My position on congestion pricing, plainly stated

The Column: 05.13.24

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Congestion pricing comes to Manhattan in June, a system of tolls to reduce daytime traffic on streets that have become sluggish so they’ll start moving again and not turn into parking lots, which is a noble idea, just as no-smoking laws were back in the day: you don’t have a right to be a public nuisance. If you drive into Manhattan below 60thStreet, a license plate reader will assess you fifteen bucks, more for trucks and buses; your taxi fare will go up $1.25, twice that for Uber or Lyft, and the $1 billion collected per year will go to improve mass transit. Like most bold reforms, congestion pricing is unpopular, and New York being New York, people love to jump into the fray, lawsuits are filed, bureaucracies are denounced, families are split, lovers break up, conspiracy theories abound, the death of the city is predicted, dread mounts as June 30 approaches, and why shouldn’t I, a Minnesotan in exile in the city, not voice my concerns? I pay taxes here. I vote. Why should I be silent? You got a problem with that, pal?

I like congestion. It’s part of city life. Why try to turn Manhattan into Minneapolis? Downtown Minneapolis is a ghost town. Walk down Hennepin Avenue at noon, you feel like the lone survivor of a catastrophe. But a taxi ride from the Upper West Side down Columbus Avenue to a 1:30 appointment on 23rd Street is very very exciting. You jump in the cab at 96th and you cruise for a few blocks and in the Seventies it becomes a dramatic slalom run. The cabbie keeps switching lanes to avoid stopped vehicles. Delivery trucks are double-parked, reducing three lanes of traffic to a single lane. Sometimes cross-street traffic blocks the intersection so you may sit through a couple of stoplight changes. Bicyclists fly past, ignoring red lights. Motorcycles thread through the jam, helmeted guys with delivery boxes on their backs, zooming inches away from your cab. If you jumped out of the cab at any point, your mangled body would lie there until the cops arrive, further tangling traffic; eventually a hearse would pull up. Other drivers would curse you as they passed. There is extensive cursing in times of congestion: English and other languages are fully employed, horns honk, pedestrians shake their fists. Diners sit in the restaurant sheds built in the parking lanes back during COVID and eat their lobster rolls and Thai chicken while inhaling carbon monoxide and paying exorbitant prices. You sit in your cab as pedestrians pass, the whole carnival of diverse ethnicities and body types. Food aromas waft from the food trucks, hot dogs, burgers, felafel, burritos. It’s the Minnesota State Fair on amphetamines. Your awareness is heightened. You arrive at 23rd an hour late — your appointment is canceled, or you’ve lost the gig, or the lady’s left the restaurant and won’t ever speak to you again — but it’s thrilling.

Back when I lived in Minnesota, I got into several romances that I later wished traffic congestion had prevented. I paid huge sums for houses that a good traffic jam, a missed appointment with a real estate agent, would’ve saved me a bundle. I made rash decisions that, had I sat stuck in traffic for an hour in the back of a cab and thought over my options, my life would be better.

I met my beloved in 1992 at Docks Restaurant on 90th & Broadway. We had lunch for almost three hours. The marriage has stood up for almost thirty years. I adore this woman, as she is well aware. I lived at 90th, she lived at 102nd. We each walked to the restaurant. We didn’t meet by way of a dating app — they didn’t exist then — I knew of her by way of her older sister who was a classmate of my younger sister. She grew up in my hometown of Anoka, on Rice Street, a block from where my old girlfriend Christine lived on Benton Street. My school choir director Ruth Hallenberg was a member of my sweetheart’s church. My eventual mother-in-law was a friend of my classmate Pete Benzian’s mother. Do you get my drift here?

The wild ride down Columbus to 23rd through single lanes between double-parked trucks with motorcycles and bikes passing may not be the road you really need to travel, exciting though it be. Your heart’s desire may be right in your own neighborhood. A pedestrian romance may be what you’re really longing for. My sweetie is a walker in the city who knows mass transit forward and backward. Case closed. Congestion for pleasure, but for romance look around you.

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