Doug Gordon: Prepping for a quick episode on the latest congestion pricing news and this bit from Governor Hochul's announcement is enraging. 99% of the people Hochul is talking about here — "teachers, first responders, small business workers, bodega owners — DO NOT DRIVE INTO MANHATTAN.

Prepping for a quick episode on the latest congestion pricing news and this bit from Governor Hochul's announcement is enraging. 99% of the people Hochul is talking about here — "teachers, first responders, small business workers, bodega owners — DO NOT DRIVE INTO MANHATTAN.

There is zero acknowledgment of "hardworking New Yorkers who make the city thrive" by taking the fucking bus and subway to work. "The little guy" = motorists.

Absolutely. If you want to support the NYC little guy, improve public transit.

But how could we do that?? We’d need like $15 billion! Where could we get that kind of money?

it’s a real head-scratcher to be sure

How everything works now. The "working class" of Trump supporters is people who own travel agencies and body shops, not factory workers. The "little people" who believe they have to drive to Manhattan live on half-acre lots in New Jersey and Westchester suburbs.

Yup the only thing LITTLE about this constituency is how little they use public transportation and how little regard they have for community and the environment

Even using sidewalks is way slower because of how narrow they are due to vehicular lanes + stopping for drivers at every intersection!

Okay, when are we going to make a grid lock of the city through malicious compliance? Drive every car possible into Manhattan and snarl it up

Ha. If you did this how would it be different from a day ending in y?

Let's make it impassible at all hours of the day. How many volunteers would it take, driving the speed limit and going in circles around Lower Manhattan? Pile on the traffic above and beyond the usual. Critical mass by car-overdose

I bet it's fewer than we'd think. Charles Komanoff probably knows. If we did it on a UNGA day or one of the gridlock alert days after Thanksgiving it wouldn't take much at all

Right! And it doesn't have to be every single block. There has to be some critical areas, intersections that see a lot of traffic and congestion there would be more impactful

buy me a car, pay the insurance and I'm there!

Rent a car for the day?

are governor is so car-brained she doesn't realize most NYers commute by train or bus

This pisses me off possibly more than anything else

All of these arguments would totally make sense… if NYC didn’t have the best regional transportation and subway network in the US.

And if the point were not DISCOURAGING PEOPLE FROM DRIVING INTO MANHATTAN because it causes giant problems for millions of people!

The arguments don’t make sense, but you’re flat-out wrong that we have decent public transportation. It’s horrifyingly insufficient. Now, “best in the U.S.”? Possibly. MAYBE. But definitely awful.

Well what I actually said was “best in the US”, which I think is clearly true. I’d love for it to be better— this program would have made it better.

Except it wouldn’t. Understand, I’m all for making the wealthy pay through the nose for us to have good public transportation. But look at how the system works and the way the MTA hemorrhages money, and then tell me we’d see better service. (And I addressed the “best in the U.S.” qualifier.)

As a teacher, fuck Michael Mulgrew especially.

[Pictures unrelated]

UFT leadership fosters the idea that the only way for teachers to have rights is to go against what’s actually good for kids. Yes, we need to fight the city bc the city doesn’t care about kids, either. But if they let us align ourselves WITH parents to do what’s best for all of us, we’d be strong.

But no, we can only do what works for our “allies” in Albany who fucking sell us out whenever possible. The union leadership wants us to keep giving the lobbyists money so the politicians don’t get even worse. My union is a corporate, DP-owned disaster.

Agreed. For more than just this. The Unity caucus is fucking despicable.

has she ever met a person before? has she ever been to manhattan before?

“The little guy”

FFS please show me this lowly working class New Yorker who can afford the existing tolls and parking to drive into Manhattan everyday. This is a Gothamist straw man!

plus a car payment, car insurance, gas!

This is why it's called car brain. Their brains literally cannot comprehend not using a car. It's not discouraging people from driving so they take public transit to them - it's discouraging people from driving so they cannot enter anymore because what other means of movement is there?

Philip Bump lays out the facts in this piece, totally refuting Hochul’s bogus claims. bsky.app/profile/pbum...

Wrote about Hochul’s change of heart on congestion pricing. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Analysis | Gov. Kathy Hochul’s odd argument against New York congestion pricingwww.washingtonpost.com Thousands of people drive in from Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. Reducing that traffic was a goal of the program, not a challenge to it.

The comments r wild. Readers from …NJ and Rockland County theorizing about …whether outer boro New Yorkers use the MTA. (??) 🥹

It's not hardworking New Yorkers who drive (they tend to take public transit).

I never even had a driver's license when I lived in NYC. Who can afford the insurance, parking, etc.?

WHERE WOULD THEY EVEN PARK?????

I’m not even a New Yorker and this is a stunningly bad take. Everyone takes the subway.

Love how Kath says this as if we don’t know that she is completely bought by corporations and billionaires. She’s Cuomo lite.

Translation: cities will wither and die without cars

i'm so tired of arguments like these, cars are luxury goods in new york!

How is it even possible to be a pro-gridlock politician? I thought we settled how that goes with Christie.

I'm a daily bike commuter, but I have to take the subway to classes after work because traffic between Union Square and Central Park is so bad that I get stuck in traffic on a bike most of the time.

I’m looking forward to the war on cars episode on this

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