Charles Komanoff

It's the New Math: a dollar-a-trip rise in the cost of fuel for a car trip to Manhattan is cutting traffic almost as much as Mayor Bloomberg's eight-dollar toll plan would have done.

“In for a penny, in for a pound” is how the Brits express what we Americans less elegantly call “the whole hog”: why do something halfway when you might as well go all the way?

The Times reported Saturday that vehicle traffic on Port Authority bridges and tunnels declined by 2.9% in March, in the wake of toll increases that took effect on March 2. In typical bizarre fashion, the Times' lede asks, “Who needs congestion pricing when plain old toll increases seem to do the job?”

Comrie is right -- $8 to drive into mid-Manhattan is nuts. The fee should be at least $40.

Grief, solidarity and resolve brought out two hundred New York cyclists yesterday for the third annual Ghost Bikes Memorial Ride, to commemorate cyclists killed by motor vehicle drivers last year.

Portraits of cyclists killed on the streets of New York, Eric Ng, Keith Powell, Andre Anderson, and Carl Nacht by artist Christopher Cardinale.

"The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole, and not because damage has been done to individuals who are entitled to reparation. It is the body politic itself that stands in need of being repaired, and it is the general public order that has been thrown out of gear and must be restored."  -- Hannah Arendt

Assembly Member Richard Brodsky, archenemy of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, is urging the mayor to seek a carbon tax instead. So he said, following Monday's meeting of the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, as reported by Streetsblog and confirmed by at least one other observer.

A dozen or so years ago, back when congestion pricing was a distant dream and New York City's number one transportation priority was to squeeze more transit funding from government, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign commissioned me to determine which was greater: the dollars that New York State governments took in from drivers, or the dollars spent on drivers' behalf. I spent months immersed in bookkeeping arcana, parsing revenue pots like the statewide Petroleum Business Tax and expenses like fire department equipment for prying crash victims from mangled vehicles, before I emerged with an answer.

Chad Rachman / S.I. Advance Police view Honda in which Michelle Arout, 17, died in Veterans Road drag race.