Hey, NYC? Just ... go away, OK?

[unixronin]

I'm tired of NYC trying to be the tail that wags the dog.  If it's not one thing, it's another.  You've got the Mayor going around the country making illegal straw-man gun purchases in an effort to blackmail gun dealers into accepting intrusive monitoring of their business that he has no legal authority to do.  You've got NYPD stealing legally-owned Harleys from their owners because of alleged irregularities in the way the VIN numbers are stamped, to the extent that Harley-Davidson sent out letters for all of their registered owners to carry certifying that yes, they really do own the motorcycle they're riding.

And then there's the carpool thing.  NYC will ticket you for riding a motorcycle in a HOV/carpool lane.  Federal law says you're legally permitted to do so.  (It's Title 23 United States Code, Section 166.)  NYC will ticket you anyway.  Last month's American Motorcyclist, which I just now got around to finishing, has a story about a woman who got ticketed by NYC for riding in a HOV lane and fought the ticket.  It took her three years, but finally she beat it, and a NYC administrative board acknowledged that she was exercising a legal right under Federal law and dismissed the ticket.

Most cities would, at this point, concede defeat and accept the inevitable.  But not NYC.  NYC is now trying to overturn the Federal law and get the Federal government to declare motorcycles a danger in HOV lanes nationwide.  Because NYPD wants to be able to keep writing HOV-lane tickets to motorcyclists... apparently, because they can.

You go to hell, NYC.  And NYPD specifically.  You want to be asshats in your own city, hey, that's your problem.  But you don't get to export your asshattery and make all the rest of us in the US live with it too.  We're very glad to have places that Are Not NYC.  And you can't have them.

Disclaimer:

If you live in NYC, and you like NYC, that's fine, I don't have a problem with that.  It's your city, you're allowed to like it.  But I don't have to live in your city, and you can't force me by exporting it to me.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

yeah, London's congestion-charging scheme (and the one proposed for adoption in NYC) involve setting up a zone (in NYC's case, it would be all of Manhattan below 96th St.) and then charging individual drivers for entering that zone. And it doesn't apply to highways, it applies to city streets--which would be a cast iron b*tch to privatize. Are you going to pay a toll to the owner of every building you drive past?

Congestion-tolling highways, or even putting up new tolls, would push the problem off onto local streets as drivers will use them as "shunpikes".

I *would* be in favor of privatizing limited-access highways and charging tolls on them, as long as I didn't have to pay fuel taxes to drive on them. If tolls are supposed to pay for the operating costs of the road, then if I pay fuel taxes I'm paying for it twice.

As far as paying for streets, roads, and highways, they're already supposed to be paid for by gasoline taxes--which are about the closest thing we have to a user fee. It's not perfect but gasoline taxes map fairly closely to miles driven and to vehicle weight, and vehicle weight is a useful proxy for damage done to the roads. Granted, it's not perfect, and I could see several places for improvement, but it's the current scheme and it works. (As long as gas taxes aren't stolen and put into the general fund to pay for other things, that is.)