Memo To Staff — Try New Slogan: “Congestion Pricing — It’s Not Just For Finger Lakes Wineries”

The State Assembly offers a traffic-mitigation plan without the promise of billions of dollars for the mayor of New York City and the truth comes out:

Missing from the rival bill is any trace of the mayor’s proposal to impose a fee on most motorists who drive below 86th Street in Manhattan during peak weekday hours — a proposal that has stalled in Albany despite broad support from environmental groups and some top state officials, including Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Instead, the new proposal, sent to Assembly members on Sunday night, would attempt to ease traffic congestion with tax credits for businesses that encourage employees to telecommute, for employees who use car pools and for commercial drivers who enter Manhattan before 6 a.m. and after 9 p.m. A $500 million program to expand express bus service outside Manhattan is also included in the bill.

Top Assembly officials said the proposal was being seriously considered by lawmakers. Its author, Assemblyman Rory I. Lancman, a first-term Democrat from Queens, said he hoped to introduce the bill this week.

Also released yesterday was a sharply critical Assembly report that described congestion pricing as a regressive tax that would disproportionately affect poor and middle-income drivers, and questioned the plan’s feasibility.

“I think the mayor’s plan, certainly in its current iteration, is not going to happen,” Mr. Lancman said in an interview. He said that state legislators had “a genuine desire” to tackle congestion problems, but that the mayor’s proposal offered few public transportation alternatives for the influx of commuters who would leave their cars at home.

“If you’re telling people you have to make a choice between a $2,000-a-year tax or use mass transit, I think it’s only fair that those people actually have a viable mass transit alternative, and we don’t,” Mr. Lancman said. (The $2,000 figure refers to an estimate of what drivers would pay annually to enter Manhattan under the plan.)

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg said that the mayor’s plan called for large-scale improvements to the city’s mass transit system before the start of congestion pricing. “None of the other potential plans provides a revenue stream to fund $30 billion in mass transit improvements over the next two decades,” the spokesman, John Gallagher, wrote in an e-mail message.

There — add “$30 billion in mass transit improvements” to “one million new people” in a growing list of gratuitously infalted numbers devised to scare people into accepting bold new initiatives. $30 billion for what exactly? Fourteen or 15 new 7 train stops?

Then again, maybe the Mayor’s people should point to the example of North Fork and Finger Lakes wineries, where congestion pricing has been tried and seems to actually help.