The toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is too damn high.
I realize that it’s a time-honored tradition for Staten Islanders to beat our breasts and complain about how “forgotten” and taken for granted we are. Don’t let me steal your birthright from ya, but there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have to go over the river and through the woods and across two expensive bridges to get to Grandma’s house in New Jersey. They feel your pain.
A $17 bridge toll, a free ride for tourists on the ferry and $2.75 for a subway train that’s as likely to break down as get you to work on time is an inequitable system for all parties involved.
Writing in these pages, columnist Tom Wrobleski points to the toll-free East River bridges and notes, “They’re one of the few examples of government totally overlooking a revenue source.”
He suggests “toll equity.” I would humbly propose that our problem is one of a lack of imagination and memory.
Once upon a time, all bridges were intended to be free to cross. Tolls were merely temporary fees charged to travelers to pay back the bond money borrowed to fund their construction. The Brooklyn Bridge was a legendary expenditure of time and money to construct. The bridge was never for sale, but horse-drawn carriages had to rent it for the first few years until toll revenue had paid off its creditors. Now it, like the other East River crossings that were built before 1909, is free to commuters.
What changed? A man named Robert Moses began consolidating power as a public works planner in the 1920s.
When it comes to Moses’ legacy, there are two camps. Some give him all the credit for the highways, byways and thousands of acres of parkland scattered throughout our region. The rest of us curse his name during our interminable commutes.
Moses hated buses and trains and wasn’t that fond of the idea of black and brown people having too many of options for traveling beyond their neighborhood slums. His dollars-over-pennies “master planner” budgeting is why traffic is so awful. One example: the reason traffic backs up for a couple of miles before the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, as thousands of cars cram into the one-and-a-half lanes that lead from Brooklyn into Queens, was that Moses was convinced that the vast majority of drivers would always and forever need to get into lower Manhattan instead. (And that we’d all be driving instead of taking buses, boats and trains in to work.)
Moses couldn’t win an election to save his life. But he concurrently headed up various New York public authorities between 1924 and 1981. The authorities were governed by mayoral, county and gubernatorial appointees – none of whose terms expired at the same time – making Moses uniquely immune to direct accountability to voters.
To keep his appointed boards of governors in check, Moses hid behind his fiduciary responsibility to the bondholders who financed the impressive highways and bridges he built.
And he kept on borrowing money to build them and raising the tolls on them in order to maintain that responsibility to the bondholders that he used as an excuse to disagree with and flat-out ignore the governors and mayors that we-the-people elected under the misguided notion that they should be accountable to us and not some megalomaniacal man who didn’t even drive a car.
Restoring the tolls on the free bridges along the East River has been a favorite solution of tax-loathing billionaires like former mayor Mike Bloomberg ever since the city of London introduced “congestion pricing” under socialist mayor Ken Livingstone in 2003.
But all of these bridges really should be free from tolls, and our mass transit system deserves a massive reinvestment and a radical expansion. Staten Islanders deserve everything from high-speed ferries on the South Shore to an R train that crosses the Verrazano and a PATH train that connects a West Shore light rail line to Bayonne, Jersey City and lower Manhattan.
My preferred solution is to do something much closer to the spirit of socialism and tax the crap out of the billionaires who rely on the bridges, subways and buses to help the rest of us schlubs drag our sorry butts to work every day.
[This op-ed originally appeared in The Staten Island Advance.]