Congestion Pricing

The New Yorker has an excellent piece on the proposed congestion pricing plan for New York City. An excerpt:

The case against congestion pricing is often posed in egalitarian terms. �The middle class and the poor will not be able to pay these fees and the rich will,� State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, of Westchester County, declared after listening to the Mayor�s speech. In fact, the poor don�t, as a rule, drive in and out of Manhattan: compare the cost of buying, insuring, and parking a car with the seventy-six dollars a month the M.T.A. charges for an unlimited-ride MetroCard. For those who do use cars to commute, eight dollars a day would, it�s true, quickly add up. And that is precisely the point. Congestion pricing works only to the extent that it makes other choices�changing the hours of one�s daily drive or, better yet, using mass transit�more attractive.