The Ultimate System: Free Mass Transit and Congestion Pricing

WABC’s John Gambling spoke with Michael Bloomberg this morning. In anticipation of the Mayor’s Earth Day speech, they discussed everything from congestion charging to light bulbs. Below are some highlights from their conversation; you can download to the entire show here.

On congestion pricing:

If you were to charge, and I’ll let you know on Sunday at 12:30, you would take the money and invest it in mass transit. We have to do a much better job of providing mass transit to parts of the city that never invested in it in the past and now we are paying for it.

If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars.

On Plan NYC:

A book lays out 127 different things we think we should do and the cost of every one of them, and the benefit. A handful will not be very controversial and a handful will be very controversial, most will be sort of in the middle.

We have problems right now. Asthma and congestion cost everybody a fortune because the traffic is so bad, and if you think it’s bad now it’s going to get worse.

On global warming and energy:

People argue about global warming. I can’t tell you how fast the oceans will rise, whether they’ll rise. I can just tell you a handful of things: dirty air isn’t good for you to breathe and we aren’t doing our environment any good by dumping all this crap into the air.

You want to solve the energy crisis in this country, you’ve got to either raise gasoline taxes or force manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient cars. That’s the biggest thing you could do.