Tag Archives: Public transport

Toll Wars

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We occasionally drive north to visit grandchildren (and their parents). It’s a great drive through Delaware (and sometimes even into central New Jersey), but when you get near New York City, it’s a mess. At one point it took us three hours to go from the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to the middle of Long Island. Traffic in and around New York City is always a mess. So what is the solution?

One America News Network posted an article today about one ridiculous idea.

The article reports:

A mayor in New Jersey is suggesting a commuter tax on New York City residents in retaliation for the Big Apple imposing fees on drivers coming from his state.

This week, Jersey City mayor Steve Fulop suggested implementing a commuter tax on New York City residents leaving the city. This appears to be a rebuttal to New York approving plans to use automated license plate readers to impose fees on drivers entering Manhattan from New Jersey during rush-hour traffic.

The article concludes:

“We don’t see any incentives there for drivers,” explained Robert Sinclair, spokesman for the American Auto Association. “They’re still punishing their vehicles on bad roads and yet being asked to pay for the bulk of the funding to fix the subways and the commuter railroads.”

Fulop said both states should have a “regional conversation” to work out a long-term transportation agreement.

In the meantime, lawmakers are still working out how much money to tax commuters in New York City, with the policy expected to take affect by 2021.

You can’t force people to take public transportation, but you can make public transportation so attractive, convenient, and affordable that people will want to take it. That might be a better solution.

When Viewing The Statistics, Follow The Money

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On Sunday, Michael Barone posted an article at the Washington Examiner about mass transit in America. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) announced last week that Americans use of public transportation was at an all-time high.

The chart below tells a different story:

So why would the American Public Transportation Association be telling us that ridership of public transportation is up? Well, it has to do with the way highway funds are distributed.

The article explains:

APTA is promoting the idea of a transit boom because it would like to see lots of federal money continue to be spent on transit. It already is: as King et al. point out, transit receives about 20 percent of federal surface transportation funding while accounting for only 2 to 3 percent of U.S. passenger trips. And as Cox points out, two-thirds of the recent rise in transit commuting occurred in the six “transit legacy cities”–New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington. These six cities have the nation’s six largest concentrations of downtown office employment, and transit routes were designed to funnel people into and out of these concentrated areas. Transit use has languished in other areas with subways or much touted light railway systems like Portland‘s.

Those who complain about the condition of the nation’s highways need to remember that since the 1980’s, money has been taken from highway funding to pay for bike paths and other items that are not related to maintaining highways. The program with our highways is not lack of money–it is how the money is spent. The amount of spending on public transportation in relation to the percentage of the population that uses public transportation is another example of the government trying to force people to do something they are not interested in doing. That is not the government’s job.

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