You almost certainly couldn’t do away with tolls without also raising taxes on the middle class. There simply isn’t enough tax revenue among the top earners to cover that. And if you tried to make it super progressive like 1950s era taxation with top earners getting taxed at 90% of income they would just… Yknow, leave. Or simply find ways to skirt it by avoiding making income and instead put it into assets.

All besides the point that eliminating tolls would simply incentivize car dependency. What better way to entice people to buy cars and use their existing cars more than to literally make everything free? The last thing this city needs is more motor vehicles on the roadways, and the bridge tolls serve as critical funding for public transit projects.

Taxes on who? In what form?

My general opposition to this is that taxes get collected and dispersed through a government agency to whatever they feel is most important: maybe it’s 30% operating expenses, 2% for parks and recreation, 15% for transit, etc.

With tolls, that money is kept within the transit funding. Riding over an MTA bridge and paying an MTA toll means that money goes directly into the NYC subway.

My other opposition to this is that car owners skew wealthy in NYC. If you drive, you should be paying into the system. Taking that burden and imposing it on everyone in the form of taxes just hurts the working class more.

The bridge costs money no matter what. Why should I have to pay for your toll if I don’t drive?

And you’d pay for other key city and transportation services… how?

November actually has the single biggest deviance between two months’ average high.

The average high in NYC in October is 67, the average high in NYC in November is 54. No other month to month has a 13 degree difference.

It really does go from warm fall days to early winter real fast.

Is that due to low speeds in NYC on residential streets?