BTW, there are no Republican Presidential elector votes to be lost in either New York or New Jersey so this is a big nothing to any of us.
They move and pollute the gene pools in other states.
The Port Authority collects $3.5 Billion in tolls now - in addition it is borrowing $2.5 billion more. Virtually all of that money is going to projects such as the Freedom Tower which have NOTHING to do with bridges and tunnels.
Why should I subsidize something unrelated?
“Tolls are user fees ~ they are quite legitimate, particularly if they reduce the tax burden on the general public.”
Name a single instance where that is the case? In every case they are an additional fee on top of all of the other taxes - which incidently continue to go up as well
Clear thinking and simple reason. Get off this thread now!
I live here. ost of the workers for the MTA are grossly overpaid and don’t do a damn thing. this is pure theft.
That's a mixed argument.
1. In most places, the tolls have very little relationship to the cost of maintaining the particular infrastructure asset on which they are charged.
2. The benefit/value of the infrastructure, in terms of vehicle-miles plus person-hours it saves vs a longer alternative route you would have to follow if the asset didn't exist, could represent another basis for the toll level. However, after the asset has been in place for some time, geo-economic development follows transportation routes and resource savings vs an alternative route become meaningless.
3. Transportation bottlenecks such as bridges, tunnels, and sometimes passes are a terrific way of trapping people who have no convenient alternative and nail them for whatever fees you can frog-boil them into over time.
Seems to me that bridges and tunnels whose construction costs have long been paid off and are fed by major arteries should just be part of the highway system and be free of special tolls. Newly constructed bridges, tunnels, etc provide new value and can legitimately be paid off via tolls. If they are bridges to nowhere, by all means keep charging tolls at the level required to maintain them. But if they have become an integral part of local economic patterns, charging those ever-increasing tolls to trapped commuters and delivery vehicles is totally inequitable, since the total local economy, i.e. the general public, benefits.