This summer, after nearly a quarter of a century of anxious delays, I got my driver’s license, a small victory followed by a commitment to get in the car and go longer and longer. This task in exposure therapy produced the best results for the individual over Labor Day weekend. On a cloudless and low-traffic afternoon, I took my son to visit a friend in Duxbury, Mass., a ride about 60 miles from our starting point in Rhode Island and a trip, albeit well-received. performed in the least stressful conditions imaginable, still leaving me with the vague feeling that I was taking the risk of heli-skiing in Kashmir.
Highway driving continues to be a major challenge to my skeptical mind, and does not believe that people who have driven for many years enter into the interstate social contract with too little thought or fear. hesitate. There is nothing else we do every day that requires so much trust in strangers – a belief that they value their own lives enough to keep from taking risks, the belief that they will act. to protect us. Along the way, the source of our increasingly acute social frictions seems difficult to analyze. Driving requires responsiveness, accommodation, synchronicity, collaborative improvisation; it called for us to join a group choreography, and over and over we said yes.
The question of whether that is still a fundamentally ethical option is at the heart of the congestion pricing debate, which is now peaking in New York City. Two years ago, state legislators passed legislation allowing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to charge cars and trucks for the privilege of entering Manhattan below 60th Street. Even if these conversations have been going on for years, many details have yet to be finalized, including the cost of the toll, which can run up to $23. Similar shows have been carried out in Singapore, Milan and most famously in London, where for a 12-year period ending in 2014, the number of personal cars entering the city center decreased by 39%.
The MTA recently wrapped up dozens of hours of public hearings in which pedestrian and alternative transportation advocates, business owners, public servants, and many ordinary New Yorkers took to the streets. Voices for and against the plan come at a time when the pandemic has caused car ownership in the city to jump and traffic deaths among children to double. One stream of objections is that too many places in the city have poor access to public transport – of course, this is true – and so the plan unfairly punishes those who do not. have the good fortune to live in metro affluent neighborhoods.
But in fact, the hardest and most often car-requiring routes are those that don’t require an entrance to Manhattan. The subway system is designed to get into the heart of the city at the expense of making it easy to travel between the other four districts or even within them. For example, if you live in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and work near La Guardia Airport, you’ll have a good reason to travel by car, but the toll scheme won’t affect you. If you live in Kew Gardens and work in Midtown Manhattan, the argument to get your Camry is going to be harder.
Driving is as much a matter of identity as it is of convenience or necessity, which has been evident in a number of testimonies that merely express unfounded suspicions about the proposed toll for any person. any reasonable means of persuasion. One speaker worries that the congestion pricing scheme “will turn into another multi-billion dollar rebate fund used to bail out emerging ski resorts.” (Six years ago, the MTA paid a debt to the state through the transmission of $4.9 million for a regional agency manage three mountains.) In addition to the goal of reducing pollution, the congestion valuation means raising about $1 billion annually to help the city pay for its depleted bus and subway systems.
Others expressed concern for workers carrying “ladders”, because you can’t imagine them carrying them on the subway, as construction workers are often well-paid (construction is the field. fourth highest paying job in New York City by Data for 2021 from the state management office, with an average salary of $87,200) and home repairs and renovations have exploded in the Covid era.
A Brooklyn father who attended the virtual hearing said he was still undergoing physical therapy after an assault from a driver when he questioned his decision to park in the lane. bicycle. He points out that anyone who needs to go to Lower Manhattan for work — “a plumber, a carpenter, a professional harpist” — is likely to be “ahead” with congested, freelance pricing. do more with all the time no longer stuck. . He gave up his own car years ago and is a lot happier.
I listened to the hearings hoping to find some greater justification for my decision to start driving again, in middle age, as the climate crisis deepened – a decision that came from mainly from a psychological need to prove that I can overcome a strong fear and unify my consciousness. about herself as an independent woman, rather than someone who had to ask her husband to drive her to the Fairway. I go to empty. Last month, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat, was uneasy about his voters having to face new and higher costs than they pay for tolls and roads. tunneling, called congestion pricing “an untimed idea.” The existential fear is that it has come too late.
