Opinion: Keeping Things Fair for Essential Workers Should Be Essential to Congestion Pricing

Resilience. It’s a word that’s often used to describe New Yorkers. And that toughness was perhaps never tested as much as during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when it came to the city’s essential workers.

While many residents had the ability to work from home, nurses, police officers, firefighters, and other government workers didn’t have that luxury and they were forced to put their lives on the line to help others.

With Staten Island Ferry service slowed and the historic overnight closures of the subway system, many of these first responders turned to rideshare. Data from Lyft shows riders who used its platform during that time were almost three times as likely to work an essential job. Drivers, who were also deemed essential, gave hundreds of thousands of rides to these workers who needed a safe way to commute. Those same workers were celebrated and applauded daily for all they did for all of New York City.

And yet, it is those same heroes of the pandemic who will suffer under the misguided tax plan known as congestion pricing. Police, Sanitation, and other government workers have long called Staten Island home, thanks to its affordability when compared to the other boroughs, great schools, and safer neighborhoods. Yet that affordability is now being threatened by a pricing program to fund a system that consistently underinvests in our great borough.

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