But as to toll (flat) vs tax (progressive), you're right: it's definitely screwing over the poor.
I'm all in favor of usage based charging, but "unaffordable to live near work on a moderate salary" + "we're going to tax your daily commute, the same as your boss" doesn't feel fair.
In Chicago, the vast majority of people who live in the suburbs and work in the loop take Metra. But Chicago's transit system is so heavily hub-and-spoke that the public transit just isn't practical if you don't work near the hub, and plenty of people don't. For them, it's frequently a choice between an hour or so in traffic, and more like 2 hours split among some combination of traffic (to get to the commuter train station), train, and maybe bus. I can't really blame anyone for deciding that 4 hours total commuting is not an option.
I know people who drive from their faraway place to a train station outside the city and then take the Metro-North into Grand Central Station. From street parking to bridges and tunnels, New York City massively subsidises drivers.
I'd strongly prefer we raise tolls and congestion charges and use the proceeds to modernize our subway system.
Actually, the bridge and tunnel tolls are major revenue generators for the MTA. The subway is near revenue neutral. The buses lose tons of money.
Edit: Elsewhere in this thread, someone posted a link to Beijing's solution to congestion, which seem interesting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_space_rationing_in_Beij...
Unfortunately, I don't know if I would trust the politics of NY to allow for that.
From what I've heard well off families in Beijing will then just have multiple cars, one with an odd license plate and one with an even one.
That said, especially given the circumstances of Manhattan, congestion charging probably makes the most sense and also has the virtue of bringing in additional money that can theoretically be used to improve public transit.
[ADDED: I think the key here is that driving in Manhattan for individuals is something of a luxury good. We'd view things differently if this was about distributing relief food after a natural disaster.]
Lotteries are an absolutely terrible system. They fail the basic test of Pareto efficiency. Or in other words: lotteries result in outcomes in which one person could be made better off without making anybody else worse off. The only way to avoid this with a lottery is provide a secondary market, and that defeats the whole purpose of a lottery - at that point, you might as well skip the lottery and use a direct market.
Not all Pareto-efficient scenarios are good, but all scenarios that are not Pareto-efficient are bad, by definition. If Alice could be made better off without making Bob or Eve (or anyone else) any worse off, we know there's a problem.
Say there's a national park campground that fills up within a few minutes of opening up reservations.
However the lottery is implemented exactly (wardialing, picking applications at random), it's pretty much how you have to do things. Raising prices until supply meets demand is (properly) politically a non-starter even if it's the "correct" economic solution.
You can have a waiting list (as I believe many Grand Canyon permits use) but creating multi-year waiting lists have their own set of problems because it makes it hard for people to plan.
But, yes, in general the alternatives for excess demand of a fixed quantity item tend to be:
1.) Increase price
2.) Have a lottery (which doesn't really make any sense here)
3.) Have some sort of rationing scheme (waitlist, can only buy X of item, etc.)
Okay, so as a solution to that, let's stop paying for roads with taxpayer money, and instead let roads in Manhattan be funded entirely from private funds, collected from those who use the roads instead (either individuals who don't mind paying, or businesses who pay fees on the deliveries, the same way ships pay fees at port).
That way, taxpayer funds can go entirely to public transit instead, so (assuming we solve the problem of rampant corruption and fraud within the MTA and NYS government[0]) it's a win-win for all!
I'm being half-facetious here, but those are the implications of the argument you're making, and I'm not going to say they're necessarily a bad idea.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Edit: "screw the poor" always happens when you have a limited quantity of the desired product/service. In this case, the allocation is based on how much money you have.
Why screw the middle class? Is paying 15$ every time you drive somewhere sustainable for you? If it is, then your not middle class - your rich
Who's to say $15 isn't a normal toll amount? As far as I know the bridge is quite busy which means it seems very defensible. They discount it for electronically billed tolls (which makes it faster for everybody) and discount it again for carpoolers (less cars, again faster for everybody). The $15 is the amount you pay if you're having the most impact.
The answer isn't "screw the poor", because the poor aren't generally driving into Manhattan. They're taking public transit.
Driving into Manhattan is already incredibly expensive. $15 is a drop in the bucket compared to what people already have to pay.