A Setback for ‘Sado-Progressivism’
A Setback for ‘Sado-Progressivism’
The New Center: A Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari
In an 11th-hour intervention, Kathy Hochul indefinitely paused implementation of congestion pricing, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to extract hefty fines from drivers crossing south of 61st Street into Manhattan. The New York governor cited congestion pricing’s chilling effect on the city’s post-pandemic recovery, as well as the added financial burdens that would have been imposed on ordinary New Yorkers.
Kudos to Hochul—and a hearty Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah to the urban sado-progressives who’d concocted this awful scheme.
This is, of course, a huge relief for me personally. My wife and I have kids who play sports, meaning we have to lug gear up and down the island, and we happen to live just below 61st Street. The congestion-pricing plan made no accommodation for families like ours. We’d have been hit with a $15 fee every single day we drove our kids to school or to their various athletics events, or nearly $5,500 annually.
And for what? The scheme was meant to buck up funding for a subway system that has been hemorrhaging riders (and therefore revenue) ever since the pandemic. But squeezing cash from drivers wouldn’t have boosted MTA ridership. For that, the city and the state need to tackle the criminality and lifestyle nuisances that plague the underground.
An extra fine wouldn’t cause middle-class families to use the underground—where their children are at high risk of being exposed to open drug use, public masturbation and urination, and straight-up gun violence. The fine would simply have pushed more families to the suburbs, while giving office employers one more reason to expand their work-from-home offerings and/or to relocate away from a Midtown region still suffering from critically low occupancy.
While it isn’t nearly as bad as non-New Yorkers might imagine (at least, not everywhere nor at all times), traffic congestion is a real problem. The solution, however, is quite simple: pausing the expansion of endless underused bike lanes—another sado-progressive fetish—while requiring businesses to accept night deliveries, so trucks don’t take up entire lanes in peak hours. (Yes, that latter proposal would mean raising labor costs somewhat, but it would be a far more targeted intervention.)
Hochul understood all this, and she acted decisively to save the city from one more governance misstep. Those of us who oppose sado-progressivism, however, mustn’t grow complacent or rest on our laurels. Like the sadists they are, these people never rest, never weary.
I am hereby adopting the brilliant phrase 'sado-progressivism' for the mean-spirited anti-driver legislation we're seeing everywhere but I do suggest you go back and look at how bike lanes actually work in big cities (e.g. London where I live). To state the obvious: they're kind of like roads. They're under-used and then they're more used and then they're used just right and then they're over-used (and then you need more).
It's fairly obvious that the goal of congestion pricing is not to decrease traffic congestion, it's to leverage traffic congestion to generate revenue for alternative modes of transportation. While I agree with you that there are a host of unaddressed problems with those other modes, in principle, the idea of subsidizing a societal good with revenue from activities that are more societally harmful makes sense to me.