He instead focused on the part of the congestion-pricing plan that targets cabs and for-hire cars like Uber and Lyft and called for lower outer-borough bridge tolls.
While he endorsed the part of the Fix NYC plan released Friday that would charge for-hire cars to travel through Manhattan south of 60th Street, he slammed the brakes on repeated questions by a reporter about the bigger proposal to charge private cars entering the zone.
“My focus is on for-hire vehicles,” said Cuomo, blaming them most for worsening gridlock.
“We now have yellow cabs and black cars and green cars and every color in the rainbow,” Cuomo told The Post at a women’s march breakfast. “That is one of the first places I would look to reduce congestion and to raise money. If they want to cruise through the central business district to pick up fares, they should have to pay for it, or we should limit the number.”
The second thing, he said, is “lowering the outer-borough tolls, which are crazy high.”
Cuomo spokeswoman Abbey Fashouer confirmed the governor “believes tolls need to be rationalized, and any plan that moves forward must reduce costs on the outer-borough bridges.”
The governor would not directly comment on other potential fallout from the private-car part of the plan, which would be rolled out in 2020, like how to handle cars owned by residents who live in the toll zone.
Some outer-borough officials already have sounded off about the outsize impact a plan that would charge up to $11.52 would have on residents who already pay up to $17 round-trip for MTA bridges and tunnels.
Meanwhile, the Fix NYC blueprint piles a lot on the city’s plate, requiring huge cutbacks in the number of parking placards awarded city employees, which increased under Mayor de Blasio; an NYPD crackdown on moving violations; reforms to the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and more city funding for the MTA.
The 160,000 city-issued placards could become a battleground.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg reduced the number of placards given to Department of Education employees to 11,000, matching the number of available parking spaces. But the principals’ union won an arbitration ruling restoring its members’ placards, and City Hall has since upped the total to 50,000. Unions will not take kindly to the scaling back on parking passes for schools and other city agencies.
The Fix NYC plan also calls for more enforcement of moving violations like “blocking the box,” which would require the city to shift away from an emphasis on parking tickets. And city DOT would have to work with the Port Authority to review congestion caused by commuter, tourist and regional buses.
Issues the city would have to address under the Fix NYC plan:
- Pumping more money, along with the MTA and Port Authority, into public transit for the outer boroughs.
- Step up NYPD and camera enforcement of moving violations like “blocking the box” and stopping in bus lanes.
- Overhaul the rules on who gets city parking placards to reduce the use (and abuse) of the passes.
- Address the explosion of tour buses in Midtown, which have increased more than fourfold in the past decade.
- Re-examine incentives that increase the number of black cars and for-hire vehicles flooding streets at rush hour.