Paying to Use Public Streets. The rich are now trying to ban the poor from driving on public streets in prime areas by imposing a fee to use public roads, so that the rich can ride in comfort and get around conveniently in their enclaves, free from the necessity of sharing the roads with their 'inferiors'.
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Of course, they don't come right out and say that's what they want to do. They couch it in other terms.
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Using London's "congestion charge" as a model, Republicans are now suggesting that congested city centers — for now — impose a fee per car to reduce traffic. Plainly this is a hugely regressive tax designed to victimize the poor and give the rich privileges that the poor do not get, indeed actively take away a right the poor have always had — to drive on public streets that their taxes helped build and repair — instead to reserve those streets to the rich alone.
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The New York Post, which should change its name to The Voice of Plutocracy, today published an op-ed piece by "Peter Hendy[,] the surface-transport managing director of Transport for London, which runs the city's public transit, and chairman of the UK Government's Commission for Integrated Transport" to argue (by implication) that New York should impose London's high-handed and regressive system.

In February 2003, London took a radical step to do something about [traffic congestion]: We introduced the congestion charge to the most clogged-up part of the city center.

Our aim was to cut congestion and raise funds to invest in London's transport system, which had suffered years of neglect.

Drivers are charged $13.75 to enter the zone or drive inside it. Cameras pick up vehicle registration numbers, which are later compared to a list of those who've paid the charge for the day.

$13.75 a DAY simply to drive on public streets that the public paid to build and maintain! That's an outrage. That the ruling class of Britain, the evil monstrosity we had to throw out of our country because of its vile high-handedness and aristocratic instinct, should inflict such a crime against its own people is hardly surprising. After all, Britain has been controlled by slime for centuries. Has our own country so completely abandoned its Revolutionary principles as to adopt a rigid system of class discrimination in which the rich get rights the poor and middle-class do not? I would rather we have a full-scale civil war in which we slaughter the rich and chop up their bodies for parts for poor and middle-class patients awaiting organ transplants.
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The rich plainly want to clear the roads of "riff-raff" so they can drive comfortably and quickly from place to place in areas reserved to them. The hoi-polloi are to be reduced to taking inconvenient, uncomfortable, and infrequent public transportation, or walking or riding bicycles in the snow and pouring rain so the rich can speed crosstown in their BMW's and limos. Sh*t on that!
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It's bad enuf that we have toll roads, bridges, and tunnels, but they were built as toll facilities and might not have been built had tolls not been charged to construct them. Even that is hard to argue as a practical matter. If the demands of society and the economy require us to span rivers and get vehicles quickly from Point A to Point B, and especially if, as is usually the case, efficient traffic flow is indispensable to a well-functioning economy, such structures should be built as every other public convenience is built, at public cost thru general taxation, and permitted to everyone in society without discrimination on the basis of ability to pay.
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In my state, our major interregional roadways, the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, are toll roads. In California, similar roads are freeways, free not just of cross-streets but also of tolls. California's is far the better way. I do not for an instant believe that all the costs of the Turnpike and Parkway are covered by tolls. I suspect that at least some repairs and improvements, and emergency services to accident victims, etc., are funded by general tax revenues collected from people who can't afford to use those toll roads. That is immoral.
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Toll roads, bridges, and tunnels everywhere in this society should be abolished. We certainly should not be applying tolls to roads long ago built and always maintained at general public expense.
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What next? Charging people for the right to drive on Park Avenue in the middle of the nite, or on Rodeo Drive, or any surface street in Rancho Mirage or East Hampton? Why not charge a fee to walk or ride a bike on the streets of the rich? Oh, hell. Why bother with camouflage? Let's just erect gates across now-public roads and reserve them to the rich, barring riff-raff altogether? That is where we're headed: complete separation of the Two Americas that John Edwards talked about, the best parts of this country being reserved to the rich, and the rest of us kept out of huge swaths of our own country.
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Any public official who attempts to impose a "congestion tax" on any part of this country should be shot.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,097.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:03 PM