‘No more car for me’: will a $23 toll finally rid Manhattan of gridlock?

Nope. Gridlock is a special condition that occurs when a vehicle is trying to turn across traffic (let’s say a left turn) but can’t make the turn because the opposing traffic is bumper to bumper. So, they sit there. But behind them traffic builds up until it’s bumper to bumper, too. Now, if someone in opposing traffic is trying to turn across all that bumper to bumper blockage in the lane behind the first vehicle – everyone winds up sitting there, stuck. And the light changes and now cross-street traffic is blocked and the same thing repeats itself for blocks down the cross-street. New York more or less solved its gridlock problems by placing a very heavy fine on anyone “blocking the box” – i.e.: making it impossible for opposing traffic to turn – and New York’s finest went around fining people for a while until the problem went away. It’s probably back, now, under the cover of “freedom of navigation” or something absurd like that.

Could a moonshot policy finally rid the nation’s most congested city of its incessant, noisy, polluting traffic? Soon, over a million drivers a day could be forced to cough up as much as $23 to enter midtown and lower Manhattan – a toll that planners say will raise $15bn to fund New York public transit while cutting vehicles in the area by as much as one-fifth.

Yeah, but would that money actually be spent on public transit, or would it be spent on fixing potholes on Wall St.? Let me guess. It’s also hardly a “moonshot” policy, unless we want to consider the many European cities that have pedestrian zones to be engaging in lunar colonization.

The obvious answer is to make downtown New York a pedestrian zone, and allow cargo delivery vehicles only between 3:00am and 5:00am, but they have to be driven and unloaded by Wall St. execs. The point of getting rich, I suppose, is so that you don’t have to work up a sweat moving boxes.

I find it disappointing whenever I see these media-led trial balloons regarding fairly straightforward issues of public policy, reporting as though “gosh, this may be an … idea.” except failing to fully explore the problem and its run-on effects. This is complicated stuff. New York was designed with a lot of road-facing cargo elevators, in many stores (they come up through the sidewalk and block foot traffic, but usually before the tourists come out) Of course there are delivery parking spaces, where truck drivers can unload – except they’re usually occupied by town cars.