The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Congestion Pricing and the Safety of the Subways with Nicole Gelinas

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

Nicole Gelinas is a columnist for the New York Post, a regularly quoted source for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. She has covered New York’s transportation issues for over a decade. Her book, Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car if forthcoming.

Welcome Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world-famous Comedy Cellar. I'm here with Noam Dwarman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar and host of our show. Dan Natterman is gallivanting around somewhere in Alaska. Last time I saw on Instagram, he posted something where he wrote, I'm in Juneau, which should be called no Jew. I'm Perrielle. I'm the producer of the show. And we have our guest today, Nicole Galinas. Did I pronounce that correctly? Galinas.

Galinas. I did not pronounce that even close to correctly. Nicole Jelinis is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal and a columnist at the New York Post. She writes on urban economics, infrastructure and finance. And she is the author of The Forthcoming Movement, New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, forthcoming in November 2024. Congratulations. And what about the article that you wrote in the New York Times that we read? Well, you can talk about that. That wasn't in the bio.

I have to apologize in advance. The article in the New York Times is called How New York's Congestion Pricing System Could Have Been Saved. Exactly. So I am and have been for a long time very against congestion pricing, almost like irrationally, emotionally involved with this subject. And I, I clicked my heels in happiness. I couldn't believe they actually canceled it at the last minute. And I've tried for, we were trying for two years to get somebody to come talk to us, some politician, some city councilman. So nobody, nobody would discuss congestion pricing with us. That's how our democracy works. Not a single public official would discuss it with us. So when you finally wrote an article about it,

I jumped at the chance just to talk to somebody about congestion pricing. So welcome to the show. I have one question before we start. Are you a commuter? No. Aha! Yeah, I was going to say, A, you're in good company. The poll after poll shows that the public supports Hochul's decision. You know, the transit advocates, and understandably because they've been working for this for decades and decades, I mean, people have committed their lives to it. So of course they're upset, but most people agree with the governor, even if they think the way she went about it,

waiting till the last minute was not a good- Wasting half a billion dollars. Right, exactly. I guess no one's perfect. But may I ask why you're against it? I'm not against being against it. I'm just interested in what people think about it when they are against it. The reason I'm against it is because it's a terribly... So what was the latest proposal? $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street in a car, 16 hours a day, 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., and then the other eight overnight hours, it would be $4. And more for trucks. It would be $26 to $36 for trucks. So we're talking about $75 a week times 52 weeks. It's about approximately $4,000 a year tax on the middle class.

We've seen presidential debates revolve around a $2,000 increase on the middle class tax. So I have people who work for me who, of all, and people I know, some people plan their lives around buying a house in a certain place. I'll drop the kids off on my way to work. Then I'll go to work. I have people who work for me who are elderly, who don't live anywhere near a subway or who are leaving late at night. I know people who would have to, like someone like me, I would have to leave on the hour, take my car to the train station, go to Grand Central, probably two to two and a half hours added daily to my commute. People who bought cars, bought houses, planned their lives around it.

From every angle, it just seemed like an assault, an assault on the middle class. And it reminded me of kind of when there's a run on anything, they raise the price on it. We call it gouging. It's almost like price gouging in a way so that all the wealthy people, and I do very well, I would be happy to pay the $75 a week to get to work without traffic. But it was kind of clearing out the poorer people who would have to either move out of the city, get different jobs, have to submit because they had no choice, take the horrible subways, expose themselves to the crime. I can guarantee you the subways are not going to improve. We saw in London, the congestion doesn't even improve. It was just a money grab. And I saw nothing to recommend it before COVID. And then after COVID, when half the people in New

York haven't even returned to work and were worried about a commercial real estate crash that could bring down who other who knows what the other dominoes are the idea of making it very very expensive to go to midtown so that why would people come back to the office and i'll say one other thing came pretty fluidly i didn't i didn't prepare the answer because it's heartfelt. Every wealthy organization, a law firm, hospital, whatever it is, has support staff, secretaries, janitors, whatever they are, who are middle-class people. And they would have to pay this amount of money. The elasticity, that's the word the economists use,

that people assume, oh, no problem, you can just take the subway, is so arrogant and untrue to a large number of people's lives that it just seemed indefensible to me. And I couldn't believe they were going to go for it. And that's without even getting to the issue of people who are already paying $15 or $18 tolls where we live in the outer boroughs. Those tolls already sound outrageous on their face. Now you're going to double them. I mean, it's just if they really need more money, then we should all just chip in from the general tax base. That's what I think.

Yeah. I think the governor's been hearing this a lot. And I think the pro side would say 75% of people take transit into core Manhattan. The other 25% is split across people who commute in cars and then people bringing goods in and trucks. So you take those parts. The argument of, oh, those people can just switch to transit has always been very simplistic. So the trucks obviously can't switch to transit. So yes, there will be a surcharge on goods coming in.

People who are driving in, because they are in the minority if they had an easy transit trip they would do the easy transit trip in other words there's a reason why people are getting in their car and driving to manhattan it's not right it's not it's not cheap it's not convenience it costs a lot of money to maintain a car it costs a lot of money to find parking in manhattan um the uh the tolls and everything else this is not something that people just do lightly so there's a reason that they're doing for it including the reasons you said a lot of times on weekends i'll just fool around with google maps and say from a random location in Westchester,

Long Island, or even Queens and Brooklyn, is it faster to drive or is it faster to take transit? A lot of times it's faster to drive because by the time you've driven to the suburban train station, you've gotten on the train, you've got to Grand Central, your destination is probably a good walk or another train ride from Grand Central. So you were looking at something that might be a 45 minute trip being more like an hour and 20 minutes, an hour and a half. And if you're going to the theater, you know, I used to live on Ocean Parkway and Avenue X. So you get out of the theater 11 p.m. or so. You don't want to take the F train back to Brooklyn at 11 p.m. So maybe you drove in that day because, you know,

you don't want to be waiting half an hour for a train. You don't want to be on a mostly empty train with, you know, negative elements on the train. So it is perfectly rational for the minority people to drive into New York, to drive in. I think this plan would have been more palatable if it was only a peak hours plan. So 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. start with $5, $7, $8. Don't slap an immediate $15 toll for 16 hours a day when rush hour is not 16 hours a day. mean you know like we were cynical yeah i mean

that just makes it look like what you said is a cash draft grab the london plan is not 16 hour peak hour day it's not a 24 hour plan the london and on the plan gives you a break if you drive a tesla because it's actually about right yeah yeah the the uh it's only like 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. It's free in the evenings. They actually tried to expand it to the evening hours. And after covid, they stopped doing that because they were worried about the nightlife that people wouldn my God, we need to raise a billion dollars. In London, it only raises $400 million a year. So the way that New York went about it in saying, we're starting from we need to raise a billion dollars a year no matter what, and we're going to completely ignore COVID and completely ignore that office buildings are still only 60 to 70 percent full and that the trains are only 70 percent full this was not the the best way to go about it to say the least so the way to revive it would be peak start with peak hours only if you can rearrange your schedule you know a lot of people might say okay that's fair i'll get up an hour earlier and drive in at 6 a.m. instead of 7 a.m. and avoid the

actual congestion and saturation hours. But to say, I mean, if we were coming home from a party somewhere and on the rare occasions that we drove rather than took transit, we're coming home at 1 a.m. to have to pay $4 to cross that line to 60th Street just feels very arbitrary and it makes it not a congestion program. Well, I'm going to tell you why I don't even agree with that, although I'm very happy to hear a reasonable person, is that much of what I'm describing of the injustice of it all, have a 75-year-old person that drives to work in the morning that makes $70,000 a year and now is going

to get hit with $4,000. It can't really afford it. It doesn't really have a choice. Winters can be horrible, even if they can walk. I mean, it's just so many different scenarios, right? I know somebody is taking care of their grandchildren, has to drive the grandchildren to school, then go from there to where they... There's so many stories of, and you know, the, the backstory to all this, the under, whatever we call it, the thing below the surface that always has to be remembered is that this is coming from the party that's supposed to be concerned about the middle class, which makes it even more, a more bitter pill. But one of the arguments, I think maybe it was in your article was that,

well, after all people are using are using the roads and everything, and they're causing whatever wear and firm, I'm happy. Those people are not just working for themselves. They're working for all of us. They're manning our stores. They're manning our supermarkets. It's just not fair to say, well, you want to come in here. So, you know, we'd be just as happy if you didn't come at all, right? No, that's not the case. We need you there. We're a community. And we shouldn't be, I don't think it's morally correct or analytically correct to be elevating different people. The person who comes and mans the store is in an even exchange with the person, the customer of the store. And they're both benefiting from the fact that this person gets to work. So I think, again, we all benefit from our community. And if we need money, they're looking, they run out of money. They've run out of ways to get it. So they're looking for a way that they can kind of justify,

but it doesn't really hold up. And again, I said one other thing. In London, so there's this again, I said one other thing. In London, so there's this website, inrix.com, and they have all the stats. Every article does the stats from this, right? And it does indeed show that New York City, Mexico, and London have the worst traffic. Now, London, still the worst traffic, even after congestion pricing. And this is very important because if London actually could show some real benefit other than the money, at least we'd have to take that into consideration. So the worst traffic zones are New York City, Mexico,

London, Paris, and Chicago. But then, and this is where it gets sloppy. What should I search on here? Distance, right? The greatest, if you look at the distance, the longest distance of commutes, New York, Mexico, London, Paris, Chicago. So even the statistic itself, it's measured in hours added, but it's a little deceptive because, of course, the longest commute is going to add the most hours. So we don't even really know if the traffic is worse in New York as opposed to when you add 2% time to New York because it's the longest commute, you have the longest amount of time. So even that's all sloppy, right? Yeah. I mean, without... There's no good way. This is not defensible to me. Yeah. I mean, without arguing with you, you know, tit for tat, oh, people should pay for the road space they use, blah, blah, blah, which is a fair economic

argument. I think you raise another important point about how poorly it's fair when they go home but go ahead how poorly they couch the program because they never said what's the congestion goal so if you call something congestion pricing and you were saying we're going to provide a benefit for drivers for example a plan that sam schwartz the former traffic commissioner, came up with, you know, this is going back 20 years ago, would be that a third of the revenue raised from congestion pricing would go to maintaining the roads. So you can kind of think, OK, that's fair. We'll maintain the roads in better condition. That completely disappeared from this plan. All of the money would have just gone to the transit system.

So the drivers don't see a benefit in better roads. Then your other point that you're making, what should the traffic speed be? I don't think cars and trucks should move very quickly in Manhattan. I think it makes it more dangerous for pedestrians. I don't really mind when I'm riding my bike, just riding by all the cars stuck in traffic. If they want to sit there in traffic, fine. But when you say this is going to alleviate congestion, then people are expecting, okay, I'm going to go 10 miles an hour. I'm going to go 20 miles an hour during the rush hour times in Manhattan. That is never going to happen and it shouldn't happen. And so they only had financial goal. They never said,

how do we know when we've succeeded with congestion? So I think you do risk, if we had gone ahead with the program, congestion might not improve perceptively. They'll still say, oh, it's a success. And you're right. The congestion has not improved in London. Again, that's fine with me. I have no objection to repurposing some of the space for bicycles, for pedestrians, for, you know, parties in the middle of the street, whatever you want to do. I'd want to make it more difficult for using cars inside core Manhattan. But no, you, I completely understand the point. You don't want to call something a congestion improving plan if people are still going to be sitting in traffic in Manhattan.

You know, you're kind of, you're doing a false premises argument. Another one of the arguments was that, you know, there's a lot of traffic deaths. But actually, I just right before you came, I started reading. It seems to me deaths and injuries. Injuries and deaths have shot up since we started having more bikes on the road, including pedestrians getting hit by bikes. You're not much more than by cars. You're not wrong. The introduction of e-bikes has really harmed the argument for traditional bikes. I mean, I've been out here, you know, saying for 15 years, bikes are good. We need more room for bikes. We need more women on bikes because most, you know, for decades,

women have been a very small proportion of people in city traffic because, you know, women generally tend to be less risk takers without getting into all sorts of tricky gender issues. You know, there is a reason why men are on motorcycles and women generally, of course, there are exceptions or not. Making the streets safer for women pedal cyclists was an important goal. But that goal has completely disappeared because the bike lanes have been entirely taken over by commercial e-bike delivery people. The apps are massively exploitative of the people working for them. So, you know,

you have no workman's compensation. You're working for, until recently, less than minimum wage delivering these meals cheaply to people's apartments. And so you're contending out there in these bike lanes with fast-moving motorized bicycles that are not really bicycles going every which way. There's a big difference between a pedal bicyclist on the sidewalk, that's not a good thing, but they're not going very fast, they're not posing much danger, and an e-bike that is much heavier that is going 20-25 miles on the sidewalk. And we have seen an increase in these deaths, You know, we've seen 10 pedestrian deaths from e-bikes and mopeds in the past three years. And the number of cyclist deaths has gone way up, reversing decades of progress because they're not really cyclists.

Again, you know, motorcycle, riding a motorcycle has always been very dangerous. Riding these e-cycles is also very dangerous. Riding these e-cycles is also very dangerous. So we are the transit advocacy community and bike advocacy community by sort of giving in to the app-based e-bike argument has lost a lot of its credibility. And this bleeds into congestion pricing. Are we just making more room on the streets for delivery cyclists was not an argument that existed 10 years ago. Yeah, I think there's not many good arguments. Why do you think she backed out? I think I have many theories. I think she inherited this program from Governor Cuomo. So the law creating congestion pricing was signed in 2019. I don't think Cuomo would have ever done it. You know, I can't prove that.

I think you're right. I think he was just trying to stay on the right side of the progressives were winning elections. He could do congestion pricing, say this is now the law, and get the credit that he needed from them without actually going through with it and never getting the backlash from the broader general public, which has always polled against it. So she inherited this. Cuomo had already gotten the credit. She was the one that was going to get the political backlash. And I think she got tired of this long, years-long process and going through

the months-long commission of setting the toll of the law that says you have to raise a billion dollars, of no flexibility built into that, of the advocates telling her, you know, you have to do this or we're going to pillory you. And just said a few weeks out, the people I talked to were not in favor of this. And this is even if I didn't care that they weren't in favor of it, this is not the right time. You know, Manhattan's economy has not recovered. It's lost tourist industry jobs from COVID. New York is having a very slow recovery from COVID compared to the rest of the country. You know, we've only got like 2% more jobs. The rest of the country has close to 5% more jobs. So we are losing ground. And we've had

36 murders on the subway since March of 2020. The level of murders has quintupled and the transit advocates have, they have no credibility on this issue. You know, they, all you hear from them is, oh, you know, it's, you're not very likely to be killed on the subway. Riding in a car is still more dangerous. That's fine. But having a quintupled murder level and almost all of these murders being random stranger on stranger you know mentally ill mental illness driven murders is not acceptable she's got to get as a baseline for reviving some form of this one of her goals has to be get the subway safety environment back to 2019 levels you know we hear a lot crime is a lot. Crime is in the atmosphere of all these issues.

And you guys, I mean, you are down here in a liminally safe area at all hours of the night. So you see the crime and disorder that somebody living on the Upper East Side is like, oh, what are they talking about? You know, I go out at 2 p.m. and it's fine. Well, so let me say about that, that I look at the crime statistics and I'm very open to the idea that things could be misleading,

that some random spate, some statistical cluster can fool us. But in the last, I don't know, two months has it been? I've had two employees slashed and just last week And they were slashed walking home from work? I think one person was slashed

walking home from work, one person was on the subway and then just last week two people were robbed at gunpoint, one person on McDougal Street and one person on Thompson Street. Maybe it was the same thief. I don't know. But at some point, anecdotally, statistically,

only a certain number of anecdotal things can statistically happen to you before you can generalize, you know what, either I won a lottery or this probably does. When four things like that have happened in a short time, where we had years and years without hearing of a single incident, I don't know if I trust the crime stats. Right. I mean, this is more progressive gaslighting, which is, again, it hurts their argument on congestion pricing. I mean, I kind of want to say, if you want this to succeed, you've got to give ground on some things where people can see the reality. And you

are saying the opposite of reality. I mean, it's just like Biden with the, you know, for months and years, the larger news outlets were saying, Biden's fine. You're all crazy. It's like, well, I guess not. So, I mean, the felony rate is 40% higher in the city overall than it was in 2021. So 40% is an enormous increase. I mean, we went from 30 years of steadily declining crime from 1990, 2019. Crime went down every year, pretty much without exception. Even for de Blasio. Right.

Suddenly, you have a massive increase in crime starting in early 2020. You have a 52% increase in the murder rate, the biggest increase in such a short time ever. And then all these other smaller crimes and elements of disorder also start to rise. And so people naturally are upset. And all you get from the progressive side is sort of like, oh, you know, you're just crazy. Everything's fine. And people, you know, we've had three murders in Manhattan below 60th in the past two weeks, that is not something that happened on a regular basis in the pre-COVID era. So it's not...

Do you have a theory as to why it turned? Yes. There are, like any social issue, there are multiple things happening in the real world. You know, this is not science in a closed sterile lab. But I think there's a few factors. COVID was clearly a very dislocative event. People that had very fragile mental health, this sent their mental health over the edge.

There is more casual use of psychosis-inducing drugs, including very potent marijuana. Do you commit crimes for that? psychosis inducing drugs including very potent marijuana um crimes from it i think if if you are in a mentally fragile state and you're sitting around smoking very potent marijuana that is also laced with k2 and other synthetic drugs all day this is not helping your mental state um the bail reform and the discovery reform. I mean, my colleague was looking at a case of just a fair evasion case where they had to turn over video footage and footage from three witnesses and the log books of the person that gave them the summons. And it was like weeks worth of work for a simple fair evasion case, and that's why so many of these cases are dropped or not prosecuted now. Bail reform means you can commit multiple, multiple low-level violent acts. You know, if I go up to you and punch you in the

head on the street, probably something not right with my mental health. That should be assigned to the criminal justice system. This person needs to be hospitalized. Instead, they just send them out there under bail reform until they escalate their crime to a seriously violent act. So you put all of these things together and you have much more disorder escalating to violence. Yeah, I think you're right for all those things. I think that the police are just not policing like they used to. I mean, I've heard that firsthand and we've seen it firsthand. I can't say that I blame them if they know, forget about BLM and the cameras and all that stuff and the fact that everybody hates them. Just what's the point if you know,

the guy's going to get out a minute later, you know, they lose their, their motivation. I thought, you know, this, we were lucky. The city really was very well run for a long time. And then de Blasio took over and he started making a lot of changes, but things don't come apart overnight. It takes a little while before the word gets out and the, the bad element understands, you know what, you can get away with it again. And, and,

and it reaches a kind of critical mass as what's the, what's the famous Hemingway go bankrupt a little bit. And then all of a sudden crime might be the crime rates might be the same thing. It went up a little and then all of a sudden crime might be the crime rates might be the same thing it went up a little and then all of a sudden yeah and there's no there's no set level of policing and prosecution that is right for all time uh you know when crime is set record lows it is okay to start to experiment with absolutely you know maybe we don't need to arrest people for low levels of marijuana maybe all fair evasion instead of most fair evasion should be a civil ticket rather than a misdemeanor, which, by the way, didn't come with jail time. It's just that some people don't want a misdemeanor on their record. So that is a deterrent for them to to to jump over the turnstile or go through the exit gate. But when things change, you have to change with them. And the city really hasn't done that very quickly.

And of course, you know, nobody is saying if you have mental illness, you should be sitting at Rikers Island. But if you are not going to put people in jail, you have to have an alternative way of incapacitating them. And the city hasn't done that. You know, the public mental health system is still a disaster. It's a little better than it was, but it's not, you know, you're, you're put in a mental health hold for 72 hours, you're stabilized in the hospital, then you get out, then you immediately destabilize and the same thing happens over and over. So there's no long term mental health treatment with the goal being you stabilize yourself, you go through certain steps, you know, being able to hold down a job, being able to show that you can stick to a medical regimen for a few months. They're not doing that. They just release people back. What was I sure I want to cover first? I don't want to go,

I don't want to go too easy on the non-mentally ill criminals because at some point we've lost the will yet again, we've lost it once and we kind of regained it in the 90s. We've lost the will to impose on our environment a civilized way of living in some way. We allow drugstores to have to lock every item up. I told this last week on the show, I was in Washington Square Park, hadn't been there in years. I just went to kill a half an hour. And I saw kids running around. And then I see these bums sleeping, defecation all over them, aggressively coming up to me. And I'm like, well, what is going on here?

I mean, I understand we don't have an easy solution to all this, but can't the cops at least get these guys away from our children who are playing in a park? Is this normalizing? It's like, we've lost the will. Who lives that way? There has to be, if you are severely mentally ill, you're not responsible for your actions and you should be either in a hospital setting or in a very well supervised outpatient setting but if you are not seriously mentally ill you are responsible for your actions and so the repeat shoplifting

i'm not saying your first shoplifting arrest you should be on rikers island fine but three four five ten seventy five there has to be some criminal deterrent for people who are doing this as a business. Nothing wrong with a week of community service for a shoplifting event. Yes, and there are, you know, this is a business where people go in, they fence these-

This is a perfect example, kind of the point I was making before. It's not just for CVS's sake, it's for the sake of all the people who live in the community who need to shop at CVS, right? Let's tax CVS. It's not just about them. We need

CVS. So that's another... Living in House Kitchen, two of our three drug stores have closed since 2022. And the third probably, there's a good chance of it closing uh so this is not you know the this is a very big change in the physical environment of new york city and manhattan

where if i leave my house now very very different walking around in the public safety disorder and the many many closed storefronts that was just not the case in 2019 yeah it's um but you understand you know like a big part of my book is the public safety situation in new york city changed um tremendously between 1960 and 1970. And if you weren't there at the time, like I wasn't there, you might think, you know, things can't change that quickly. Well, I mean, we're kind of reliving it that they can change that quickly.

I mean, anybody go back and watch the old movies like Death Wish. I lived in that neighborhood at the time the movie Death Wish came out. And it was a little bit of an exaggeration. Like the characters were bigger and over the top. But Wish came out. And it was a little bit of an exaggeration. Like the characters were bigger and over the top. But yes, that's what it was like.

Like people can't imagine it was really like that. We were not allowed to walk above 104th Street. It was crazy what New York was like in the early 70s. Right. And we had 26 homicides on the subway in 1990. So when we go from one or two homicides on the subways a year from 1997 to 2019, and now we've had seven one year, seven another, 11 one, and six one, that is a huge change. You know, you can't just ignore that change and be like, oh, you know, that's still not a lot of people. But the problem is with homicides, I understand the reason they use them

is because it's the most reliable statistic, right? Because virtually every murder is reported. But there is probably some ratio of a single murder to the number of people who were beaten up but didn't die, people who were robbed, people who were raped, people who were robbed. You know, it's probably an indicator. And that can be 30 to 1, 100 to 1, 200 to 1.

So the difference between 1 to 7 might also correlate with a huge change in all sorts of horrible things that happen that don't kill you. Right. So if you go to the hospital. smoking uh illegal drug probably laced with fentanyl so it's not good for you to be breathing it in or someone's playing a a loud speaker device you could say well that's not a violent crime that has nothing to do with violent crime but it does because we saw one of the subway murders this january this grandfather richard henderson commuting in brooklyn he got on the train someone's playing a loudspeaker. He says, can you not do that? And a fight ensues and the guy shoots him and he dies. So these elements of disorder, if they go unchecked, some percentage of them escalate to violence. Not all of them or

most of them, but if there is more disorder, there will be more of these incidents that escalate to fatal violence. One of the things that we lived through, and you may disagree, was this. There was a very, very begrudging attitude and an attempt to prove that the reason we saw the huge drop in crime had nothing to do with the tougher on crime policies that came from basically from the julianne administration and continued on and we had people telling no it was the lead paint and it was this and it was that and i i was always very skeptical of the lead paint theory i think i think it's been finally debunked but you know common sense just tells us that if you're tougher on it as you see if, the people who eventually commit the more serious crimes,

they started out with the lower level crimes. If you intervene sooner, they either learn their lesson not to get mixed up in crime or you end up taking them off the streets. Yes, incarceration at the levels that we have in this country are deeply disturbing

and very difficult to live with. Right up until your kid gets mugged. And then you say, fuck it, lock them all up. This is more important to me. Right. I mean, I talked to a lot of people in New York City, lived in New York City for years, and they'll say, I am a liberal, but, and the but shows that in this environment, they're not really a liberal. The city at heart is actually very moderate, and that goes across race, it goes across neighborhoods, you know, you can, we can go out to Jamaica, Queens, we can go to East New York. People who show up to community meetings, mostly women over the age of 40, will say, we don't want to be blanketed with police. We don't want disproportionate, unfair enforcement, but we want a police presence and we want some level of public safety. And if there are people hanging around the lobby of our building, smoking pot all day, being loud, we want the police to deal with that. We don't want to live in a different public

safety environment just because we are not in a wealthy neighborhood. Let me add one other thing. I don't know if you've thought about this. I'm concerned about this. A little Tyler Cowen, you know, the economist, Tyler Cowen, he told me not to worry about this, at least not yet. But you know how Detroit went bad because it turned out that cars can be made elsewhere. I just wonder at this point in our technological history, you know, what's New York's moat, as they say? The entire New York Stock Exchange can say, you know what? Nobody wants to live this way. We don't even need a stock exchange. We can do everything online. We can have a stock exchange in the cloud. Now, we're just shutting down in New York City.

There's not a thing which is done in New York City now, which to me is not at risk and also requires skilled and enthusiastic labor. And that means people who make a lot of money and people who make a lot of money want to live in a certain way and they want to raise children in a certain way and that doesn't make them bad. And if we don't respect reality here,

New York could go away. And this scares me. And I think now is not the time to be clamping down on drivers. And now is the time to be making the quality of life and prioritizing making the quality of life good, better than good for middle class and wealthy and wealthy. I hate to say it. And wealthy people who pay the bills here. Right. So it's terrible to speak up for the wealthy, but it's reality. And by the way, Cuomo understood that. I think Cuomo understood how to change with the changing winds.

And so we would see a very different Cuomo today than we saw in 2019 now he's on you know when he was right yeah when he was kowtowing to the progressive uh side with bail reform and but as you said he's paying them lips oh did he sign the bail reform yes but i do i mean again you know you can't predict an alternate reality but i think he would have understood earlier when things had gone too far and how to go back and also understood how to cajole the legislature into bigger reforms to the reforms than hokal has done but yes on the bigger you know two of the bigger points you made, one, congestion pricing is a value proposition right now. You don't charge people more for a product that has gotten worse. And there is no question quality of life in Corman, Miami has gotten worse in the past five years.

The other issue is, should we be worried about the future of New York? If we were sitting here in 1950 our major industry was manufacturing so the village you know all these luxury warehouses now that have been turned where my bar is right yeah right there you know shoe factories um clothing factories this was like the the global children's shoe making capital um all kinds of dyeing and tanning and everything else. So there were a million manufacturing jobs in New York City. This was more, this was like a third of our jobs, middle-class jobs, working class jobs. So you would say New York can't really survive

if the manufacturing industry disappears, but it did. It went to the South, and then it went overseas. And so we lost a million, or nearly all of these million manufacturing jobs. I mean, there's still, you know, a few, but they tend to be high-end, high-skill manufacturing jobs. The only thing that saved New York was the jump to white- jobs. So we transformed ourselves between 1950 and 1980 into an economy dependent on white collar jobs. Wall Street, law firms, advertising, these were massive growth industries. Show business. Right. Going from the Wagner administration in the 1950s up until Bloomberg, the economic development strategy of the city was build more office towers and bring people into these high rise office towers. at that point now where just as with manufacturing we will always have some but will we have that critical mass that is needed to fund the massive social services in the city the 50s didn't even have to pay for right the massive public services i mean you can say well we can replace office jobs with others other jobs but those jobs are not going to pay, you know, the $200,000 and above that you

need for redistributing taxes to fund the massive city budget. And we still haven't, we don't know the answer to that question, but the question is very real. It doesn't have to be on or off. You can just lose 20% of this business overall, and the city has a huge, huge financial problem. By the way, speaking of almost, speaking of, by the way, you're so smart. I can't believe I never knew you before. I'm so happy to meet you.

Everyone in New York City is smart. No, no, we do a lot. It's funny because in this podcast, sometimes we bring in well-known, smart people. And they're really dumb. And they just like melt under questioning and they don't know. Like you're truly smart woman. And not just because you agree with me.

Cuomo is just so this Biden thing. I mean, I can't get enough of the whole just as entertainment value, the whole debacle, all the covering up for him and the people were claiming that he was fine and better than ever and all the backtracking. But it occurred to me that if Cuomo hadn't self-destructed, he would be a shoo-in right now for the country, for the party to turn to. Because I remember when I was a kid, I said, well, when I was a kid, there were larger-than-life figures waiting on the sidelines. Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, these national figures, heir apparent. The Democratic Party really doesn't have its heir apparent anymore.

Cuomo was that guy. At the height of his COVID fame, before we found out, that, right? And Cuomo was that guy at the height of his covid fame before we found out that right it was a no-brainer to biden i mean cuomo came up and they did they the tour of the third world la guardia airport together i mean this is going back 15 years ago now but they were they were quite close so he's in my mario cuomo no no the son. Andrew Cuomo? Yeah, yeah. 50 years ago? No, 15. 15 years ago. Yeah. Well, I don't know.

Does Cuomo's record matter now that we found out all of these things about Kennedy that are coming out now? I mean, does anybody really care? Like Cuomo could probably still come out. Look, I separate the art from the artist. And I try to understand that in the end, you have to separate in some way the politician from the policies and the kind of country that they're going to run because people live under those policies. And then you add to that when you find out the things that John F. Kennedy was doing. I mean, you know, so I don't like to be holier than thou. I thought Cuomo behavior during COVID was pretty bad. And I think that his the idea that he's

kind of a lech is probably true, although I know he's accused of anything, although, you know, horrible. But I would vote for Andrew Cu cuomo right now i would i mean not that trump isn't a latch right i'm just saying i mean like it'd be nice if your president bill clinton like it'd be nice if your president wasn't a latch but have we had any recently listen i i i like i said i'm doing very well my unless unless one of these presidents has bombs raining down on America, I'm going to survive the next administration well. But people live under policies. If one person's policies brings more jobs, more manufacturing, whatever it is, then I'm reluctant to say, well, it doesn't matter if the white working class will be better off. This guy did, you know, this guy's a pig. I'm uncomfortable with that. And I also know that emotionally, it's very easy to not agree with other things I said about Trump, is that he's so erratic that if we need a steady hand in a crisis,

I would not trust him. That's the bottom line. And that, to me, is the reason. That's the reason. Now, would I trust Biden's team that's pretending, the Weekend at Bernie's team that's pretending the president is compus mentis, but he's not? Yeah, I probably would trust them better in a certain way. It's not ethical. with Cuomo when it comes to the COVID mismanagement is that nobody did a good job with COVID. So I am very sympathetic to... The nursing home thing was real. Yes, exactly.

I am sympathetic to these... That's the cover-up. It's always the cover-up. Exactly. Substantial investigations that have come out saying, you know, the nursing home orders were wrong to do. The process was wrong and so forth. But if you are a voter looking at the big picture, very, very hard to figure out who dealt with this well at the time because this was a good point this wasn't two months later um when florida could learn from what we had been wrong i mean that those last two weeks in march and going into april you know april 9th i think when we had like 800 people die on one day

it was just a total disaster there was no decision to be made that was the right right decision well he was slow he was slow shutting down the schools i remember railing about it on on on the pod but now people would say he shouldn't shut down right exactly win yeah and to be fair most of the presidents are pigs so and it was it was wrong for cuomo to say the nursing home patients would have died anyway. But realistically, when you look at how COVID was spreading and these things that we were doing, like washing our hands and wearing non-medical grade masks. So if you had people coming into these nursing homes to work and they were on the subways, they were with their families, you were not going to stop the spread of this thing. Spraying down Oreos. Right.

So was the decision-making process good? Was that order wrong? But I am not sure. And I'm not a doctor but what what kind of decision would you have made that a person in very fragile health who was realistically probably in their last six months of life what other decision would you have made so that they wouldn't get covet i am not sure what that decision would have been, but I understand why family members. And so it's a weird process. It's a weird process of fair judgment because

on the one hand, you want to judge these people based on the information that was known at the time. So given the information that was known at the time, I'm not going to give Trump a total pass on the things he got right about, the things he was right about, when I know he was right about them for his own self-interest or because he just didn't care to look into it any further. But it turns out his gut was actually right about certain things.

The schools seemed to me at that time when what they were doing was like, we shut down a school as soon as one kid gets COVID you remember that and then what are we going and what we knew everybody was getting COVID so my argument at the time was what are you waiting for the one kid to get COVID when that one kid has COVID at that point it's already too late right and this was at a time when we had and I mean remember how crazy we had no tests we totally run of tests. And they would tell us how much COVID there was by how many people had tested positive. Did you ever see the show Chernobyl, that docudrama Chernobyl?

One of the things that happened in Chernobyl is that they says, Oh, Mr. Gorbachev, it's okay. It's only 50 rengen. And then later on, it turns out, well out well no the Geiger counters only go to 50 it was actually 5,000 this really happened that's kind of what Culver was like we only have 50 people sick how many tests do you have 50 so at that point he was he was slow and reactive hey why don't I get a quote

but he did one thing and this was this is a real fault line between progressives and sensible liberals is that when the at first night of BLM protests in Manhattan, when de Blasio basically told the police to stand down, Cuomo blasted him publicly. What are you doing? And that to me, well, I'll always remember that when push came to shove, he was the guy who was not so far out there that he was actually concerned about the fact that i might lose my business while de blasio was in the property

is not violence you're insured you know this kind of like you can't have people like that right and it was the same dynamic on the subways where de blasio you know when we had again these awful five weeks of march and april 2020 when we had three murders in subway in five weeks including the subway um operator who was killed in an arson fire on the train that was set by a mentally ill person so you had de blasio uh saying you know the subways are subways there's always stuff happening um and cuomo actually did take that move to shut down the subways so that you could get the mentally ill people off the trains at the end of the line um that was without doing that they would have descended into more uh chaos so there were you know in that time when nobody was making good decisions, there were worse decisions to be made.

And de Blasio made some of those decisions. You know who handled COVID very well? I say this to you just so that when you leave here, you can have a bad opinion of me. You did? DeSantis. He was actually very sensible about a lot of things he did in Florida. He's, you know, he was a, was a Yale law school guy. He's not a dummy. And apparently he crunched a lot of stuff and he got the monoclonal antibodies to

the old people and he's to the, to the pharmacies. And he had the most, he had the state with the highest risk population by far. And I said, whatever, you know, I'm not defending his, I'm not defending his i'm not defending his uh attitudes on gays but you know who would have been very good as a president during covid michael bloomberg yeah somebody who actually doesn't mean to get everything right but at least his approach is scientific you need somebody the approach has to be scientific well trump's approach certainly wasn't scientific it was not i mean he what he got right he got right kind of by accident just because he's an asshole.

Yeah, that's what I said. I don't want to give credit to Trump for getting something right by accident. I also don't want to give Cuomo credit for not doing something that clearly he should have done based on what he knew, even if in the end, unless he said, I don't believe this. I'm doing it because it's not the right thing to do. Right. I mean, I am not a trump supporter by any means but i think his management and mismanagement of covid including all the bleach ridiculousness and everything else has been completely neutralized on in the minds of swing voters because if you're not like a scientist and you're not following every minute of this and you've blanked a lot of it out because you're still traumatized by it it's like if you're

thinking who am i gonna vote for nobody handled covid well uh britain didn't handle it well italy didn't handle it well oh god right the countries that people said were doing such a great job like sweden turned out the death rate was not any different um so you know he was a real virus gonna virus like right i mean if you have a that's thank you for the title of the show so things that he the most ridiculous things that he did like ride around with the secret service when he had a case of covid rather than staying in the hospital people have forgotten these things or they're weighing them against the other ridiculous things that went the other way i mean everyone has friends who stayed home for like three years yeah so if you're saying which decision was worse. It's hard. But he did do Operation Warp Speed. And from what I hear, and I've spoken to people who know and are not Trump supporters, I say,

wouldn't any president have done that? And they say, no, not every president would have done that. They said Biden. Actually, we had some issues afterwards where somebody said, why isn't Biden? And it's just not his. That is, I mean, people want to say Trump has no talents. Trump can't do anything right. But Trump obviously does have some talents,

or he wouldn't be where he is. And he has a certain can-do approach to things. Yeah, it's that same arrogance, right? Yeah. I mean, you can't take it away from him. He did it, and it worked, and we had the vaccine. And interestingly, this is a very interesting political dynamic. If Trump had been against the vaccines

and then we saw all the far-right opposition to vaccines, there would be no way you could convince me that he was not the cause of all that anti-vaccine attitude. But actually, he was pro-vaccine. He took credit for it. And they still hate the vaccine. So there's a limit to what even Trump can influence with them. He caters to them in a way. They don't necessarily follow him. successful tabloid media that you are making public opinion rather than seeing public opinion before other people see it and then um satisfying that public opinion and i noticed in the debate trump used the word therapeutic and not vaccine and i think he did that on purpose and he made sure to slam biden

for the vaccine mandate i don't think the far right would be as against vaccines it's against being forced to take a vaccine it was a different issue and they were right i mean there was a certain point where it's kind of like congestion pricing. You couldn't even get someone to come on and defend it because the arguments had dissolved. We knew already that the vaccines were not preventing. Everyone we knew who had COVID had had the vaccine. We knew people weren't dying anymore from it. We knew there was a vaccine.

You don't want to take the vaccine. You've had COVID three times. There are side effects to vaccines. Why should you have, these were hard arguments, you know, there were no answer to these arguments. Can I ask a question just cause we're running out of time and while we have you here. So practically speaking, um, as somebody who rides the subway all the time, um, I used to ride it until one in the morning. And now I really don't like to ride it past really like nine o'clock at night, even though I think probably a little bit later is OK, too. I do see an increased police presence and even a National Guard presence.

Is that having any effect on the violent crimes and the safety of the subway? It's having an effect. But the problem is, we've seen a pattern set in in the past two years since the fall of 2022. So, you know, to condense somewhat from 2020,22, the rise in subway crime, elected officials dismissed it and said, you know, you're crazy, whatever. By the fall of 2022, in the weeks leading up to Hochul's election as governor for her own term, there were four murders in the subway in four weeks that October 2022. The governor got very alarmed that their Republican opponent was running on subway crime. So she paid for New York City to put more police on the subways.

And that basically worked. You know, a thousand extra police on subways. Right. But then what happened was the crime fell. You didn't have subway murder for a while and the police disappeared. You know, Adams didn't say, I'm taking the police off the subway, but that program of extra police disappeared. So then by the spring of 2023, you had another four murders on the subway in from like April to June, including the Daniel Penny Jordan Neely killing, which got a lot of public attention.

Happening with that, you know? Right. Well, the trial will be in October. So then Adams put more police back on the subway. Then crime subsided again. Then he took the police away. Then we had another four murders early in 2024. So now we have yet another thousand daily overtime shifts on the subways. And they seem like they're keeping it for longer this time

which is good i mean when i came down here i heard that announcement twice you know there are police on the subway platform so things you see them too though right yeah yeah i always say hi i smile yeah and you it does you know if you're on the train if something happens at that station you can get stick your head out and say you know hey there's a person in distress on this train car um so that does make people feel comfortable but it is not it is nowhere down to pre-covid levels ask a question before you go disorder yeah but i was just gonna say i'm just like you i mean i took the train home at 1 a.m all the time thought nothing of it. I would not do that today.

Why? And maybe you could write something about this, if you think it's worth it. Why is there not a video camera in every single train car with an app where you can immediately identify? No. There is more camera coverage uh the uh the mta has been putting up cheap cameras on buses and train stations and on train so uh they whenever there

is a serious violent crime they use those cameras and they catch the suspect within 48 hours. You know, invariably. Wow. But the problem is, they're not- I mean, you should have to notify, I'm sitting on the train, there's trouble here. Immediately, but it's just- Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and I think also, as the trains become automated, the trains can pretty much drive themselves.

So you don't need a train operator and conductor. I'm not saying you should get rid of the job, but the conductor's job should turn into a different job where that person just walks up and down the train. And when he or she sees, here's a person who seems like they're having a mental health episode, here's a guy aggressively panhandling, they can press a button and police will come on the train at the next stop. And they're doing that in Washington

where Washington has uniform security guards, but they're not police just walking up and down the train cars right now. I think more of that would be very good. I feel like I should be on a, I'm sorry, I should be on a train and alert somebody. Somebody in Central Station that can bring up that car and say, oh yeah. You know, it's a great idea. Great idea.

It's the most obvious thing in the world. Every business has that. It doesn't seem that hard to do. No, it doesn't seem that hard. I mean, it got to a point where it was actually shocking. Like you would walk on every subway car and there was something insane going on. Like a naked homeless person or like somebody like I grew up on the subways coming into the city from Queens like in the 90s. I remember that level of mayhem and like people smoking cigarettes on the subway.

I hadn't seen that since I was a kid. It's insane. Yeah. And now it seems to have gotten a little bit better. Right. I agree. I think it has, you know, again, there are these ebbs and flows, but like today, you know, my station.

Watch, I'm going to get killed on the way home. Yeah. So, you know, there were two. It's like a great episode. Uniform MTA staffers, not police, but just making sure no one went through that exit gate and just kind of keeping an eye on things. I think the more they do that, the better. But yes, I mean, when people like yourself say, you know, I'm not crazy to see that things have changed.

And when the transit advocates are saying, oh, no, they're fine. You know, you must be a Trump supporter. Like that, in the way that your mind works, that makes you not support congestion pricing. Yeah. I mean, I just kind of like talking to you. This Trump thing is endlessly fascinating to me because I sometimes look at it from his point of view. And I imagine I was in a situation just with COVID. They were blaming him on day one for the fact that the CDC tests were defective.

Serious people would say, and I compared it at the time to blaming Reagan for the Challenger disaster, the spatial. Do you think Trump's in there with a white coat and test tubes? And they're so over the top with this guy that they were so they accused him of being such a Russian spy that we know that world leaders were afraid to talk frankly to the president of the United States because they were reading. They're watching Rachel Maddow. And in a certain way, I mean, I know myself, I would fucking lose my shit. I'd be going crazy like he held it together kind of but you know if if only this erratic boorish guy could get hit with the reasonable and correct criticisms that he deserves rather than turning him into a mythological satanic

figure which i don't think he is. I guess I just, I'm scared about what the next four years are going to be like where every little thing he does defensible thing, or, you know, it's not such a terrible thing is going to get turned in yet again into the end of, end of history. All right. So Cuomo for president. Nicole Gelinas. Gelinas.

Gelinas. Oh, Gelinas. Yeah. Okay. You say Gel Nicole Gelinas? Gelinas. Gelinas. Oh, Gelinas. Yeah. Okay. You say Gelinas, I say Gelinas. I don't really care. If you didn't ask before, I'm not going to. Well, at least the soft G sound is important. Yeah.

I wasn't going to correct you. Well, my name is Periel, so people butcher it all the time. I'm particularly sensitive. Periel Jolgeberg. All right. Well, thank you very much. This was a very pleasant interview. I'm particularly sensitive. Peril Jolgeberg. All right. Well, thank you very much. This was a very pleasant interview. I'd love to do it again.

Maybe feel free to contact us the next time you get a Jones for spouting off about something that's going on that you feel particularly- Well, when my book is out in November. Okay. That'd be great. Tell us the name of your book again. It is Movement, New York's Long War to Take Back the Streets from the Car. I think that's right.

They went back and forth with the subtitle. But you can find it. You can preorder it now online. Just remember Movement. And I will read the book. And by the way, if you are pro-car or anti-car, it is a factual history. You can read this and be like oh boy this is why they they tried to take you know take away my car space it's that you you can be on either side and still learn

a lot i do have one question for you do you have a car um i don't know how to drive i haven't i haven't driven a car in probably 25 years since I finished college. The last time I drove a car was in New Orleans when my friend I went out with was so drunk. I was like, me being sober and not knowing how to drive is obviously much better than her driving. So I drove it a few blocks to my apartment and took her home walking. So I haven't driven in New York ever. Wow. But as a family, we have a car

because my husband likes to have a car. I wish I hadn't experienced one time and I wish I could have had a cell phone at the time to take a picture of it. It had to be the early 90s and I was in Midtown somewhere where they were actually tearing down like a skyscraper-type building, a modern building that was still next to an old building. And it had been demolished, and a wall of the building next to it, to the west of it, was exposed for the first time probably in like 100 years.

And in it, on the wall, was in kind of like distressed writing, horse and buggy repair. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. And then shortly another building went up and it's, you know, who knows. I hope he took a picture. Yeah, no, I didn't have a cell phone then.

That's what I'm saying. It was such a time capsule, just sitting there, horse and buggy repair. So that's kind of what your book covers, right? Yeah, exactly. In some way. All right. Very, very pleased to meet way. Yeah, yeah. All right. Very, very pleased to meet you.

Thank you very much. Likewise. Email podcast at commiesower.com. Bye.