Bridge Tolls

When the MTA’s chief financial officer warned last month that the likely price for failing to fund the authority’s capital plan was a 15 percent fare hike, the response was swift. Just 24 hours later, according to Newsday, MTA chief Tom Prendergast “backed away” from that scenario, calling it "unconscionable."

City Council Member Margaret Chin today introduced legislation to require the city to examine the effects of New York City's dysfunctional bridge toll system on traffic safety. The bill would also mandate regular DOT safety audits for all city truck routes.

Well, a few words from Andrew Cuomo made clear that fixing NYC's broken road pricing system won't be on the table before next year's statewide elections. But some opponents of congestion pricing -- notably, Eastern Queens City Council Member Mark Weprin -- are warming to Sam Schwartz's toll reform plan, which calls for a uniform price on entry points into the Manhattan core, including the East River bridges and 60th Street, paired with lower prices on less congested, outlying bridges.

The 2009 MTA funding package passed by Albany included a plan to increase fares and tolls every other year. The most recent of those fare hikes, implemented in March, increased fares 8.4 percent, with the MTA anticipating another increase in 2015. If this pattern continued for the next decade, fares would rise 50 percent, to $3.75 per ride, according to an analysis by the city's Independent Budget Office requested by NYPIRG's Straphangers Campaign [PDF]. Unless city and state leadership act, fares will drastically outpace the inflation rate, even as crossing the East River bridges and driving to the most congested, transit-rich part of the city remains toll-free.

So John Liu has managed to take an excellent idea -- tolling the East River bridges -- and turn it into a policy disaster.

In case you missed it, Crain's ran a good piece today wherein "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz explained one of the less-publicized effects of the MTA fare and toll hikes slated to take effect this weekend. NYC's already-dysfunctional road pricing system is about to make even less sense.

In case you missed it, today the Staten Island Advance rounded up outraged quotes from local politicos in response to the MTA's proposed fare and toll hikes. Big emphasis on "toll hikes" -- it's the prospect of paying more to cross the Verrazano Bridge that has State Senator Andrew Lanza vowing to somehow defeat the proposal in Albany, while U.S. Representative Michael Grimm pledged to do the same through an act of Congress.

Since the beginning of 2008 -- right around the time that Albany legislators failed to enact congestion pricing -- NYC subway and bus fares have been hiked three times. Now the fourth fare hike in five years is on the horizon, and with Albany lawmakers sitting on their hands as MTA revenues fail to keep up with costs, there's no relief in sight for millions of transit-riding New Yorkers.

Saturday will mark two months of non-stop acclaim for Gridlock Sam’s traffic-pricing plan. The accolades kicked off on March 5 with a gushing op-ed, "Meet Sam Schwartz," by New York Times emeritus editor Bill Keller, and they haven’t let up. The Wall Street Journal, Transportation Nation, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, Channel 13, and Crain’s New York (a profile plus an editorial) have extolled Sam’s plan to overhaul New York’s tolling network and generate $15 billion over the next decade to improve roads, bridges, subways and buses across the city. By now, any New Yorker who professes ignorance of the plan has either been hiding under the proverbial rock or is flummoxed by its political implications.