Originally Posted by
Saintly Loser
I think the big problem would be in Queens. It's not so much those people who live in Queens, it's all the Long Island commuters from Nassau and Suffolk (and there are lots of them) who would drive to a point in Queens at which they could catch a subway into Manhattan. And they'd look for parking there, rather than driving all the way into Manhattan. It is, to some extent, transferring the parking problem from Manhattan to Queens. That's why I said that more municipal parking garages and lots would have to be part of a traffic-abatement program.
What happens in New Jersey is outside the scope of this discussion, I think, because neither the state legislature or the city government can do anything about it.
I don't know if I'm going to settle any arguments with my comments but I think this post raises some of the salient issues that differentiates the NYC issue from the London scenario.
NYC is an unique situation as it reflects some of the dissonance of competing voices and interests in our federal system because of the fact it is within one state, draws a significant number of commuters from another state, and even the municipal interests within the city can create conflicts as each borough could be seen as a de facto city in and of itself with idiosyncratic interests. When such diverse, and often conflicting, interests exist then the status quo tends to win out.
With London it is different because the governmental power is more centralized in the UK, London is also the capital of England and seat of parliament in the UK. It would be as if NYC was Albany, DC, and was not neighbored by a different state. I also don't see CCTV going over very well in an American city. For good or bad, consolidation of power makes it easy to push through a given agenda since there are less needs to find compromises.
And as a total tangent, while the points raised concerning the MTA are likely legitimite I have one word/acronym for you:
SEPTA