Congestion brawl back
MTA boss takes on Jersey pol trying to nix plan
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber took on members of the New Jersey bridge-and-tunnel crowd who say it’d be better to raise bus and subway fares than toll Garden Staters driving in lower Manhattan.
“We put more of the burden on the riders than other systems … Our riders are less subsidized on a percentage basis than NJ Transit, for example, and other transit systems in the United States,” Lieber said Thursday.
The comments came after Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a North Jersey Democrat and a leading west-of-the-Hudson congestion pricing foe, claimed that tolling motorists driving below 60th St. in Manhattan would reduce car and truck travel from New Jersey enough to cost the Port Authority $125 million in bridge and tunnel toll revenue each year.
Gottheimer, who held a press conference Thursday on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, said that to make up for lost revenue from congestion pricing, the Port Authority would have to raise tolls on the bridge and at at the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.
“The MTA is literally robbing Peter to pay Paul to boost revenue for the MTA,” Gottheimer said. “I’m calling on the MTA to back down now [and] find another solution to its financial woes that doesn’t squeeze more blood out of the Jersey stone.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Lieber said he didn’t know where Gottheimer got his data about Port Authority toll revenue. “They’re not in any MTA reports and I have no idea where they came from,” he said.
A spokesman for the Port Authority said the agency didn’t yet know what New York’s plan will do to the port’s coffers.
“The Port Authority is currently engaged in a thorough analysis of congestion pricing and its potential impact to the agency,” the spokesman said.
Lieber noted that aside from providing revenue for the MTA’s capital program, congestion pricing would curb pollution and improve street safety.
“I just find it slightly amazing that the selfstyled leader of the problem-solvers caucus in Congress is against solving small problems like climate change [and] congestion in the United States’ largest city,” Lieber said of Gottheimer.
“It mystifies me that he would choose to follow the motto of the prior administration in New Jersey — time for more traffic problems in Fort Lee,’ ” Lieber quipped — a reference to the 2013 “Bridgegate” scandal, in which aides to then-N.J. Gov. Chris Christie arranged a traffic jam on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge to spite Fort Lee’s mayor.
The congestion pricing plan, which is required by state law to finance $15 billion of the MTA’s capital plan, was initially slated to go into effect in 2021. It is currently expected to begin in 2024.