Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - Empire State O'Reilly: Congestion Prices

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Bill takes on 'congestion prices' in New York City. Originally only available in the New York City area, Bill’s Empire State O’Reilly commentary addresses local New York issues, but those issues have implications, impact the country, and mirror problems in other states. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Congestion pricing. Do you care about this? You should. Even if you don't go into the city to work, you should care about this because there's a lot of different things to it. So it's supposed to kick in on June 20th, what, June 30th? I don't like that. End of the month. That's upcoming. And it's going to charge the regular driver. If you go below 60th Street, 15 bucks, okay? In addition to your tolls, getting it. I mean, it's absurd. It's insane.

There's another tax. And the city, they do this all the time. So June 30th, and most of the money is supposed to go to the MTA. Now, no matter how many billions of dollars goes to the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City. it'll never be enough, ever. It's a mismanaged agency. It always has been.

They have pensions like crazy. People work a long time for the MTA. Then the last year, they work insane overtime. So they boost their pension funding up. They can't meet their obligation. So they have to just kill people with taxes. And that's what this MTA congestion pricing tax is. Now, there are three main laws.

against it. One by a group calling itself New Yorkers against congestion pricing, another by a woman named Elizabeth Chan, another by the United Federation of Teachers, because the teachers say, look, we don't get paid enough in New York City to pay this tax. And a lot of our teachers are driving in from suburbs. And they can't pay it. It'll bankrupt them. Also, the town of Hempstead on Long Island has filed suit and on and on and on and on. They filed the suits in federal court, not in state or city courts, because the Department of Transportation had to okay this, which they did. So they're suing the federal government, which is a smart play, because you're never going to justice in New York, ever. It's not going to happen. But the feds, they have to look at these lawsuits, and I think that they're going to be blocking the implementation of this on June 30th.

Could be wrong, but I don't think so. I think you're going to block it. Now, down the road, each lawsuit is going to have to be heard, examine for evidence, that kind of thing. And maybe eventually congestion pricing will happen. But it should not happen because it is punishing working class people. That's who are going to pay the price for this. The same thing to do is to stop all truck deliveries in New York, in Manhattan. You can have them in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. But once you get on the island, only 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. trucks can deliver. That would unclog most of the roads. And then you've got to cut down the bike lanes, which has devastated the streets when you go east to west. You can't go across town because the

bike lanes are taken up all the road space. You've got to cut it down. If you did those two things, the congestion would ease, I'd say 50% in Manhattan, which is the problem. They're not congestion pricing you in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx, only in Manhattan. So I gave you the solution. It's been done in other places, and the reason it won't be done here in New York is because the unions don't want it. Because then they'd have to pay overtime, but the people are, no, put them on a different shift. Put the truck drivers on a different shift, the delivery people.

And then the stores go, oh, we don't want to stay up on the, hey, you know, a lot of stores are going to go out of business for this congestion pricing thing. A lot of restaurants are going to get hammered. People aren't going to go in. Mark my words, we got this on tape.