The New Year tends to bring many new changes. There are changes in our health insurance plans, new laws, new tax categories, not to mention the ever-popular new diets we start on January 1st that may or may not last the entire year.
So, this year we are being blessed with one that was thrown at us like a splash of mud, without much thought and discussion by our governor, no voting by the people, and most likely with a big gleam in the eyes of the MTA and Port Authority, who seem to be brilliant in wasting our money. Naturally, I’m talking about congestion pricing, and I am sure it will reap new moves to throw down the toilet with the other monies they’ve been misusing for years.
Is congestion pricing something we really need? And if we really need it, doesn’t it sound logical that more time and effort should have gone into structuring the plan so it could be utilized in the best possible scenario to get the best results given that the new toll charges are really high and the bank account collecting them is going to be overflowing with high numbers in a very short time?
The short answer is that we really do need a congestion pricing plan for the city. Is this the right plan that the governor should have implemented to get the right results? In my opinion: No.
This plan reminds me of the Tower of Babel, destined to collapse, and that is probably what we’re going to see after it starts running for a few weeks, with everything upside down, nothing working, people complaining and yelling and cursing, and court cases.
Governor Hochul should have first organized planning groups to restructure mass transit improvements and create an atmosphere in the subways where people feel safe and secure before putting her congestion pricing plan into action. You have a situation where people do not feel safe utilizing the subways because of criminal activity or homeless people suffering from mental illness pushing people off platforms or setting people randomly on fire (to mention just a few of the situations we’ve deal with on our subway system). Before you put a restrictive and expensive driving policy into play, you would think cleaning up the subways and making them safe for mass use again would be the first priority. Before these whole shenanigans started, it would have made more sense to have a simple “things I need to do before I put a congestion pricing program into play” checklist and actually fix those things before starting a program that is more like throwing a grenade into a crowd just to see how it plays out.
The governor may have actively started this program with blinders on and no preparation in advance of promoting this mandatory program, but I’m sure we are going to be hearing plenty about it and its disastrous start. Reports in the newspapers already describe how desperate people are, altering their license plates to evade this disastrous tax.
Let’s see what we hear when this program has passed its two-week mark. Should be interesting, I will prepare popcorn! n
Anessa Cohen lives in Cedarhurst and is a Licensed Real Estate Broker (Anessa V Cohen Realty) with over 20 years of experience offering full service residential, management and commercial real estate services in the 5 towns of Long Island as well as the tri-state area. She can be reached at 516-569-5007 or Readers are encouraged to send any questions or scenarios by email to anessa@avcrealty.com.
