It's deeply frustrating that Hochul will torpedo a project of this size in vague hopes of winning a few upstate votes in her upcoming reelection battle. She should be impeached for this.
On brand for New York. Good at spending money. Maybe not at actually getting stuff done.
Congestion pricing seems like a nice "free-market-ish" "capitalist" solution to traffic. If a road doesn't have enough capacity allocate that capacity to those willing to pay for it.
Now we are back to allocating capacity to those most willing to wait. Not sure that's actually better.
Streets need planning, like any network. We had one near me that was congested every day. It was solved by planning: one lane in each direction was turned into a bicycle lane. Lower car capacity, higher bicycle capacity, higher overall and a localish problem was relieved (the street formed a too-fat pipe into the area at its western end, leading to clogs there).
Congestion charging without decent alternatives is pretty terrible tho.
I thought New York had a pretty good subway system, as well as decent commuter rail
From what I read it's pretty awful and unreliable. Only spent few days there but it wasn't great. Useable, but pretty nasty.
Trying something that has some chance of working isn't a waste! You can't know beforehand what's going to happen, any big project is a calculated risk. Maybe they should have stopped earlier, maybe they should have tried something else from the start, but it's bullshit to say it's "waste" if you didn't find out until you tried.
The waste is the governor's canceling it for craven political reasons mere weeks before it was meant to go into effect, after years of preparation (and $16B in future revenue already spoken for).
Classic. Spending the revenue before it shows up.
That's one way to describe "budgeting based off a relatively reasonable expectation of future revenue", sure.
Most people with a mortgage do the same thing.
This is normal NY politics. They were perfecting their corruption skills before Chicago was even blueprints. None of that money was “wasted.” The nominal objective was never the primary purpose of the project; it was always to enrich the politically connected and their various clients, lackeys, and so on.
There is enough data out there surely to make an informed decision? NYC is late to the congestion charging scheme, so just look at all the other places doing it?
Something has to give, American politics cannot be stuck between the party of pure evil and the party of pure incompetence forever