ALBANY — Same trolling, different troll.
Rep. Mike Lawler journeyed to Albany on Tuesday to pitch what he said was a new vision for the New York State and the MTA — a broadside against the agency, and congestion pricing, that was the same empty rage that transit opponents have trotted out for years.
When asked why he wanted to be the person who returns traffic-clogged streets to Manhattan by ending congestion pricing, next year’s probable GOP gubernatorial candidate disputed that the toll was showing any initial success, and launched into a fact-free rant that was filled with grievance politics and immigrant- and bike-lane bashing, but empty of a single realistic idea to run the MTA any better than his predecessors.
"I love that the MTA put out a report showing one week in January, and compared that to the average commute for the entire year of 2024," Lawler said. "This whole thing is a scam. I don't buy this nonsense." (It is unclear if Lawler has even been in the congestion relief zone since tolls started on Jan. 5.)
Had Lawler read the MTA briefings on the subject (or Streetsblog), he would know that the MTA adjusted the number of vehicles driving into the Central Business District to include the traditional lower January traffic and that our own independent analysis of January-to-January traffic showed drops on some MTA crossings into Manhattan.
The Hudson Valley Republican was also happy to ignore the factors that kneecapped the agency, such as expensive megaprojects pushed by suburban legislators.
“The MTA has more debt than 80 percent of the states in the country," he said. "That is the most incompetent, bloated, mismanaged authority in the country, it's not even close."
Staff for Gov. Hochul defended the agency's modern record on construction and pointed out that the suburbs benefited from that work.
"It's just silly," said Kathryn Garcia, the state's Director of Operations. "In the past, there may have been overruns, but I will tell you that this MTA has been delivering projects on time and on budget and some of the biggest projects for the suburbs, like third track for the Long Island Rail Road, which makes your commute into the city so much faster. They are on time at a higher percentage than they have ever been in the past."
But the carping about mismanagement and inefficiency was the same kind of empty rhetoric Albany problem-makers have thrown about any time the MTA needs cash to replace decades-old equipment and modernize rail systems.
"There's something to the inefficiency argument, but it's not a blanket blithe statement," said Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein, who reiterated that without real backup from elected officials, deep changes at the MTA will never happen
Lawler may have leaned on tired standbys because his proposals for funding the MTA and speeding up traffic seemed to come directly from an AI-generated anti-congestion pricing novelty song.
"If the MTA needs money, they should look no further than the $4 billion they're pissing away on illegal immigrants, or the $100 million used on welfare for politicians in New York's scam of a taxpayer finance system for political campaigns," he said. "Get rid of that, put that towards the MTA.
"If they really wanted to reduce congestion, they would stop clogging up every single road in the city, putting restaurants, bikes, taking up so much of the traffic lanes, and actually reducing traffic to single lane," he added. "They would actually sync the lights so you can move more than one block at a time." (He did not mention that the city's car population has risen faster than the human population over the past 10 years.)
The issues of how to run the city's streets are taken care of by Mayor Adams and Department of Transportation, of course, and, as advocates note, moving people in and out of Manhattan requires putting people in transit, not cars.
According to numbers compiled by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, 3.3 million people entered lower Manhattan on a typical weekday in 1992, a number that rose to 3.8 million people by 2019, the last full year before the pandemic disrupted normal travel patterns. In 1992, 1.1 million people entered lower Manhattan by car, truck, van or taxi, but that number dropped to 909,782 people by 2019.
"This massive migration of people is only possible because New York is built on a dense network of commuter trains, underground subways, dollar vans, bus lanes, and bike lanes — all of which move people substantially more efficiently than private vehicles," said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Ben Furnas. "Transportation policy in the greatest city in the world has to look at science and fact, not anecdotes from politicians who don't even represent New York City."
Riders Alliance Director of Communications and Policy Danny Pearlstein had an even harsher take on Lawler's presser. "Rather than playing to social media trolls, New York's public servants owe us grownup solutions in response to the challenges we face," he said.
