E-toll travails & Joe Hoarda Peluso

E-tolling got the attention of the New York tabloids last month in between Saudi truck bombs, crazy British cows, FBI reports of presidential trysts at the Marriott, fire ants chomping north, and Hillary Clinton’s seances with Gandhi and Eleanor R.*

For once the Big Apple tabs — NY DAILY NEWS, Long Island NEWSDAY and the NEW YORK POST got serious. They discovered some backups. NEWSDAY’s reporters decided that electronic tolling was the cause. They found a Joe Peluso who had hoarded 15 tolls of tokens and who told them electronic tolling was the problem.

“Before the bridge and tunnel tolls went up in March, Jon Peluso of West Hempstead did what any commuter would do. He bought tokens. Lots and lots of tokens. More than $500 worth.

Peluso commutes several days a week on the Throgs Neck Bridge and, as such, he is a prime candidate for E-ZPass, the electronic toll system that was supposed to make everything better. But he won't sign up just yet.

"I've got 15 more rolls of tokens," he said.

Of course, E-ZPass hasn't been the solution to bridge traffic backups; instead, it's become a symbol of them. Peluso, like others who use the Throgs Neck every day, is cursing the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority every day.

"You finally get to the approach where it opens up," he said. "And you see nobody sitting in these E-ZPass lanes."

We say: “Well, Joe yer stoopid dummy, that might be because they flew through with their E-ZPass e-tags! If you had a brain in that pea head of yours, Joey Boy, you’d get one too.”

But trust a New York tabloid to turn a demonstration of the success of the new gadget into a sob story by reporting from the perspective of the guy who hadn’t got around to getting one for himself. By that standard we would judge an automobile no good because the guy who had stocked up on horses and carriages was upset that his means of transport was so slow by comparison with the new fangled banger.

Nothing can win with Joey Peluso journalism from the NEWSDAYs of this world!

Not that there weren’t problems apart from Hoarda Peluso’s envy. On the Cross Bay bridge linking Queens to the Rockaway peninsula beaches the first weekend with electronic toll collection saw horrendous backups. Miles long. 90 minutes to get through. Another tabloid reporter wrote in a piece that ran the following Friday: “The relatively small Cross Bay Bridge could be the scene of monstrous traffic backups this weekend because of a new toll collection system...”

There were quite small backups that weekend, because the cause of the monstrous backups the previous weekend had been an apparent one-off act of industrial sabotage. A Luddite toll plaza manager rebelling against e-tolling had apparently engineered the backups by keeping only 2 in-bound toll lanes in operation compared to the normal 4 lanes. An MTA Triboro agency spokesman Josh Taylor denied for the record it was an act of sabotage, saying only that the failure to use two reversible toll lanes was “inexplicable” and that every weekend since has seen traffic flowing as normal, or a bit better than normal. We don’t think the 2-lanes only at the Cross Bay was the least inexplicable but the MTA doesn’t want a labor dispute. A local labor union official denounced the electronic tolling saying “They are ramming the E-ZPass system down people’s throats and they don’t care about the delays.” Well of course they had to have delays to prove the point and get people roiled up.

At Throg’s Neck the MTA took away a couple of regular toll lanes to put in 2 exclusive e-toll lanes, so that probably made for an imbalance at the plaza. But at the Cross Bay as well as on the Whitestone bridge e-tags are read in the same lanes as tokens, so it was difficult to see how e-tolling could produce delays! But if there was a delay it could easily be blamed by the tabloids on the new gadget.

There was another culprit. A Dan Turbidy was quoted as observing: “This is greed, this is all it is." You would have hoped the electronics could banish that stuff, eh?

At the Throg’s Neck bridge MTA’s Josh Taylor admits his agency did a poor initial signage job on the approaches to the toll plaza leading to confusion among motorists and lane-changing back and forth. Morever in the first days the proportion of motorists with e-tags may have been too few to justify the dedicated e-toll lanes but that number has quickly reached 20% and now the toll lane balance is better, and traffic flows well. And of course the tabloids have lost interest.

The NEW YORK TIMES at least got it right under the headline “Easier Passage,” editorializing June 28: “Several New York City toll bridges now offer drivers the prospect of relief from endless waiting in line. An electronic payment system lets cars slide through toll plazas while a (radio) scanner reads the vehicle’s identity....that will mean no more fishing for ‘exact change,’ less waiting time and reduced air pollution. The new system has been suffering from growing pains. There have been tie-ups and complaints. But patience, always a virtue required of New Yorkers, will in time be rewarded.”

Interestingly the TIMES called for congestion pricing though it didn’t call it that: “What is needed are (Ugh!: TR newsletter) intelligent pricing variations to encourage more usage at non-peak hours.” The Toimes noospaper also called for assurances that electronic recordkeeping would not invade motorists’ privacy, overlooking stories in industry circles that two former White House security officers named Livingstone and Marcese are said to be seeking jobs at the MTA Triboro authority! Go for it NOOSDAY...

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