NYC’s “Flawed” Traffic Plan Brought to You by… Toyota

Grim picture: A screenshot from the CBS Channel 2 web site.

CBS’s Marcia Kramer adds some splatter paint to the Village Voice’s “grim picture of the state of civic engagement” on congestion pricing.

On Tuesday, her Channel 2 special investigative feature let us know that one guy in London has foiled that city’s congestion pricing cameras by using a fake license plate. Headline? “Bloomberg Wants to Bring Flawed London Plan to NYC.” Oh, and by the way, 2007 Toyota’s are priced to move!

CBS 2’s award-winning political reporter tells us that “Londoners are now cloning license plates to avoid congestion fees” (note they’re not copying license plates — they’re “cloning” them. Terrifying!) She doesn’t tell us how widespread the practice is, how many people might be doing it or how it may be impacting a system that has reduced traffic congestion by 70,000 vehicles per day and is raising $250 million a year for mass transit (You’d think it would be easy for an award-winning investigative reporter to find this sort of information). Rather, Kramer gives some airtime to Westchester obstructionist Assembly member Richard Brodsky, incorrectly referring to him as “head of the Congestion Mitigation Commission.”

After analyzing all of the public testimony delivered during the recent Traffic Mitigation Commission hearings, Environmental Defense’s Neil Giaccobi found that once New Yorkers “get into the details” of what congestion pricing is and how it works “they come around to it.” But right now, most New Yorkers “fundamentally don’t understand what congestion pricing is.”

Is it any wonder why?