Congestion Pricing Emerges as a Self-Defeating Choice for New York and for Governor Hochul
The message is clear to those with the effrontery to drive into Manhattan: We don’t need you, and we don’t want you.
Imagine that you own a shop, and that your business is trending downhill. You’ve lost some customers to competitors, who are offering lower prices and better service, and you’ve been forced to lay off staff, making matters worse.
What do you do?
Would you start charging people a fee to walk into your store? Not likely. That would be crazy, an insult to your clientele and utterly self-defeating. Instead, you might try sprucing up your space, offering customers money-saving deals that show you really want them back, and possibly undertake a publicity blitz to show how hard you’re working to regain their loyalty.
Making them pay, though, to walk through your door? No way. Yet that is what Governor Hochul wants to do in New York City. Under the bogus pretense of trying to ease the city’s endlessly snarled traffic, she wants (again) to lob yet another tax on the shrinking number of people who live in the Big Apple and who actually want to visit and do business in New York.
Yes, she has trimmed the so-called congestion fee to $9 from $15, but the message remains clear to those with the effrontery to drive into Manhattan: We don’t need you, and we don’t want you. This, moreover, is just the latest in the catechism of Democratic assaults on New Yorkers and their guests.
Residents have been buffeted by the country’s highest taxes, some of the worst schools in the nation, and regulations that make operating a small business in the city nearly impossible. In addition, we are the only metropolis in the world that requires buildings to undertake an every-five-year inspection of masonry, essentially dooming 20 percent of the city to be under scaffolding at any one time.
This ridiculous sop to the building trades renders entire blocks dark, occasionally unsafe, and definitely unattractive. What used to be a beautiful city is no more. If those indignities were not enough, the city’s brilliant officials have instituted bail laws that make it difficult to lock up criminals, and “Raise the Age” laws that protect young offenders from prosecution.
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Published in The New York Sun
