By Robert Hornak
If you’ve driven into Manhattan in the last few days you likely felt a somewhat familiar but also new sensation, a big hand jamming its way into your pocket to take more of your hard-earned money. But it’s not the usual sensation New Yorkers have been experiencing in recent years from the rise in crime, especially in the subways.
No, this is the big fist of government forcing its way into your wallet to take an unconscionable amount of money from already overtaxed city residents, and simply for exercising the right to move freely about their home town.
They have almost euphemistically labeled this part of Manhattan a Congestion Relief Zone, which is laughable since the politicians championing this tax scheme are the same people who for decades have been exacerbating the congestion problem they claim to want to mitigate.
The congestion in Manhattan drivers face has come from decades of bad policies from Manhattan-centric elitists who believe that since they have an apartment in that borough, they have the right to dictate the access the rest of us have to live in or just drive through Manhattan.
For decades they have used political power and control of the community boards to block development that could have brought tens of thousands of new apartments to underdeveloped neighborhoods like the east and west Village, or even the most centrally located neighborhood, the Garment District, that is now filled with empty buildings that were once home to a long-relocated garment manufacturing industry.
Many of these elitists just couldn’t accept the concept of sharing and allowing the local population to grow where it made the most sense – close to where the jobs were. Had this happened, many thousands more people would be living close to work with very short, possibly walkable, commutes.
Instead, for decades, they have been forcing the majority of new development to the outer boroughs, where neighborhoods like Long Island City and Dumbo, areas with close proximity to Manhattan, became the main areas for development. High rise buildings began popping up by the dozens in these former warehouse districts to accommodate the demand for housing close to where people worked and without existing locals to complain.
Then these original NIMBY (not in my backyard) Manhattan obstructionists decided that the streets weren’t mainly for cars but instead should be used for recreation – their recreation. They took most of the two-lane cross streets in Manhattan, added protected bike lanes and Citi Bike stands, leaving just one narrow lane for cars to crawl along.
Avenues running north and south got an even crazier makeover, with bus lanes (often double bus lanes) on top of the new bike lanes, reducing most avenues from four to two lanes. Needless to say, losing 50% of the space for cars and trucks to drive on has created massive congestion.
And while the drivers are the people who are mostly suffering from all this, the elitist Manhattanites can’t stand the idea that the “bridge and tunnel” people are coming into “their” borough, sometimes on a bridge without a toll, and creating noise and smog in their neighborhood.
Now, because they made drivers lives a living hell, they want to further tax those drivers to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege of being able to take their car into Manhattan in a commute that often takes twice as long as before, and then because they eliminated thousands of spots of street parking, parking in an overpriced garage is also a necessity.
Let’s not even start talking about their latest scheme to increase housing density in the furthest reaches of the outer-boroughs, adding to the numbers of people who will need to commute across the entire city to get to a centrally located job from areas with little or no mass transportation.
This just makes no sense. They hate cars and want to reduce the numbers on their streets but refuse to adopt basic policies that would make is easier and more affordable for people to live close to where most of the businesses are located. So instead, they simply plan to make it so painful to drive in NYC that people will look for any alternative. And the outmigration of working-class people from NYC shows that they are finding that alternative. Somewhere else.
Robert Hornak is a professional political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @RobertHornak on X.
