{"id":3508,"date":"2025-02-27T20:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T20:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=3508"},"modified":"2025-02-27T20:00:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T20:00:05","slug":"opinion-trump-can-pry-congestion-pricing-from-my-cold-dead-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=3508","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Trump Can Pry Congestion Pricing From My Cold, Dead Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"


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New York is a hard place to live. You especially feel it after spending a little time somewhere else. Here you have to walk in all kinds of weather. The crowds are relentless. The subway is an undependable fright. The other day I missed watching a friend conduct a show because of signal problems \u2014 any New York straphanger dreads the term \u2014 due to the system\u2019s antique equipment.<\/p>\n

But if you need a car, as I do, then none of that holds a candle to the hassle of driving in Manhattan. Unless you have the option of doing your motoring at 2 in the morning, it\u2019s a tedious and frustrating misery. Endless putt-putting, dodging buses nosing out of their lane, getting stuck behind massive, roaring trucks (with the big wheels spraying snow salt on your windshield), sitting in a line of vehicles so long and stalled that you\u2019re lucky if four at a time get through a green light. There are just too many damned cars.<\/p>\n

Or were. On Jan. 5 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority instituted congestion pricing: $9 for most vehicles to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.<\/p>\n

It worked. Tens of thousands fewer<\/a> cars now enter the congestion pricing zone daily. Let me be one of the sources social historians decades hence quote on what this feels like: Suddenly, traffic in New York is more like traffic in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., than I have experienced in my 23 years here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n