Downtown Decongestant

Mayor Bloomberg's pitch to tax the poor off of Manhattan streets appears to be picking up steam. So what better time to check in on London, where a similar experiment is three years deep. Paul Biggs of the British Drivers Association offers this analysis:

To start, the whole project has been very expensive to implement, and has generated less revenue than anticipated. Setup costs were about $600 million (U.S.). The charge promised to raise $400 million per year for public transportation projects, but the estimate quickly dropped to $140 million. In the first two years, nearly $200 million was "lost" in running costs.

The lower-than-expected collections should not distract us from a far bigger problem: business in London has been hurt, and working families have been stretched. On one of the busiest streets in Europe, centrally located Oxford St., stores such as Selfridges and John Lewis reported a 10% decline in sales in the first 18 months. Overall, 84% of businesses said their income was down - and 62% blamed the congestion charge.

Residents in poorer parts of London complained of less visits by family and friends, and around a third were having difficulty paying the charge.

All these results are culled from an official government survey.

Moreover, what started as a supposedly modest charge has been hiked beyond what many can afford. The £5 ($10) initial fee was not to be raised for 10 years; it has already gone up to around $16. Bus fares are still rising despite a £500 million ($1 billion) subsidy.

Well, at least traffic is down and travel through London is causing fewer headaches, right? Not exactly. Recently, Transport for London's head of traffic management admitted that traffic was creeping back up -- and was 5% higher on boundary roads than before the scheme began. And because it's buses, trucks and taxis - which operate unfettered -- that cause the worst pollution, air quality has not improved.

Still, it's worth a shot, right?

Cultural Condescension

From the Daily News. Here's today's lede editorial on a gun raffle Virginia gun makers organized in honor of Mayor Bloomberg:

"Well, golly gee, Gomer, that were a butt-kickin' gun giveaway down in ol' Virginny t'other night, weren't it?" In case you missed it, something called the Virginia Citizens Defense League held a "Bloomberg Gun Giveaway" to raise funds to pay the legal fees of firearms dealers who are being sued by Mayor Mike for illegally selling weapons.

According to the league, the prizes were "a beautiful Para Ordinance [sic] PX745E handgun" and "a sweet Browning Varmint Stalker," and we thank the league for offering the rare opportunity to use the words "sweet," "varmint" and "stalker" in the same sentence.

The weapons were said to be worth about $1,000 apiece, which, as civilized people know, is nowhere near the value of a single human life, approximately 29,500 of which are lost in the U.S. annually because of guns.

What might happen, I wonder, were a Virginia paper to do the same, except using the broken English of ebonics to rip New Yorkers? The Daily News would scream racism. Good thing liberal elitists are incapable of anything so dastardly.

Lupica Watch: Readers React

To its credit, The Daily News runs an excellent letter to the editor today:

Double-dipping
New Hyde Park, L.I.: Now that Mike Lupica is the new editorial voice of the Daily News, can he stop inserting his one-sided political views into his "sports" columns?

Michael J. Ogle

Earlier:
Mike Lupica: Still Not Thinking
Lupica the Lunatic

Mike Lupica: Still Not Thinking

Mike Lupica, aka the FunkyPundit's favorite columnist, writes in today's Daily News:

You make up your own mind about the senator from New York, and whatever baggage you think she brings to all this. But she would make a better President than the one we have because anybody would. This isn't her war. It is his.

And later:

Hillary Clinton can admit she was wrong right after Gen. Colin Powell admits he was wrong to throw in with Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld on this war, and the trumped-up reasons for entering into it, in the first place.

Not Hillary Clinton's war. Theirs. It is theirs. She didn't make the world more dangerous than it already was. They did. You want an apology? They go first.

Wrong. America is at war. Not President Bush. Even those who voted against liberating Iraq must accept the vote's outcome. A Republican representative who disagrees with Senator McCain's campaign-finance bill cannot simply announce, "McCain-Feingold is McCain's campaign-finance bill, not mine. Therefore, I'm ignoring it." Indeed, that would be illegal.

One of the various features of a democracy is that nobody can get everything he or she wants. Nor can one pick and choose which legislation he or she abides by. When Congress voted to authorize American intervention in Iraq, it set the country upon an inalterable course. Regardless of what your opinions were leading up to the conflict, if you failed to convince Congress, that doesn't make you, as an American, any less a participant in the vote's resultant effects. Like it or not, this is how democracies work.

And why the war in Iraq is just as much George Bush's as it is Mike Lupica's.

So Creative, That Daily News

"Saving Gotham's Golden Goose," headline, New York Post editorial, Jan 23

"Saving N.Y.'s Golden Goose," headline, Daily News editorial, Jan 28

Lupica the Lunatic

Mike Lupica has never been much of a sports columnist. I believe the first letter I ever wrote to a newspaper was as an 11-year-old, writing Mr. Lupica to let him know how incredible I thought it was that he could at once be so consistently unoriginal and so consistently wrong. Rare is the day an original thought arrives in his head, and, should he suffer the folly of expressing himself in those infrequent moments, unfailingly it proves false.

Which makes it all the more confounding why The Daily News would think Lupica should expand his repertoire to international politics. The day President Bush announced his new strategy for Iraq, Lupica penned a column [warning: don't click that link] that made Maureen Dowd look like Aristotle, arguing Bush's plan was flawed because instead of withdrawing the troops, he was sending more, and that means more war. And, you know, more death.

Today, he's back in the front of the book, arguing ... well, it's not quite clear what he's attempting to argue. No matter. Whatever Lupica lacks in logical argument he certainly makes up for in distempered passion. The piece is all over the place, jumping from one angry bromide to another with all the felicity of a DailyKos blogger. And like DailyKos, the only common thread tying these otherwise scattered thoughts together is a seething hatred for George Bush.

Take this typically penetrating Lupica insight:

Sen. McCain served this country bravely and proudly. If he thinks continuing to align himself with this President, on this war, is some kind of brilliant move toward higher office, he should ask a distinguished soldier like Gen. Colin Powell how that worked out for him.

Eh, what's that? Which "higher" office was it again that Powell ran for after leaving the Bush administration?

Or this:

One year ago George W. Bush talked about working with the Congress when it was still controlled, all of it, by his own party. Last night he talked about reaching out to Congress again. Yet when he makes the unilateral decision to send more troops to Iraq, when he sends a number that wouldn't have been enough back in the summer of 2003, when we still had a fighting chance over there, he doesn't want to hear from anybody. Then his outgoing vice president, Cheney, goes on television and says that you can't run a war by committee.

Here Lupica comes closest to actually advancing an argument. While difficult to decipher, I'm pretty sure he's suggesting Bush wasn't being earnest in his previous attempts at bipartisanship because he's now sending more troops, despite the current "surge" not being satisfactory had it hypothetically occurred three years ago. Yet Democrats were the ones recommending a surge, right up until the point where Bush started agreeing. So for Bush taking the Democrats up on their advice, but not realizing their advice would also switch, he's obviously ... ah, my head's starting to hurt.

To boil this all down into one bite-sized concluding blog sentence: With writing like this, Mike Lupica is the best thing that ever happened to The New York Post.