By deberarr @ Adobe Stock
New York City plans to charge a toll for anyone entering the area of the city below 60th Street in Manhattan. The toll will affect many working-class residents from New York and nearby Connecticut and New Jersey who travel to the area each day for their jobs. President Trump recently posted that he hopes the toll “will soon be withdrawn!” Dean Karayanis reports in The New York Sun:
Mr. Trump, as I wrote in the Sun last month, plans to campaign for the Empire State. He’ll also be stumping next-door in New Jersey on Saturday, where residents who commute into Manhattan are frustrated with congestion pricing. They balk at the cost and fear that the plan will shift Gotham’s traffic and pollution to their backyards.
“I can’t believe,” the Queens-born Mr. Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social, “that New York City is instituting Congestion Pricing, where everyone has to pay a fortune for the ‘privilege’ of coming into the City, which is in desperate trouble without it.”
Mr. Trump’s objections echo those of the Sun in July. “As Gotham struggles to recover from Covid,” our editorial stated, “it’s hard to imagine a worse idea” than this “money grab.” Identifying the local discontent the former president seeks to harness, the Sun cited “an unusual coalition of New Jersey Democrats and New York Republicans” uniting to stop the scheme and “save” the city’s economy.
Mr. Trump called the congestion tax “a big incentive not to come” into Manhattan. “There are plenty of other places to go,” he wrote. In a nod to the fact that congestion pricing is a first in America, the former president called it “a failure everywhere it has been tried.”
Congestion pricing, Mr. Trump wrote, “would only work if a place were HOT, HOT, HOT, which New York City is not right now. What office tenant or business would want to be here with this tax? Hopefully, it will soon be withdrawn!” Next, look for him to point out that President Biden gave the plan a green light in May.
Weekdays between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. — and weekends 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. — private passenger vehicles will pay $15 to enter the Central Business District. Trucks, depending on size, will cough up $24 or $36, and motorcycles $7.50. Rideshare services will get dinged $2.50 and Gotham’s ubiquitous yellow cabs $1.25. The fees fall about 75 percent in off-peak hours.
Read more here.
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