When I first moved to New York I had a car. Well, OK, I moved my car here from the friend’s house it had been parked at out-of-state after I’d lived here for a few months and had decided to stay. While I’d pretty quickly adapted to taking the subway or cabs everywhere, and wasn’t in any particular rush to hit the city roads, I had to do something with it eventually. At that point my driving-in-New York experience had been limited to cruising around for a few days in the rented 14′ U-Haul I’d used to yard my stuff into town, the highlights of which were (1) barely escaping death on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at 4:00 a.m. (it really is narrow), (2) realizing on a trip back from IKEA, as I approached an underpass bridge with 10′ posted overhead clearance, that I’d gotten onto a parkway on Long Island uring rush hour in a truck that needed 12′ clearance (oops; they don’t have the parkway/highway distinction out West), (3) and getting pulled over by the police getting on the bridge into Manhattan so they could check the contents of the truck (which at that point contained only a bunch of unmarked brown boxes from IKEA). Admittedly, none of these occurrences were likely to repeat in a car, but still. Between those incidents, the beat-up roads, the traffic, and the maniacal drivers, I wasn’t looking forward to having a vehicle.
Once I got the car back here, the plan was to sell it more or less as soon as possible, though in the end I kept it around for a few weeks as I had to re-order a copy of the title or something along those lines. Having let the insurance lapse over the summer, I went to get a new rate quote online without changing my address with Progressive, and was informed that, because the credit bureau database they ran my application through reflected that my address had changed, my new monthly rate was going to jump from $83 a month to $440 a month, a big hike just for moving to Brooklyn. I managed to convince them that the car was still garaged out-of-state just so I could get the proof of insurance certificate, but was told quite flatly that if I submitted any claims in or around New York that they would deny them.
Predictably, after about 12 days of parking on the street near the Graham stop, I hopped in the car one morning to drive to brunch and saw that the stock stereo had been jacked. Whoever stole it managed to reset the alarm, though, and I kind of had to appreciate the artistry. It’s a bit like raping someone and then pulling their pants up, but since s/he was willing to go to all of that trouble for the CD player in a Dodge Neon, I figured they were welcome to it. I never ended up driving more than a few times in the city. I did drive through Times Square once while playing host to some out-of-town guests, and it was fun but harrying, like a video game but without any extra lives. And I think I carted one of my roommates into town a few times when the L wasn’t running. In any case, a few hundred dollars in parking tickets later — one for, like, $150 for partially blocking wheelchair access to a curb that was about 1″ high — and I finally got around to selling the thing to a quite pleasant house DJ from Bushwick. Who kept his appointment to see the car on a morning it happened to snow. A perfect finishing touch, really.
Why bring this up? My experience owning a car here led me to the inescapable conclusion that even if you’re driving a total piece of shit, owning and driving a car here is crazy expensive. I got to thinking about this more after my brunch conversation with JL last weekend about how we were both disappointed to see Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan fail, after being approved by the city council, without even coming to a vote in the state legislature. [Good editorial on Sheldon Silver's role here.] Pertermitting any conversation about how laughable New York’s home rule is in the first place, and the opprobrium of losing a few hundred million dollars in federal funding for mass transit infrastructure, it struck me as rather incredulous that much of the opposition to the plan came in the form of argument that charging $8 a day to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street would be a regressive tax on the working class commuters who drive into the city every day.
I’m sorry. Who are these people and how can they afford cars in the city?
By my math, with a clean driving record and street parking my $1200 car in a not-too-dodgy part of Brooklyn, it was going to cost me about $5,280 a year in insurance alone just to keep the thing street legal. And that’s before actually driving it. Admittedly, I’m in a higher risk insurance bracket than a 45-year-old soccer mom, but to me it seems a bit off the mark to posit that the people taking the hit on an $8 a day charge are the people just scraping by, and there’s evidence strong evidence that most driving commuters aren’t driving in out of necessity.
In my opinion, driving into and out of the city does seem like a luxury, and while my populist tendencies tend to shy away from taxing and overtaxing as a way of achieving a desired “social good” (e.g., fewer cars, improved transit services and more people taking the train), I’m not beyond suggesting that using the additional funds the plan would have generated for public transit was, on balance, a good idea. Above and beyond traffic being annoying and buses running slow, and taking a somewhat meta approach given that I no longer drive in the city, now that it’s fairly safe to assume that the science behind global warming isn’t just a hoax perpetuated by Al Gore, I’d go so far as to say I have an articulable interest in there being fewer cars on the road. I’m much more supportive of luxury taxes on items that in some remote way have an impact on me than I am on sin taxes on things that really don’t. For example, I can’t decide who drives or doesn’t, but their driving affects me in some way; I can’t decide who smokes or doesn’t, but that doesn’t affect me. And, again, while I’m generally leery of do-gooder plans to tax people into behaving the way “we” want them to — upping cigarette taxes seems largely colored by this motivation — I don’t mind as much when I have an interest.
Actually, I wonder how long it will take before the “going green” mentality extends to embracing the sentiment that gasoline taxes are viewed as more of a sin tax than a luxury tax. Admittedly, I think we’re a ways from that point; the recent clamoring for temporary suspension of the federal excise tax on gas stemming from the roiling commodities markets seems strong evidence in support of that conclusion. Anyway, think of OPEC what you will, but $4.00 gasoline doesn’t bother me so much…
I miss the Cherry Bomb…