare. But Uber is banking on the plan being good for business. The tax primarily punishes their workers, not customers.
According to The New York Times, a spokesman for Uber, which fought to pass congestion pricing, said that “the company supports the tolls because funding a robust public transit system reduces the need for car ownership, which is likely to lead to more Uber use."
As it stands now, the fine for passenger cars entering Manhattan below 61st Street will be $15, with trucks paying between $24 and $36. This is in addition to the taxes New York City already places on vehicles entering Manhattan, in the form of tolls on bridges and tunnels, sometimes as high as $20 per crossing.
The tax is charged once daily per vehicle, which explains Uber’s enthusiasm for the plan. Ride-share passengers probably won’t notice a change—something that would surely cause a collapse in Uber ridership if each journey suddenly cost $15 more. Instead, the fine will be absorbed by the drivers, amounting to as much as a $5,500 tax on ride-share drivers each year, simply for showing up to do their job. Uber riders already pay a $2.50 tax per ride in New York City, with additional, nonsensical fees for things like airport pick-ups.
If the goal were to persuade more New Yorkers to use public transportation, that seems unnecessary, if not homicidal. As violence skyrockets and armed National Guard troops are deployed underground, New Yorkers are increasingly terrified to take the subway. Still, one-third of all mass transit users in the U.S. live in the New York City area, with 56 percent of New Yorkers relying on mass transit as their primary mode of transportation. It’s the New Yorkers who can’t take public transportation—the elderly and disabled—that will be directly hit by the new tax.
While annoying and miserly, the once-a-day fine structure is how you know it isn’t seriously aimed at limiting congestion or “improving air quality,” as Democrats also claim. New York’s air is consistently ranked as “relatively clean” and “moderately good” by environmental monitors and has been steadily improving over the last two decades. The congestion zone already has some of the cleanest air in the city: It is, after all, where the rich people live. And Gotham air overall remains cleaner than London or Paris and, depending on the time of day, is often better than Minneapolis, Denver, and Washington, D.C.—cities that are a fraction its size.
If it were really about congestion, there’s only one thing I can think of that routinely causes massive, crippling gridlock in midtown Manhattan. And that’s when the United Nations is in session—every single time. If traffic were really the problem, we’d ban them instead.