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for larger version       Bloomberg's Proposed Congestion Pricing Plan This is why the proposed congestion pricing plan needs a second opinion - yours: 1. Its dividing instead of uniting the city is grand folly. 2. City activists have tried for years to eliminate barriers to free concourse, pointing to intra-city tolls as hindrances to mobility and open trade. They would say the mayor's plan is a giant step backwards 3. Our mayor, essentially a bean counter, a billionaire businessman who acquired a city late in life, should look a lot closer to home for successful government models instead of chasing grandiose European exoticisms. He has only to peer over the backyard fence; Ella Grasso did more than anyone in the great state of Connecticut's 400 year history to ease traffic congestion, and improve travel conditions by sweeping away all the toll booths in the state in one bold stroke. To America's first woman governor, the underlying rationale for government was first and foremost to improve the average person's lot. 4. A plan that calls for a blizzard of bills (tens of thousands a day) sent by mail, and based on a technology to photograph mammoth masses of the public has never been tried before; is bound to be unpopular, and can easily misfire, causing levels of cynicism and government mistrust beyond anything ever experienced in this city - and this considering politicians have never been very popular here to begin with. 5. Tolls on the free bridges has been discussed throughout the 20th century, but like a bad dream, was always dispelled in the glaring light of reality; no mayor, regardless of how hardbitten and hard pressed ever dared the coup de grace. For a lame duck mayor and legislature to suggest a thinly disguised plan to do just that, and seriously consider implementation without first getting the voter's consent, and not placing a proposal of this magnitude on the ballot, is the very height of hubris. It's not true that New York City voters always say no, after all, they said yes to term limits - twice.
JOSEPH TIRACO
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