Dear Neighbors,

I recently sent this letter to our elected officials:

Since the members of our Association all live on the border of the new pricing zone, they want to know how they figure into this poorly thought out cash grab. Our representatives seem to have forgotten that Midtown is a residential neighborhood, and our people feel this a targeted tax on them, especially for non-car-owning people who use Zip Car or rental cars when they need to.

What the creators of this plan fail to recognize is that NYC is not London or any other city for that matter. It is unique, and saying that because something worked somewhere else it should work here shows small thinking. I realize it’s too late to point out that London is a circle that one can easily put a ring around. Chopping a city in half is NOT the same thing.

Let me point out that bikes and rideshare are the reason we have a traffic nightmare in Manhattan right now. Unlike Amsterdam, a city the size of Queens with a population of 750,000, New Yorkers do not use bikes to replace cars; bikes only replace Mass Transit. No one who previously used a car for work in NYC is now happily tooling along on their bike, and rideshare has added around 100,000 cars to the city traffic. That inability to think about future impact, is the same reason we are now living with a bike/e-bike nightmare.

And did they ever consider a much simpler way of doing things? Taking the tolls off the Tri-Borough Bridge and adding small tolls to the Queensborough Bridge and the other East River bridges?

The rush to implement this ill-considered rule just looks foolish...