The MTA’s funding crisis could lead to some form of congestion pricing or Manhattan bridge tolls as soon as springtime, Mayor Bloomberg predicted yesterday.
“I don’t think that congestion pricing and those kinds of things are dead,” Bloomberg told CNBC as part of a day of appearances touting New York’s efforts to use less energy.
Bloomberg’s controversial idea to charge $8 to drive into Manhattan below 60th St. died in the Assembly last year, and a plan for tolls on every Manhattan bridge was scuttled in the Senate this year.
But with the MTA facing an unexpected budget hole of up to $700 million, Bloomberg said, the revenue from a toll could be irresistible to Albany lawmakers – while also cutting traffic and pollution in Manhattan.
“Come March, they’re going to have to balance a budget, and I think any kind of revenue source is going to be on the table, and it may in fact still get done,” Bloomberg said. “If we had done congestion pricing two years ago, perhaps they wouldn’t be in this situation.”
London, Stockholm and other cities pioneered the idea of charging drivers to enter a central city, and Bloomberg overcame outer-borough resistance to ram his plan through the City Council last year.
The idea remains unpopular in many parts of the city, though, and Bloomberg was careful later to distance himself from any new push for congestion pricing.
“Whether you see it in New York or not, I’ll leave it up to the state legislature,” he told a group of American mayors later at the United Nations summit.
“Perhaps it’s an idea whose time has come.”
{NY Daily News/Noam Amdurski-Matzav.com Newscenter}
The MTA needs money so we have to pay to go over a bridge? Bridge tolls were meant to pay for the cost of and/or maintenance of said bridge, not to fund something else. Maybe the MTA should trim the fat.