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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Congestion pricing is a no-brainer for the environment and urbanism alike, and we can’t even make it happen in the country’s biggest city. It’s such an uphill battle to get any buy-in from the voting public. Even in such a politically homogenous city like New York.

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As someone who lives in New York and doesn't own a car (and hasn't for almost two decades), this was such a poorly thought out plan that I hope it never comes back.

It was little more than a backdoor tax on all city residents, disguised as urbanism. Good riddance.

(FWIW, I even support more funding for the MTA, within reason, but this wasn't the way to do it.)

The law in question is a New York State law, not a NYC one. The state is much less politically homogeneous than the city is, and Hochul's (tepid) argument for suspending the law is in part based on this political dynamic.

(The entire situation is a pathetically self-inflicted one: the MTA is a state entity instead of a city one, meaning that the city's single most important mode of transportation is perpetually shackled to the state's political slapfights.)

There is a similar issue playing out in Boston too, where the MBTA, the public transit authority that operates the busses and trains predominately in the Boston metro, is a state entity.

Isn’t the MTA a state-level agency so it can access state-level tax resources? While in recent years the city has become rich, in the 1960s-1990s the city was in dire financial straights. The city’s transit system was unified under the MTA in 1968, and in 1975 the city nearly had to declare bankruptcy.

That’s not the reason I’ve heard. You’re right that it was originally handed over because of the city’s bankruptcy (which did actually happen, not just nearly), but the underlying reason wasn’t tax revenues: it was because the state wanted a bargaining chip for future negotiations, and unifying NYCT with the rest of the nascent MTA was an ideal one.

(To my knowledge, the MTA is not significantly availed of the general state budget. They get some money from it, but not disproportionate to the amount their service base puts in via transit taxes.)

That said, I feel it should be left to the people in the district (Manhattan) that have to live with it day in and day out. It should be a direct vote and not some politician’s call.

I think the Swiss have a system like this. Referendums galore

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