Middle Class Commuters Win, Elitist Manhattanites Lose One In Albany

If you (or anyone you know) have ever tried to rent an apartment in Manhattan, then you’re familiar with the horror stories. A cramped studio can easily run $3000 per month. To get one, you generally have to pay a broker fee of 15% of the annual rent, which will be at least $5000. Add in security deposits, etc. and the check you’ll have to write ino order to move in will be well over $10,000. What if you have a family and need a two or even three-bedroom apartment? Unless you’re fabulously rich, “fuhgeddaboutit,” as the New Yorkers would say. Manhattan is not a middle class-friendly place to live.

And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of middle-income jobs there; in fact, the majority of the workers in those soaring office skyscrapers are middle class. Because they can’t afford to live nearby, they have to commute—either from less pricey boroughs like Queens or Brooklyn, or from the suburbs. Those who can use New York’s famous subways, or ride commuter trains into Grand Central Terminal. But many do not live anywhere near a subway or train station.

Driving into, and in, Manhattan is no picnic. Once you get there, the parking fees are astronomical. Nobody does it for fun. People do it for one reason only: because they have to.

Now the people who are rich enough to live in Manhattan don’t like all those Camrys and Impalas and Civics clogging their posh streets. And, of course, it’s very fashionable these days to be anti-automobile for environmental reasons. So together with Mayor Bloomberg, a Manhattanite elitist par excellence who once received $10 million in severance pay from an investment banking firm, they cooked up the perfect plan to stick it to all the peons who drive into the city to work for them: let’s make ‘em pay for the privilege of getting here.

Thus was the proposal for an $8 per day tax on cars driving into Manhattan born. Under the plan, if you were, say, a paralegal from northern New Jersey making $60,000 per year, you’d have to either drive to a distant train station somewhere and spend two hours each way on your work commute, or pony up an extra $160 per month on top of the $4 gas and $300 per month parking fees you were already paying. The money would go to help make New York a friendlier place for your boss, who makes $600,000 per year and takes a $6 cab ride each way, and who, of course, would escape the tax unscathed.

Everybody who’s anybody in New York was for the plan, and all the nobodies who work for them were against it. But to become law, it had to pass the New York State legislature.

Chalk one up for working Americans. Both Democrats in the State Assembly and Republicans in the State Senate heard loud and clear from their constituents what they thought of having to pay a cash penalty for the crime of trying to get to work.

Assemblyman Mark S. Weprin, a Queens Democrat, said that in discussing the issue with his colleagues, “the word ‘elitist’ came up a number of times.” His constituents, Mr. Weprin said, almost uniformly opposed the measure, viewing it as a tax on their ability to move around their own city. Mr. Weprin estimated that opinion among Assembly Democrats ran four to one against the plan.

So at least, for now, the plan is dead.

Mr. Bloomberg and his buddies will certainly lament the loss at their cocktail parties, and will have yet one more reason to detest the average folk, who are so much less environmentally enlightened than they. But at least those folk won’t be paying an extra eight bucks every day for the privilege of commuting to work for them.