UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Congestion pricing woes turned a sleepy Daylight Savings Sunday into a lively shouting match between supporters and those who want to “axe the tax,” according to organizers and multiple reports.
Two groups confronted one another at Tramway Plaza on Second Avenue and East 60th Street, where locals organized a protest against the controversial policy and supporters rushed in to protest the protest.
“We were kind-of bum-rushed,” protest organizer Andrew Fine told NY 1.
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The debate over congestion pricing has been raging since 2019 when the state first passed the plan to fee drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street as a means to raise an estimated $1 billion for MTA capital improvements.
“Rich people will always be able to afford this — it’s not going to impact them at all,” protest organizer Valerie Mason told Patch.
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The plan also aims to reduce both air pollution and the 102 hours per year lost by each driver due to intense congestion. Final implementation will require approval from the federal government.
While the two groups were mostly peaceful, police had to separate anti-congestion pricing activist Charlton D’Souza and an unidentified cyclist who appeared to get into a minor scuffle.
D’Souza, Fine, and other attendees of the planned and permitted rally decried the disruptors as “frauds” and “paid lobbyists.”
“We don’t come and disrupt your press conferences so don’t come and interrupt ours,” D’Souza said in a video captured by Hellgate.
Anti-congestion pricing activists argue that the plan won’t decrease congestion — despite studies showing a similar 2003 plan in London reduced traffic by 30 percent — and will be a gift to what they call an unaccountable and money-hungry MTA.
Mason — a member of the East 72nd Street Neighborhood Association — points out that the MTA’s network can’t be compared to London’s because it widespread accessibility.
“Our system isn’t ready to replace all of those car trips,” Mason said, “London’s was.”
“I’ve lived in this city my whole life — I want New York to be the greatest city in the world,” Mason said. “And we want to reduce congestion, too, but we’re not sure if this is the right plan.”
But congestion pricing supporters say it’s time for cars to take a backseat when it comes to prioritizing transit.
“Car drivers are accustomed, they have been for 100 years, to receive this enormous subsidy of public space without really paying for it,” counter-protester Colin Hamilton told Hellgate, “without paying for the pollution, the congestion, the physical danger we have to experience.”
And, according toRider’s Alliance, the advocacy group that organized the counter rally, the subways could use the money.
“Congestion pricing will raise billions to upgrade subway signals, build station elevators and replace aging train cars,” the group said in a statement to Patch.
“It will also improve bus speeds and emergency response times and cut the wasted time and resources that families and businesses lose to gridlock. In a city where most people rely on public transit, it’s a progressive revenue measure with major benefits for everyone.”
Residents who live near the 60th Street boarder say they fear the congestion, if reduced, will move uptown to their neighborhoods, with for-hire vehicles idling as they wait for a fare before paying the congestion fee (the MTA claims that if this happens, drivers would quickly move on and adapt).
“We’re concerned that the congestion will just be displaced beyond the borders of the congestion pricing,” Fine told NY1.
The Upper East Side is one of the densest and most traffic-clogged neighborhoods, according to a recent study of spatial equity.
While no elected officials from the Upper East Side attended the rally, city and state officials from Brooklyn and Queens made the trip uptown to voice their frustrations.
Queens Assembly Member David Weprin called congestion pricing “not a fair deal,” and that the current plan has “no exemptions for the disabled, the elderly or the infirm,” in a press release sent by The Coalition in Opposition to Congestion Pricing, who organized the rally.
Exemptions currently exist for emergency vehicles, vehicles transporting people with disabilities — though some advocates are looking for more specifics — and a tax credit for congestion zone residents who earn less than $60,000 annually.
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Another Queens elected official, Republican Council Member Vickie Paladino, who did not attend the rally according to reports but sent a statement included in the group’s press release, said that the working class will be hit the hardest.
“Who will bear the burden? The working class, as usual,” said Paladino, who was just removed from a City Council committee after calling drag queen story hour events “child grooming.”
Data shows that across the city, wealthier households are more likely to own cars than poorer ones.
On the Upper East Side, only 3.5 percent of daily trips from the neighborhood to the congestion pricing zone were taken via private automobile — nearly 90 percent of such daily trips are done via public transit or walking — and over half of those trips were completed by people who earn more than $200,000 per year in 2019, according to a December 2021 presentation by mobility data firm Replica. And data from the latest American Community Survey show that over 70 percent of Upper East Side households do not own a car.
But Mason says those statistics don’t tell the whole story of how trickle down affects will hit New Yorkers pocketbooks through deliveries and taxis, she says, in addition to opponents stated concerns for the elderly and people with impaired mobility. “Most New Yorkers don’t own cars,” she told Patch, “but they use cars.”
“What about the taxi drivers that were just saddled with congestion surcharges? What has the MTA done with that money?” Mason said.
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