Photo: AFP
Barring a Hail Mary from a Newark courtroom on Friday afternoon, New York City drivers will have to dig into their pockets to pay for congestion pricing in order to drive below 60th Street in Manhattan. New Jersey officials are still hoping a judge will side with them as they ask for clarification of a ruling that seemed to halt New York’s congestion pricing plan; if not, then New York can charge drivers nine dollars to enter Manhattan starting Monday. WOR street reporter Natalie Migliore went to 60th Street for the WOR Morning Show to ask drivers what they think will happen- and the response was overwhelmingly pessimistic.
Migliore found one driver who definitely thinks the courts won’t stop the plan from happening. “It’s inevitable. The MTA doesn’t have money, the MTA squanders money, and they look to get it from the drivers every time, whether it be from the tolls, whether it be from the MTA tax on your payrolls, they are always looking to get money from somebody. It’s always from the cars; it’s a tax on the cars.”
Another frustrated motorist thinks the MTA is too lazy to find money from other sources. “The MTA has how much fare evasion, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in graft and inefficiency and waste, and they’re gonna put it back on [us]- you know, it’s easier to tax the working-class people who are going to work every day.”
But people have to get to Manhattan somehow, and changing your way to work isn’t so easy for some of them. Migliore found an exterminator who can’t change his routine because he needs his car to carry a special piece of “equipment” to work. “I can’t. I drive with a dog. My dog is trained to locate bedbugs. I have to have him; I can’t take public transportation. I’m just like the guy, like the plumber with a truck. He has pipes to carry, he needs to do it. I have my equipment; I gotta take my equipment also.”
Another driver takes the car to Midtown because she has two places to go early in the day. “I’m a patient now at Columbia Fertility over here on 59th, so I come at least twice a week when I have to come in for morning monitoring, and I come in from Brooklyn. So I come in early because I need to get to work after this.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images