So the MTA needs to pick its poison. Applying tolls to the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro bridges and varying the price from $4 to $10 by time of day would generate $730 million a year, according to the Regional Plan Association. Raising tolls at the bridges and tunnels where drivers already pay would raise $250 million. A ten-cent increase in the gas tax would yield $301 million. Hiking driver’s-license renewal fees to $50 a year would bring in $294 million; a similar boost to local car-registration fees would yield $235 million.
More creatively, the MTA could also try variable pricing on the subway, where fares would change depending on time of day or travel routes. This would be tricky, because New York is unusual in that its wealthiest areas are in the center of the city. Where it makes sense for Washington, D.C., to charge commuters traveling from suburban Maryland to suburban Virginia for the extra time they spend on the Metro, it wouldn’t for the MTA to hit up Brooklyn-to-Bronx riders for extra cash. But the MTA could easily use MetroCard technology to impose surcharges at peak travel times or at stations within Manhattan’s central business district. “I think people would support it, if they were shown that it would work and that it would be fair,” says Gotbaum. That requires a more credible and transparent MTA—which is why this option comes last, not first.
George Pataki is handling the current crisis with a blitheness that amazes and frustrates the people who know from experience what it will take to put the transit system back on track. In the budget he unveiled last month, the governor offered the MTA about 70 percent of the capital funding it will need from 2005 through 2009. And when Kalikow recommended an $850 million package of dedicated taxes to help the MTA close its budget gap, Pataki responded, “I don’t believe in taxes”—as if fare increases weren’t taxes by another name.
Year after year, Pataki’s budgets have relied on borrowing (at $2,420 per capita, New York’s debt is now two and a half times the national average) and one-shot gimmicks to keep his no-new-taxes mantra alive. The MTA is currently the best example we have of where these tactics lead. “What we’re seeing is that the political slogans that have dominated elections are finally coming home to roost on a policy basis,” says Assemblyman Brodsky. “Ideology has consequences. And we’re not in Crawford, Texas, or Peekskill, New York.”
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