Following up on the parking meters post:
As expected, he has both caught grief and heard hosannas for his most contentious proposal: a charge of $8 for cars and $21 for commercial trucks that enter Manhattan below 86th Street during weekday business hours. It’s the vaporizer solution: a way to break up congestion, all that traffic choking Manhattan streets.
For decades, little has modified driving habits that pretty much everyone agrees are wasteful and unhealthful. Many people drive into Manhattan because they prefer to, not because they necessarily have to. Some don’t even mind traffic jams. In the age of cellphones and BlackBerries, the car can double as an office during a crawl through Midtown.
Mr. Bloomberg’s goal is to nudge these drivers into subways and buses, or force them to pay for refusing to change their ways.
I haven’t looked – are there studies on how well this has fared in London? (And sorry that the link is TimesSelect only…)
Greg Palmer 