A neighbor decided recently to take a day in the city with her daughter, but not to drive into Midtown. They took the TZ Express to the Tarrytown station and hopped on a Grand Central-bound Metro North train. They did the same in reverse for the way home — traveling off-peak all the way.
The total price? $36. Imagine if the whole family of four had gone?
Another friend noted, if government wants people to use public transportation, it has to be cheaper than driving.
Or, make driving more expensive.
Guess which way it’s going to happen if a new Tappan Zee Bridge is constructed and managed as part of a public-private partnership. That’s the new buzzword, especially among politicians, who are looking at some kind of arrangement to lease the bridge to a private investor, possibly to get it built, probably to run it for decades to come to recoup the investment.
Are these plans successful? Depends on your definition of success. The toll costs are certain to be higher — after all that “private” part of the equation expects a return on the investment.
How would it look for the Tappan Zee Bridge? That’s still up in the air. We’ll certainly hear more as a state panel called for by Gov. David Paterson meets to discuss the future of public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects in New York. (There’s a longer post on this topic here, after I attended a Manhattan Institute conference on the topic. BTW, I took the TZ Express to the train myself, and ended up paying for taxi back from Tarrytown to Nyack, to the tune of $25, because there didn’t seem to be a bus coming within the hour.)
For those who do commute from Rockland, what do you think of the idea of congestion pricing, paying a premium for driving across a new TZ, or whether a privately built and operated bridge would be maintained better than the current one?