Cogdis: Paper Plates, Bikes, and Billion Dollar Scheme-s

Part II in a series of articles about cars, insurance fraud, and local politics.

The NYT outlines congestion pricing as a means to discourage drivers and address the city's gridlocked streets. The fees raised will help the M.T.A., which runs the city's subway, buses and two commuter rails, improve and modernize public transit.

At this point, the statisitics about how few people own cars in NYC are broken out. Depending on the publication they may get into the classist and racist discussions regarding what people outside the silk stocking districts can afford. In simpler words, they will say black people can’t afford cars so clearly these laws won’t affect them.

The map above shows high ownership rates in the blackest areas of the city. It’s within the northern portions of Brooklyn and Queens along with Manhattan that you see your lowest rates of ownership. With exception to the outerborough neighborhoods of the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy ownership rates appear to be well above the city average in all other majority-minority neighborhoods in the outerboroughs. Ironically, the article this map is taken from jokes about the lack of car culture in the city, while citing the fact that nearly half of the 3.1 million households have a registered car.

Uncoincidentally, the bluer the area appears on the map shown the less likely it is to have train access. Like many other cities in America, the working and middle class are pushed to periphery, but unlike say St. Louis our Ferguson isn't a separate town but rather South Jamaica is part of the city proper. For a comparison, NYC contains 300 sq. mi of land whereas the land within St. Louis’ borders measures 60 sq. mi. That’s roughly the size of Staten Island.

As discussed in the first article of this series, many breathless recitations of the car ownership rates define the reasoninig for many anti-car initiatives that are pushed forward by Manhattan and other silk stocking district politicians and activists. And as far as they can tell we all live in the city, more specifically a dense urban area. But it’s a myopic opinion that ignores the fact that de facto suburbs that have no train access make up large portions of the city.

More importantly, the statisitcs being used don’t reflect the actual rates of ownership.

It’s not hard to predict that if congestion pricing is enacted more fraudlent paper plates will appear. Part of the allure of them is the ability to dodge tolls, recent reports estimate almost 40 million in tolls have gone unpaid over the last two years. It takes billions of dollars to build a mile of subway. Until those number balance and the subways shake the grit that’s built up over the lockdown, taking the bus to a bus to a train or some other similar combination will remain unpallatable.

It also means that a clear look at a license plate is not a guarantee that a hit and run driver will ever be caught even more so if congestion pricing is enacted. During the pandemic there have been 562 crashes involving these fake plates where 293 injuries had occurred.