POLITICS: Congestion taxes won’t solve anything if the MTA keeps spending like drunken sailors

Gov. Kathy Hochul took a bus ride down 14th Street on Friday morning to show how well congestion pricing is working.

“Traffic is down, business is up!” the governor’s assembled crowd bleated at her command.

Talk about cherry-picking. The 14th Street Busway has been virtually off-limits to cars for years now, so buses are always free to traverse Manhattan with almost no traffic. Ideal for a press junket demonstrating that the new tax on cars has eased the way for buses. Not to mention that Friday mornings aren’t exactly peak driving time.

Hochul dared the “naysayers” in Washington to interfere with a system that shows that “government can work for the people.”

But if she imagines that New York is a model of efficiency for the country, the state is in serious trouble. It’s one thing to be ineffective, it’s another to deny it.

Stars in her eyes

So far, congestion pricing appears to be “working,” in that fewer drivers are willing to pay the toll. But that’s not a surprise, because taxing anything produces less of it.

And as her only proof that “business is up,” the governor touted higher ticket sales on Broadway. Maybe the fact that the spring theater season is bringing superstars like George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kieran Culkin to the boards has something to do with crowded theaters? Nah, must be the new congestion fees.

The governor also bizarrely boasted that subway crime is lower now than it was in 2001, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor. Funny to bring that up when the MTA is coming off a year that saw more murders in the subway than ever before. Twelve people were killed in the system in 2024, compared to a grand total of two in 2001.

Hochul introduced Quemuel Arroyo, the MTA’s accessibility officer, who claimed preposterously that he has “never” felt unsafe riding the subway.

Arroyo also enthused about how “safe” it is to be in Times Square, less than a week since a food cart vendor sprayed a pedestrian with lighter fluid and set him on fire, leaving him with horrific burns.

To listen to the advocates of congestion pricing, the billion dollars it was supposed to bring in every year would transform our decrepit embarrassment of a system into a 21st-century transit fantasyland.

Agency ‘rounding error’

New stations, entire new lines, functioning elevators, more trains — all this and more would fall from heaven the moment the congestion pricing cameras were turned on.

That billion-dollar estimate has now been halved, but it was always a conscious, extravagant lie that the money would make much difference. The MTA operating budget is almost $20 billion annually, and its capital plan of $68 billion is tens of billions of dollars in the hole.

Congestion pricing revenue is virtually a rounding error in the MTA’s budget circus.

Meanwhile, MTA honcho Janno Lieber says New York City needs to kick in billions more, on top of a fare hike, just to keep the trains running at all. But Gotham residents already pay through the nose to support the MTA, which drinks money like a thirsty elephant.

Hochul, for her part, thinks NYC employers ought to pay even more through an increase in the “mobility” payroll tax.

The MTA has no grip on its costs, and its labor management is a notorious joke. Hochul should put her MTA on a strict diet — or cough up some funds from her quarter-trillion-dollar state budget — before she comes back to Gotham to gouge overtaxed city residents again.

Seth Barron’s book “Weaponized” is due out this year from Humanix.